I approach my teaching as a designer, attempting to craft powerful, compelling, aesthetic, and rewarding learning experiences for my students. I expect and demand excellence of myself and try to foster a learning environment where I model principles of effective teaching, create an inclusive professional community of practice, create meaningful learning opportunities for students, and demonstrate a passion for knowledge and learning.
There are three design principles that guide my teaching: (a) Connecting technology to ideas; (b) Facilitating collaborative engagement with authentic activities; (c) Modeling scholarship and passion.
Connecting technology to ideas
The ultimate goal of my teaching is to change the way my students view their relationship to technology. I want them to see themselves not as passive users of technology and research, but rather as active designers of technology and research, who creatively re-purpose tools, technologies, artifacts and ideas to meet their own goals and desires. Accordingly, my teaching (though intimately connected to technologies) is driven by broader and more enduring themes of understanding our relationship to these artifacts, and the meanings we create with (and through) them. These concerns guide and transform my teaching, by moving it away from an a-theoretical laundry list of technologies to offering a broad framework for the structure of the course.
Facilitating collaborative engagement in authentic activity
Learning in my classes is driven not by lectures and reading (though some of that happens as well), but rather by having students engaged in authentic research and design activities . My approach emphasizes working together in groups through cycles of criticism and revision on authentic projects to design research strategies (in the case of doctoral courses) and technological artifacts for pedagogy (in the case of master’s and faculty development courses). I attempt to support student creativity through developing and sustaining collaborative communities of inquiry that respect diversity, encourage interdisciplinary thinking, and, most importantly, offer students the freedom to fail. Students in my doctoral seminars have engaged in original research that have led to funded grants, conference presentations and published journal articles. Students in my master’s courses have designed online courses for the College’s online masters program, digital movies, websites, PowerPoint presentations, FileMaker databases, CD-ROMs and streaming video projects.
In the masters’ arena, this engagement with authentic activity is at the heart of the learning technology by design process. Participants in these seminars have included practicing teachers and higher education faculty members. They work on a wide range of design problems: some small (create a PowerPoint to teach how to throw a Frisbee), and some large (work with a faculty member to develop an online course). They also work with a range of technologies and tools: some low-tech (use Play Doh to represent your love for knowledge), and some high-tech (use digital video to create a short film to express some powerful educational idea). What is common to all these activities is that they force students to look at the tools they have in terms of their inherent constraints and affordances, and to think carefully and creatively about how to leverage these to meet their design goals. Our research on these seminars indicates that such extended, collaborative engagement with authentic problems leads to the development of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge , at both the group and individual levels (Mishra & Koehler, in press).
Modeling scholarship and passion
I attempt to make the life of the mind come alive for my students, through my actions and my behavior. I am passionate about teaching and attempt to bring my experiences, my concerns, my knowledge, and my entire being into becoming a better teacher. I attempt to model for my students what it means to be a scholar–the engagement with powerful ideas, the thrill of discovery, and the pleasure of understanding some complex phenomena.