Design Forward
An emergent exploration of critical instructional design.
Design Forward
Portfolio Part: Elisabeth’s Thoughts on Teaching
Your Teaching Origins
Elisabeth’s Thoughts on Teaching
Step One
In the boxes below, Name those things/people/experiences that have shaped your approach to teaching. Describe their Influence. Add as many as you would like.
In the Rank column, try to rank your influences (as best as you can), where the lowest number means the greatest amount of influence.
| Name | Influence | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate Professor for Math Methods | First person to make me think that I could go to graduate school. I thought he looked like he was having fun teaching us how to teach math to young children. | |
| Pat Cantor and Mary Cornish | My mentors when I started at PSU. They both shaped my thinking about what it means to build relationships with students and supported my work as I learned more about myself as a teacher. | |
| CPLC | I learned so much from the three seasons of the CPLC. Being in this community pushed my thinking and made me question everything about my teaching. | |
| COVID Pandemic | COVID accelerated my shift in my pedagogy. I was making changes to my pedagogy through my work with the CPLC but when COVID hit I had to move more quickly as the students (and myself) needed these changes now not when I was ready. | |
| My early childhood and elementary experiences with children | I have many experiences working with young children. This work informs my teaching and is where I started to see myself as a teacher. | |
| Working with other HoME Faculty | Having these new perspectives helps me continue to think about my teaching. | |
| Teaching undergrad courses as a doctoral student | I had the opportunity to teach many classes as a doctoral student. This was my first opportunity to think about teaching adults. | |
| My first full time position in higher education at Slippery Rock | When I was at SRU, I learned more about higher education and how to collaborate with others. |
Step Two
Choose three influences you identified and write three paragraphs about the impact they had on your teaching.
Paragraph 1: Identify specific ways in which these influences can be seen in your teaching.
Paragraph 2: Discuss whether you feel like that overall impact has been positive or negative.
Paragraph 3: Imagine your future teaching self and write how you would like to further integrate or eliminate these influences.
This activity is tough. Influence is hard to tease out. You may think you know what influences your work but then your perspective on these ideas shift as you have new experiences. Time has a way of shifting your thinking.
I don’t think that I would have come to higher education without my undergraduate experience. I didn’t know anyone that was a professor when I was growing up. It was not until I started my undergraduate work that I began to build an understanding of what a professor did. I have a pretty strong memory of sitting in my undergraduate math methods class one day when I began to think about my professor and how he was engaging us in how to teach young children mathematics. He seemed to enjoy what he was doing and tried to make it accessible to us. I think we were learning about fractions and he created these number necklaces to help us think about how to support children’s number sense. The content doesn’t really matter. What is important is that I remember thinking, maybe I will do that some day. It was the first time this thought crossed my mind.
I thought I knew how to teach and then I accepted a position at PSU. Taking this job has shifted my thinking about teaching. I am not the same professor as when I started. My first influences when I started here were Pat Cantor and Mary Cornish. Both of these colleagues supported me during my pre-tenure years and modeled how to put students first. It is difficult to articulate everything that I learned but their mentorship was critical to my teaching practice. They both made me realize I had more to learn and more to contribute. I didn’t realize how much mentors could support your work until I had these wonderful colleagues supporting my work. They really understood my teaching and helped me push myself to learn more about my pedagogy.
The second influence to my teaching at PSU relates to my involvement in the CPLC. I enjoyed learning from faculty across campus about their teaching. It helped me to see how there are many people on this campus that are trying to reimagine what teaching can be and how to best support students. There are so many lessons that I can take from this work. I think that all of these pieces helped me to center my pedagogy on empathy and consider how to put kindness and care in the center of what I do.
