Born in South Carolina, I spent 10 years in Costa Rica before returning to the US to complete high school in Georgia and my undergraduate degree in Virginia. In 2001, I arrived in Bloomington to enroll in the Computer Science graduate program at IU. After teaching my first IU course as an Instructor of Record as a second-semester Masters student, I discovered my love of teaching.
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching is a practice that must always be viewed through the lens of its most important stakeholder – the learner. My approach to teaching lies at the intersection of active learning, collaborative learning, and peer-led instruction. Motivated learners in my hands-on, skills-based courses work together in an environment designed to prepare them for their collaborative future. Along the way, experienced peers act as guides while improving their own familiarity with the material and learning leadership skills. While performing this guidance, the experienced students gain valuable communication and mentorship skills. As the instructor designing the course, the assessments, the in-class work, and the approach to building mastery, it is my role shape the student experience, so they are primed to succeed. By bringing real-world examples into the classroom, I motivate students and help them connect their education to their professional career.
Active learning [1] has been the most pervasive and fundamental shift to my pedagogy. While many of the classes I took as an undergraduate and graduate student used passive instruction and relied on notetaking, I immediately saw the benefits of classes where the instructor was a partner to discovering your own answers, rather than a monolith that delivered content in strict hour and fifteen-minute sections. I first implemented this idea in my own classroom in 2011 with I210, the introductory Python programming class in Informatics. Traditionally, new material was demonstrated to students by the instructor, who might pretend to hit some of the common pitfalls in the content, but who did so with perfect knowledge of how to proceed. Instead, I asked students to try writing code on their own, while I circulated to provide advice. An early Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in 2014 also led me to examine the ways in which arranging a space can make it usable for active learning.
While I had grasped the core of active learning, many improvements remained. I noticed that some students naturally formed small groups to discuss the problems in class, and that these students were usually more successful. I began to read about group formation, teams, and collaborative learning [2, 3] for Computer Science. Collaboration allows students to benefit from a sum that is greater than their parts and doing so as they are learning a skill through hands-on application gives them built-in structure for exploring multiple approaches. Programming lends itself to this, as repeatedly reading code often leads to glossing over small mistakes that are uncovered during discussion. I required teams to work on the in-class material, and I explored the ways in which these teams can be constituted. Through exploration in a 2015 FLC on the topic, I discovered that homogenous groups (separated by surveys about confidence in the subject and prior exposure) worked better in introductory programming classes than heterogeneous groups, which work better in settings where discussion benefits from alternate perspectives and diverse backgrounds [4].
While I was now confident in the group setting, I found that I alone was not enough to provide just-in-time teaching [5] to a dozen or more student groups of 4 – 5 students each, and even adding an assistant instructor (AI) or two was often insufficient. Inspired by a few particularly outstanding undergraduates, in Spring of 2014 I began to recruit and train exceptional former students to return as undergraduate instructors (UI). Watching the way in which these students approach the course material with their peer group led me to study peer-led instruction [6] more formally and to make changes in my approach. Now, the active learning exercises provide opportunities for students to safely ask questions of their peers who are participating as UIs. Additionally, the training the UIs receive, and the reinforcement required to teach the material ensures that they leave the course having improved their own confidence in the material and their leadership skills. The communication between students and UIs was especially valuable when the UIs were formally assigned to specific students as mentors, giving them a sense of investment in the outcomes of their student groups.
Teaching is grounded in metaphor, and this has never been more apparent to me than when I worked from 2013 - 2015 with Joan Middendorf in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning on a project about Decoding the Disciplines [7]. Joan’s detailed framework about how to approach a quintessential problem in pedagogy, bottlenecks, gave me a path to follow in tackling these within my own courses. By participating in Decoding interviews, I learned to be flexible in how I explained concepts to students and to provide many paths to discovering the concepts of each course. Her work in uncovering tacit knowledge and discipline-specific terminology has led me to consciously correct for the error many subject experts make when approaching their area with novice learners. Continual re-evaluation is required to attain teaching excellence.
I have also examined the additional ways in which we as faculty can provide paths to success for our students. Supplemental Instruction programs [8] are increasingly offered as ways for students to receive additional help outside of normal class time, with an eye to reducing DWF (Drop/Withdraw/Fail) rates. These programs are often initially very popular, but they require a large commitment of resources from the department and can be difficult to sustain. I experienced this in my own program, and I am exploring ways to provide the same or similar benefits to students, such as using alternate materials to provide more support for students who would otherwise struggle. Along with Professor of Learning Sciences Daniel Hickey, I started work in 2019 to study the long-term trends in Supplemental Instruction and alternate approaches through the lens of Data Analytics [9]. Formal methods to assess improvement offer the insight I need to determine effective paths to change. Our work was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on classroom teaching, but I hope to revisit this soon. Our personal sense of the effectiveness of classroom teaching needs to be balanced by supporting data and strong peer review. In 2022 – 2023, I participated in the FACET Peer Review certification program and brought the lessons I learned there back to my own department. As Associate Chair, I proposed and implemented an entire overhaul of the peer review process to be more collegial and to separate formative and summative review.
Teaching is an activity that requires collaboration between faculty. Without peers to reflect with, and without mentorship, there is no way we can reach our full potential. I see service in support of teaching as a natural extension of everything else I do. In addition to working on my own classes, I have coordinated meetings and discussions for NTT faculty in my department and school. I work with CITL and other IU offices to host and promote activities for teaching faculty. I served on the Bloomington Faculty Council (BFC) (2018 – 2022), the University Faculty Council (UFC) (2020 - 2022) and on numerous BFC committees (2017 – 2022) to promote pedagogy at the campus and University level. Ultimately, it is also our responsibility as teachers to prepare and guide the next generation of educators, whether by fostering personal relationships or by disseminating our own knowledge through workshops, publications, or presentations.
[1] Bonwell, C.C., and J. A. Eison, “Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom,” ASHEERIC Higher Education Report No. 1, George Washington University, Washington, DC , 1991.
[2] Smith, B., and J. MacGregor, “What is Collaborative Learning?,” in Goodsell, A., M. Mahler, V. Tinto, B.L.Smith, and J. MacGreger, (Eds), Collaborative Learning: A Sourcebook for Higher Education (pp. 9–22). University Park, PA: National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning and Assessment, 1992.
[3] Cusea, J., “Collaborative & Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: A Proposed Taxonomy,” Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2–4, 1992.
[4] Cummings, J., Kiesler S., Zadeh R., and Balakrishnan A., “Group Heterogeneity Increases the Risks of Large Group Size: A Longitudinal Study of Productivity in Research Groups,” Psychological Science, Vol 24, No 6, 2013
[5] Bailey, T., and Forbes, J., “Just-in-time Teaching for CS0,” Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education”, Volume 37, Issue 1, 2005, pp 366 - 370
[6] Lyle, K., and Robinson, W., “A Statistical Evaluation: Peer-led Team Learning in an Organic Chemistry Course” Journal of Chemical Education 2003 80 (2), 132
[7] Middendorf, J., “Facilitating a Faculty Learning Community Using the Decoding the Disciplines Model,” in David Pace and Joan Middendorf (Eds), Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking (New Directions in Teaching and Learning, Vol. 98 (Fall 2004), pp. 95-107
[8] Ogden, P., Thompson D., Russel A., Simons, C. “Supplemental Instruction: Short- and Long-Term Impact” Journal of Developmental Education 2003 Vol 26 (3), 2 – 8
[9] Romero, C. and Ventura, S. “Educational data mining: a review of the state of the art”, Trans. Sys. Man Cyber Part 2010, Vol 40(6), 601-618