Teaching Narrative

Because college (Latin for an intellectual partnership) forms the bedrock of my pedagogy, I plan an intentional, conversation-based activity on the first day of class. As students walk into the classroom, I hand them a piece of paper and ask students to reach into a bag with random duplicate numbers one to nine. Those numbers correspond to the question they must respond to from this website offering 255 philosophical queries. From there, after about five to ten minutes, I instruct students to write their name and number on the top of the page and crumble up their paper into a ball. I then explain Florida’s version of a snowball fight, where students stand up and move about the room as they throw their “snowballs” (crumpled papers) across the room while I play fun music over the speakers. After about thirty seconds, students pick up the piece of paper closest to them and try to find their matching student with the same number. This involves students conversing with one another to find their matching partner and discuss their answer to their philosophical question.

Within the first ten minutes of class, students engage in a fun, physical activity which automatically reduces the classroom’s affective filter through productive conversation. I usually do two rounds of this activity, encompassing about thirty minutes. While this first activity is long, it is innovative. Students begin realizing our classroom culture is built around intentional teamwork, conversation, and group engagement. This activity immediately allows students to socialize in productive and friendly ways, which helps with a team formation activity I facilitate later in the week.

After this activity, instead of describing the intricacies of our class syllabus, I direct the students to a Blooket I made about the syllabus’s content. Because Blooket is an educational review-based game platform, students begin learning about the course content and expectations through a friendly, competitive atmosphere. Students also begin realizing my use of multimedia resources in class. This activity further reinforces my teaching philosophy, as students are actively engaged with the content while I facilitate, instead of becoming the "sage on the stage,” lecturing about the course on the first day. This game further highlights a positive classroom culture as students compete in Blooket’s fun minigames as they learn about the syllabus and each other. Throughout the semester, I make many Blookets to emphasize content we cover in class, demonstrating my class’s interactive culture.

After briefly explaining how I publish each day’s lesson plans as pages within Canvas, I close our first class meeting explaining the “Goal Tracker.” My central objective for students is to “learn how to learn,” and I believe setting and tracking goals is necessary to realizing this objective. After showing students the type of goal planning I do, I direct their attention to a “Goal Tracker” template. Students must fill in their year, semester, month, and week goals. Throughout the semester, students submit their progress to Goal Tracker Check-Ins. These assignments keep students aware of their personal aims, encouraging accountability and personal motivation to make, monitor, and accomplish their personal and/or academic goals. All these activities occur on the first day; while I intentionally cover little to no academic content, I know this lesson plan encourages an immediate inculcation of positive student engagement within a collaborative classroom culture.

During the second class meeting, I open by telling students our course is based upon a team-based learning model, in which students organize themselves in groups of at least three, which will be their learning team for the rest of the semester. For about twenty minutes, I have students engage in “Corner Conversations,” wherein I write words such as “interests,” “music,” “hobbies,” “movies,” etc. on name tags, placing them in the four corners of the room. I tell students they will have one minute and thirty seconds at each corner and must talk with the other individuals about whatever their corner’s topic is. After the time is up, they must move to a different corner and talk with different people about a different topic. As students move between corners, I update each corner after a couple rounds with new topics, so each time students transition to a new corner, they encounter a new discussion point. Within twenty minutes, students do about twelve rounds of “Corner Conversations,” meaning all students most likely spoke to each other at least once. After the activity, I direct students to think about the conversations they had with each other and to find at least two other students and make a team based upon a shared commonality. Students also must come up with a team name to build team spirit. Because I encourage student autonomy, I allow students to form the teams themselves. Without the social activities facilitated on the first day of class, the “Corner Conversations” and student-led team formations would not be successful on the second day. I also ask students to make a self-collage which describes their major and what they want to do after they graduate to be submitted by the end of the week. But students must represent their responses with visuals. Starting on the second week of class, I compile students’ collages into a PowerPoint, another pedagogical effort to build a positive classroom culture.

Much of my class content during the first week is not academically focused, but rather emphasizes the inculcation of a strong classroom culture and positive student interactions. Students begin realizing the stress I place upon collaborative knowledge discovery, as they start relying on their team members to solve problems or answer questions. For example, when a student asks me, “Finley, what should we do?” I respond, “Ask your group members.” They rely on their group members for a variety of activities, wherein I often supply minimal details to encourage group collaboration.

To further reinforce teamwork and accountability, at the end of each major class project, team members must use a "peer feedback rubric" to grade their fellow teammates’ efforts through the course of the project. The group members’ combined grades are worth ten percent of individual students’ overall project grade, meaning team members have a voice in each other’s grades.

I also allow students to come into student hours to discuss their effort made on the final project. Students can make appointments with me, during which I hand them a copy of the rubric I use to grade their writing projects. At this point, I have already graded the student’s essay, and once the student has graded his or her project based upon the rubric, I have a conversation about why the student thinks he or she earned what is noted. If students give themselves a lower grade than I gave them, I keep the grade I assigned. If students give themselves a higher grade than I gave them, I average the student’s grade with the grade I gave the project. This process highlights student voice and autonomy in the grading process, balanced with my professional assessment.

Additionally, to encourage student autonomy and peer accountability, each group constructs their own rubric for the third project in the class based upon expectations I share with students. In this way, each student learning team has a different rubric I use to grade their final projects, while simultaneously learning how to make a rubric. This reinforces my objective of "learning how to learn," as students become the teachers for their own groups, holding each other to a level of accountability.

While not an exhaustive list of the practical methods I facilitate in my classes, activities such as those outlined in this teaching narrative contribute to my pedagogical theory, as I continue to serve students to reach their highest academic and personal potential.