Three big influences on my teaching are WMRHS (the most recent place I taught full-time), the pandemic, and the 7 years I’ve been teaching at PSU. Although I ranked it as third, PSU really is the foundation of my teaching, and I’ve worked there longer than anywhere. My teaching has evolved greatly in those 7 years, but there are some fundamental practices and beliefs that have stayed with me from the very beginning. Sometimes, when I’m feeling stuck with my teaching, I need to re-center myself around those fundamentals and remind myself that I do know how to teach. I included WMRHS as one of my influences as well because that was my full-time gig for the past 4 years (I’m at a different high school now). This influence taught me the meaning of public education and what it means to be responsible for the education of the local community. The pandemic has also greatly influenced my teaching, as I’m sure it has for all teachers. Although it’s been an incredibly stressful and frustrating experience, I believe it’s made me a better teacher overall, especially when it comes to my online asynchronous class at PSU. The pandemic helped me to rethink the way that online learning works. For so long it seemed that students could coast through the course with a C and not necessarily learn anything about argument. But through my experience with teaching during the pandemic, I focused more on the concept of a portfolio that allows students to struggle, mess up, and explore throughout the semester, and ultimately forces them to show what they’ve learned through those trials at the end of the semester. Because of this, I’ve noticed that students are earning higher grades at the end of the semester and that I feel good about the grades they’re receiving because I can see real evidence of their learning.

I believe all of these experiences are positive, even though they didn’t necessarily feel great at the time. I had a conversation with a friend and colleague the other day about how, especially these days, our freshmen and sophomores (high school) seem to make us question ourselves and our teaching abilities more and more. And I believe this questioning is a hallmark of good teaching because it means that we are taking in information and using it to assess what needs to change in instruction, curriculum, relationships, systems, and all other aspects of teaching. We don’t take any of it for granted and we don’t assume that anything we’re doing now is the “magic wand” for education. All of our teaching experiences help us to learn and grow as educators and remind us that we’re working with humans who grow, change, and adapt with the times.

That said, I don’t want to eliminate any of these influences. When I picture my future teaching self, I hope that I continue responding to challenges like the pandemic in ways that help me question my current practices (though maybe with less existentialism) and to adapt to changes in the way the world works.