Design Forward
An emergent exploration of critical instructional design.
Design Forward
Portfolio Part: Teaching Origins
Your Teaching Origins
Teaching Origins
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Restorative Practices | structure | 1 |
| Having been an online student | loved independently learning and being able to do the lessons on own timeframe. Missed conversations and processing | 2 |
| students when I worked in a high school | I was a school counselors for many years. I listened to students talk about what supported them in classes and what caused struggle | 3 |
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.
I became trained in restorative practices years ago and have since been modifying its structure and tools to fit my needs. Restorative practices brings people together and on an equal playing field to discuss their experiences and process the content. I often create opportunities for this in my classroom. I do book groups in this structure and pose questions for students to reflect on. Overall, I feel this is positive. They learn from not just me and the content but from each other’s interpretation of the content and their experiences. I would like to integrate this more when delivering content.
Another influence on my teaching role is having been an online student in the past. I loved learning online because it worked in my schedule. I loved the flexibility but also the accountability. I HAD to read the readings or I would “miss” the class. It worked well for me because I was often the student that would start daydreaming as a professor would be lecturing on a topic. I did miss the collaboration and processing time when I was learning online. This inspired me to do a mix of required readings and focus on processing when in class through the circle structure of restorative practices. I feel this is good because I am not lecturing on the topic they just read about, but bringing it a step further by discussing how to apply it and providing opportunities to talk about it in class. I try to do a summary of the content because of the processing but need to figure out a way to make this aspect of my class more interesting. I am still working on finding the balance.
Listening to students talk about their experiences learning taught me a lot about being a teacher. Students identified loving hands-on experiences, things that allowed them to work with others, and engaging experiences. On the other hand, some students hated those things I just identified many students liked. This taught me I needed to have a mix of approaches as well as accept that no matter what I do, not everyone will be happy! I need to work on integrating more approaches with each aspect of class. Perhaps through more choice.
