My Teaching Philosophy

In August of 2012, I walked into the classroom at the Shodor Education Foundation to begin teaching our two-week workshop for the Shodor Scholars Program. This workshop is the culmination of every Shodor summer and touches on all aspects of Shodor’s computational science curriculum - computational thinking, modeling and simulation, web design and programming. The Shodor Scholars Program is meant to give a small taste of what students can expect if they apply to and are accepted into the Shodor SUCCEED Apprenticeship Program. I started the workshop as usual with an icebreaker and observed a young man in my classroom who seemed to have trouble communicating with his fellow workshop students. That student was on the autism spectrum. Despite his trouble communicating with his fellow students, this young man seemed to thrive on the learning activities in the workshop. His enthusiasm increased with each day as he engaged in hands-on, guided discovery of computational science and learned to build his own predator-prey and disease epidemic models. At the end of the workshop when students were asked to present the results of their group projects, I watched this same student stand in front of a room of his peers and their parents and reflect at length about the outcomes and observations of the model he and his group had developed. The profound nature of this experience and so many like it during my time at Shodor have shaped me as an educator. The impact that this type of learning activity had on my students’ engagement and depth of understanding ultimately led to my pursuit of a doctorate in Learning Design and Technology with a goal of training others to incorporate similar approaches into their own classroom practices.

Through my experiences as an informal educator at Shodor, I have come to believe that today’s technology, correctly harnessed, can create authentic learning environments wherein students can engage in sense-making. I embrace the tenets of Seymour Papert, who believed that technology was a powerful medium for developing understanding of abstract concepts. For this reason, my teaching philosophy is grounded in the premises of constructionism and situated learning theory. I believe that learning: 1) is an active process fundamentally situated within authentic activities; 2) is both social and collaborative; and 3) benefits from opportunities for reflection.

Seymour Papert asserted that “telling children how scientists do science does not necessarily lead to far-reaching change in how children do science.” Like Papert, I believe that learning involves engagement in authentic tasks, experimentation with an environment that provides similar contextual constraints, and is especially facilitated by the creation of personally meaningful artifacts. When introducing computational modeling to middle grades students, I often begin with the spread of disease as a domain area. Because students are typically familiar with how an interaction between two human beings can result in the transmission of an illness, this domain allows me as an instructor to build on what the students bring to the lesson. As we add complexity to the model, the students are often surprised when including doctors does not reduce the number of people infected. Their expectation is built upon their cultural context that doctors, in simplistic terms, reduce illness. For these students, the addition of doctors should result in reduced numbers of infected individuals and they “ignore” the fine-grained detail that doctors use medications to treat illness.

I use this classroom activity of experimentation with a computational model of disease spread to help students engage in the authentic tasks employed by scientists. Through this activity my students examine their expectations of how disease should spread and then make observations of the outcomes. When the observed results of their model do not match their expectations, I ask them to reflect on the possible reasons for this. Inevitably through this reflection, students will start to interpret the results by realizing that the doctors in their model did not have medications to treat the illness. In this way, my students are able to construct a meaningful interpretation of the results of their computational model and develop an understanding of the underlying scientific concepts. They are then able to put their new conceptual knowledge into practice by creating new computational models based on a scientific phenomenon that interests them.

Whereas this example shows the hands-on, problem-based approach I typically take with middle and high school students, it is the approach I seek to employ with all my students. That is, I aim to provide all students with learning activities that elicit their prior knowledge and engage them in authentic tasks that foster the development of new knowledge. For example, in the professional development workshops I lead for in-service educators and university faculty, I also follow a hands-on approach by having them participate in the same learning activities and investigations they might employ with their own students. This facilitates an opportunity for them to experience the investigation cycle of expectation, observation, and reflection as learners themselves. Recognizing the importance of multiple practice for situated learning, I also have workshop attendees work collaboratively to develop their own curricular materials that employ constructionist and situated pedagogical approaches.

By drawing from these tenets of Lave and Wenger, I seek to build a classroom culture for my students that fosters a community of practice. This culture acknowledges that each student, as an individual, brings their own funds of knowledge to the classroom which are built on personal, prior experiences. To accomplish this community of practice and foster reflection on their work, I use a variety of small- and large-group discussion formats in the classroom, including think-pair-share activities and jigsaw groups. These discussions benefit from the personally meaningful artifacts, or “objects-to-think-with” as Papert called them, that students have created. They allow my students to engage in critical self-reflection on their own practice as well as invite critique from their peers. My teaching seeks to build an inclusive environment where students are invited to share their ideas and engage with their peers. In this way, I hope to promote an atmosphere where students’ participation in a community of practice fosters their sense of belonging and their growth from novices to experts.