Teaching Competencies
Evidence of Professional Competency in Teaching
My perspective on education has been greatly influenced by my exposure to the works of Banathy, Senge, Reigeluth, Duffy, and others who have noted the inadequacies of the current education system and have called for a systemic approach to designing a new education system. Those authors focus mainly on how to facilitate systemic change by working with current stakeholders. However, I think that a significant leverage point can be found in teacher preparation programs. Pre-service teachers are future stakeholders in P-12 education and are a potential source of grassroots momentum for systemic change. Their mental models of teaching and learning should encompass not only their personal experiences in education (what was) but also ideas about what education could be to better meet the needs of learners and of society.
One way I hope to expand the mental models of pre-service teachers is to model a learner-centered approach in my classes. I am striving to engage learners as active participants in the learning process rather than passive consumers of knowledge. In my candidate’s statement, I describe teaching as a performing art; however, I want to take that performance off the stage and into the audience. Rather than being “sage on the stage” or “guide on the side,” I want to interact with learners as fellow performers, each of us playing many parts. This is in part what I mean when I refer to a ludic approach to teaching and learning: to be not only engaging but engaged in meaningful dialogue and interaction.
Teaching Competencies I Will Need
Because I intend to teach in IST, I will need a broad knowledge of the relevant theories, models, and practices. More specifically, because I want to take a learner-centered approach in my teaching, I will need a deeper knowledge of methods for assessing a learner’s prior knowledge and collaborating with the learner to select or design appropriate learning experiences.
My desire to design and use games/simulations for learning requires that I understand the fundamentals of game design as well as best practices for incorporating games in instruction. I have read extensively in this area and have attended numerous relevant presentations at conferences.
Online learning is increasingly prevalent in higher education, and I will likely be required to teach either online or blended classes. Therefore, I need to acquire experience in designing and facilitating online learning.
Teaching Competencies I Have Acquired
Because my prior teaching and training experiences fall outside the five-year limit for evidence, I have not included the early assessments of my abilities. I will simply note that I taught composition and rhetoric, that my evaluations were very positive, and that I believe my subsequent experiences have done nothing to diminish my competency to teach.
Evidence of competencies in designing and implementing training
In the late 1990s, while serving as University Webmaster at Santa Clara University, I trained over 100 faculty, staff, and students to develop and maintain Web sites. I no longer have the trainee evaluations from those workshops, but I have included my supervisor’s letter of recommendation which mentions that I taught Web publishing classes.
In 2008-09 I taught technology integration to pre-service teachers (W301) and consciously reflected on how well my teaching adhered (or failed to adhere) to the theories and principles of learning and instruction that I want my practice to embody. By the time I learned that I would be teaching W301, I had only days to prepare and so relied on the syllabi and instructional materials created by past and current instructors.
In previous semesters, students in these classes used Google Pages to create their portfolios. However, Google decided to discontinue Pages and provide Google Sites instead. Through my previous experiences in software training, I knew that group instruction is generally not the most effective approach; some learners are more experienced software users and easily draw upon their existing knowledge to learn new software quickly, while other learners are slower to understand a program’s functions and uses and require more time and attention. Inevitably most of these learners get frustrated because the pace of instruction is either too slow or too fast form them. Therefore I created a series of instructional videos that demonstrate the process of creating a portfolio in Google Sites. My students had the option of viewing these videos before starting their portfolios and/or while working on their portfolios for just-in-time instruction. In class discussions and on course evaluations, students claimed that they liked this approach. One student wrote, "Create more tutorials for the other projects. It really helped when creating my google [sic] site and think it would be helpful to have during the multimedia project." I posted these videos in the W301/W401 OnCourse site so that other instructors may use them. I have provided descriptions of these videos and links to them as evidence of my competency in creating instructional materials.
I kept notes throughout my first semester of W301 and ended my classes by discussing with my students what worked well for them and what could be improved for the next semester. My students confirmed my sense that I was lecturing and presenting too much. Over the Christmas break, I revised my syllabus and redesigned some of my lessons so that they were more participatory. For example, instead of presenting a PowerPoint on copyright and fair use, I gave my students a pamphlet on the subject written for educators. We discussed the key points in the pamphlet and as a class applied fair use guidelines to a couple of real-world scenarios. The students then divided into small groups and each group received a different scenario. They were instructed to discuss their scenarios based on their understanding of fair use guidelines; then each group read its scenario to the class and explained how they decided whether or not it was fair use. The result was livelier, more engaged classes in which students had the opportunity to practice and demonstrate their knowledge. Representative comments on course evaluations included, "Fair use and copyright activity was helpful and interesting" and "The lecture on copyrights stood out for me because it got everyone involved to talk about our scenarios."
While I received good evaluations for my first semester of teaching W301, the evaluations for my second semester showed significant improvement. Overall, my average rating on all items was 3.85 for the first semester with 73% of responses being either “strongly agree” (30%) or “agree” (43%). My average rating was 4.42 for the second semester with 95% of responses being either “strongly agree” (48%) or “agree” (47%) (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Comparison of overall ratings
In the summer of 2008, I assisted Dr. Frick as a teaching assistant in R547 (Computer-Mediated Learning), which is an online course. My primary tasks were developing videos to instruct learners in the use of Adobe Connect, answering learners’ questions, and providing feedback on the learners’ final projects. Because the learners were expected to apply Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction, I developed and applied a rubric based on Merrill’s work. This helped me to provide focused and constructive criticism of their final projects. I have included an example of the application of the First Principles rubric (Excel file) to the online instruction “How to Recognize Plagiarism.” The first page of this example is a coded observation, and the second page is a visualization of a MAPSAT (specifically an Analysis of Patterns in Time or APT) map of the instruction.
In the summer of 2009, I was given the opportunity to teach R547 on my own. Naturally I relied heavily on the approach and materials used successfully in previous years by Dr. Frick. One significant change I made was to put more focus on and provide more guidance in the development of paper prototypes. During the previous year, I had developed and tested several paper prototypes in my Informatics classes and for the redesign of the Diffusion Simulation Game, and I knew the positive impact that this approach could have on a project if done well. I scheduled individual meetings with my students before they tested their paper prototypes to ensure that they were well-designed and that the students had an appropriate plan for usability testing. I also provided my students with the First Principles rubric and example of its use described above to give them a more concrete idea of how to evaluate online instruction.
Teaching online for the first time offered some unique challenges, the foremost in my mind being how to know whether the students understood the materials that they were reading. Their understanding should be evident in their work, so I felt it was inappropriate to grade their work before I had a chance to correct their misunderstandings. Therefore I encouraged them to post their deliverables for feedback (from me and from their peers) and gave them opportunities to revise their work before I graded it. Even though this resulted in more work for both the students and me, it also enabled me to ensure that they were learning and resulted in higher grades for the students. I think that the effort I put into teaching this class is evident in the results of the course evaluations. Eight out of 10 students completed the course evaluation. Overall, my average rating on all items was 4.77 (where 5.00 is “strongly agree”) with 99% of responses being either “strongly agree” (79%) or “agree” (20%). Six out of 8 students strongly agree that I was an outstanding instructor, and 7 out of 8 strongly agree that they would recommend me to others.
Figure 2: R547 overall ratings
I have compiled my course evaluation summaries in an Excel file for reference.
One of my major responsibilities in my previous job was designing and building a data mart to support reporting and strategic planning at Santa Clara University. Because I already knew that I would be leaving my job to pursue a Ph.D., I developed formal training for updating the data mart as a final project in an instructional design course at San Jose State University. I subsequently provided this training to my replacement to ensure that he would be able to manage the data mart in my absence. I have provided my supervisor’s last evaluation of my performance as evidence of this training.
I have also included the entire project that I submitted to my instructor. The project followed the instructional design model prescribed by Morrison, Ross, and Kemp (2004), with project documents including a problem statement, needs assessment, task analysis, objectives and strategies, design and development, implementation, evaluation, and relevant appendices. These documents amount to over 100 pages, so I have provided only my instructor’s grading rubric and comments as evidence of my ability to apply IST models and practices to design instruction.
For my practicum in my Master’s program at San Jose State University, I worked with Curtis Pembrook, Lab Faculty Specialist and Instructional Designer in the Instructional Technology and Services Department at Mission College in Santa Clara, California. Mr. Pembrook wanted an engaging and interactive way to help distance learners succeed in their educational objectives. I have included my practicum report as evidence of my ability to combine game design and instructional design. I was responsible for designing a game that was pedagogically sound and could be developed by Flash developers. I developed a prototype game engine that would handle some of the basic game mechanics, and I described how instructional modules could be added to the game. In addition to the body of the report, see in particular appendices C, D, and E.
Teaching Competencies I Need to Acquire
While I am generally pleased with the course evaluations for W301 and R547, I know that I still have plenty of room for improvement as a teacher.
Assisting Dr. Frick with his online class (R547) in the summer of 2008 and teaching the class myself in the summer of 2009 provided me with valuable insight into how to manage distance learning. In my role as Webmaster for the IST department, I helped several faculty to set up websites and OnCourse sites for their online classes. This gave me greater exposure to the various instructional strategies that are used in these courses. However, I still need to seek out other opportunities to acquire more of this kind of experience.
I would also like to create a syllabus for a course on designing instructional games. This would bring together my teaching and my research interests, and I think it would be a valuable asset when seeking an academic position. I have already collected bookmarks for several similar courses, and last summer I read Brathwaite and Schreiber’s (2009) Challenges for Game Designers: Non-digital Exercises for Video Game Developers. I also read Schell’s (2008) The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Both of these books, along with many others related to game research and game design that I have read over the past few years, are preparing me to be a better game designer as well as to teach students how to design instructional games.