Evidence of Teaching Competency

My Teaching Philosophy

Micah Gideon Modell teaching Having taught in a wide variety of formats and environments, from corporate training to public schools, ages five and six through ages fifty and sixty, computer programming to English composition, I know that it is impossible for me to teach any one person everything they will ever need to know about any given topic — much less a whole class. There is too much information to impart in a class and the information itself grows and evolves too rapidly to remain relevant for long anyway. Finally, my own experiences have granted me a particular perspective, just like each of my students. In a class filled with students, it is not possible for my message to reach each of them. As a result, I have established a set of goals for students in my courses:

(click for an explanation of each and how they are reflected in my methods)

They will demonstrate an understanding of the concepts underlying the skills they learn and practice.

Explanation: While skills are important, recommended tools and even methods change over time — it is virtually guaranteed that some of the specific skills my students learn from me will be outdated by the following year. However, the concepts and underlying principles are not only more constant, but are also often transferrable to new contexts.
Supporting Methods: While I use tools and techniques to demonstrate concepts, I endeavour to use tool-agnostic language whenever it is possible. My presentation materials also go to great lengths to maintain this abstraction from the tools and I encourage my students to use whichever tools and methods they are most comfortable with as long as they are able to meet the requirements of the course.

They will develop the skills necessary to identify and learn from available resources.

Explanation

As it is not possible for me to impart all knowledge to my students, I help them to recognize and utilize the resources available to them. These resources primarily take two forms: online media and social.

Supporting Methods

Most of my courses do not make use of a textbook. Instead, part of my preparations for class include premeditation of web searches targeting the knowledge required. In some cases this includes searches which fail to produce meaningful results followed by talking through my method of evaluating the source. I make it my business to know the resources available to the students and these are also demonstrated where appropriate.

My classes leverage group work wherever appropriate. In addition to leveraging the Vygotskyan (1978) Zone of Proximal Development to induce learning, this causes my students to teach each other as they may not all fully grok the material as presented in class. After all "thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself" (Tryon Edwards as cited in Oakley, Felder, Brent & Elhajj, 2004).

They will build confidence in their own ability to experiment with the knowledge they gain.

Explanation

As it is claimed that expertise requires 10,000 hours to achieve, it is safe to say that any student of mine will have to practice outside the classroom to reach such a level of proficiency. Therefore part of my task is to encourage further engagement and confidence that they have the skills required to make such engagement a success.

Supporting Methods

I provide a great deal of actionable feedback to my students on all their projects. In addition to making extensive use of rubrics, I maintain bonus grading categories and actively seek out opportunities to award bonus points to students when they reach beyond what is required of them. This is accompanied by a congratulatory note explaining the reason for the bonus point(s).

Addtitionally, my grading schemes and assignments structures include both major and minor projects which are graded accordingly. The minor projects provide students their first opportunity to get meaningful feedback on their first explorations which they then have the opportunity to improve upon for the major project deliveries. Additionally, major projects are cummulative where possible and students continue to receive credit for successfully practicing their new skills throughout the semester.

Students are encouraged to deviate from requirements if they provide justifications for doing so. If a rationale is provided, I may voice my disagreement (with justifications) and even ask that they make modifications, but their grades will not suffer for the thoughtful exercise of judgement. This helps them to develop confidence in their own judgement as well as a sense of ownership with respect to the assignments.

Frequently througout the course, I ask my students to reflect on what they have achieved in my class and during these discussions I take pains to validate their views even if I also give voice to disagreement.

They will experience how the lessons from the course apply to life outside the classroom.

Explanation: When a student is able to relate their classroom experiences to existing or anticipated real life circumstances, their motivation to learn increases. Additionally, the likelihood that they will then be able to apply the new knowledge in the anticipated future situation rises.
Supporting Methods: I go to great lengths to construct authentic projects that accurately reflect the situations for which my students are being prepared. This extends beyond providing projects with definite solutions and enters the realm of design where we sometimes run into roadblocks that force us to double back and try another path.

I offer transparency.

Explanation

The more information I can provide about the course and it's contents, the greater my students' ability to anticipate and plan. Additionally, if students know what is expected of them, their stress level is reduced as they are not concerned about nasty surprises.

Supporting Methods

My grading makes use of rubrics whenever possible and these are posted well in advance of the due date. This leaves little to no room for ambiguity as they have the opportunity to ask me about any requirements that are unclear.

I regularly practice the phrase 'I don't know but I will find out' in anticipation of the days when this is true. Sometimes I will take the opportunity to search for the answer, modeling the skills of self-sufficiency and lifelong learning I aim to foster in them.

Teaching Methods
Description	Experimental	Lessons Learned	F401 FA10	R341 SP11	W220 SP11	R341 FA11	R341 SP12	W220 SP12
Group projects	No	Group dynamics are difficult to manage and every class runs into at least one group problem.	X	X	X	X	X	X
Reflection papers	No	These rarely often insight into group function and take a long time to grade adquately.	X
Regular comparitive self- and peer-assessment	Yes	Provides a window into the workings of the team, but the data only alerts me that something is going on and not what.		X	X	X	X	X
Online forums	No	Great means of promoting active preparation for class contents. Students get fatigued as semester progresses.			X			X
Student forum facilitation	Yes	These engage facilitator students more deeply in the topic. Must include checks on student preparation.			X			X
Physical warm-up activities related to the content	No	Provides variety and gets students thinking about the content from alternative perspectives. Good for intimidating material.			X			X
Student critiques of ceer crojects	Yes	Excellent mechanism for reflection. Requires follow-up to reinforce the thinking.					X
Cummulative project	No	Students feel		X		X	X	X
Rubrics	No	Rubrics allow me to provide a good deal of actionable and contextualized feedback. They also reduce student stress by resolving subjectivity concerns.
Bonus points	No	These are a great motivator and mechanism for influencing behavior.		X	X	X	X	X
Credit for practice of new skills	Yes	This does reward students for retention rather than cramming, but a lower modifier might be sufficient. It does have the effect of mitigating mistakes they make before they know me and how my classes operate. I have been going with a doubling of points in each class, but maybe 1.5 would be better?		X	X	X	X	X
Engineered groups	No	My one crack at fully engineered groups was a failure, but this is only partly due to the groups themselves. The literature offers mixed signals here.			X
Quasi-engineered groups	Yes	I've had success with this approach, but you must be sure to establish criteria that are realistic (e.g. asking for at leat two different states to be represented in each group is a major challenge at a state school.		X		X	X
Self-formed groups	No	Students tend to band together with others of similar motivation levels.	X					X
Students were given freedom to decide many parameters of their projects	Yes	This can be frightening, because you have to trust your students to be able to do something productive and useful. The result was more meaningful to them.						X

Competencies Identified

Content Knowledge
Face-to-face teaching experience
Online teaching experience
Course design and development experience
Learning theory, pedagogy and androgogy

Evidence of Progress

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Content Knowledge

Evidence 1: Annotated bibliography to be used by a new instructor assigned to teach a course analogous to Indiana University Bloomington's Instructional Technology Foundations (R511) course. The document breaks the field down into constituent parts and presents a selection of related readings with a summary and explanation of where they fit.

Evidence 2: Coursework in instructional design, human-computer interaction design, software design and development, educational foundations and research methodology. This evidence take the form of a table of courses which relate to these areas of focus.

Face-to-face teaching experience

Evidence 1, Evidence 2, Evidence 3, Evidence 4: In the spring of 2012, I had the opportunity to teach both Multimedia in Instructional Technology (R341) and Technology Issues in Education (W220) again. While R341 was stable at this point, W220 underwent significant revisions and benefit from the presence of two assistants in the classroom to help students work through the challenging content. The changes contributed to a positive experience.
Evidence 4: In the fall of 2011, I was asked to teach Multimedia in Instructional Technology (R341) a second time. This time, while the overall syllabus remained substantially intact, the individual lessons were tweaked substantially and I was afforded an assistant in class with me. The changes significantly improved the flow of the course and resulted in a positive experience.
Evidence 5, Evidence 6, Reflection: In the spring of 2011, I was asked to teach Multimedia in Instructional Technology (R341) and Technology issues in Education (W220 or Programming For Non-Programmers Who Want to Teach Programming). I had never experienced either of these courses before and the former involved a significant rewrite while the latter was designed from scratch. In spite of consistently impressive final projects demonstrating understanding of course content, the student reviews were mixed. Please read my reflection upon this situation.
Evidence 7, Evidence 8: In the fall of 2010, I had the opportunity to teach my updated version of Survey of Serious Games (F401) on my own. After spending the summer reworking the course, I was satisfied to find that it ran smoothly and with few modifications required over the course of the semester. The course ran with a relatively low class size of seven (7) students, and the personal attention this allowed me to devote to my individuals surely contributed to my high ratings.
Evidence 9: While assisting Dr. Bob Appelman in delivering the course Survey of Serious Games (F401), I had the opportunity to teach a couple of lessons (video available) unassisted, grade assignments and help students to understand and apply the concepts from the class. These activities garnered me the unsolicited praise documented here.
Evidence 10: As a teacher of English as a foreign language in South Korea for more than two years, I was tasked with delivering instruction to elementary and middle school-aged children. Each of the institutes at which I taught provided a series of pre-packaged learning materials including books, CDs, teachers books, etc. However, I was lucky in that they also allowed me to implement activities and lessons I devised on my own. This evidence is the supporting worksheet for a video scavenger hunt in which students perform a series of tasks through successive iterations of an amusing video, gradually going deeper into the content until understanding is achieved.

Online teaching experience

Evidence 1: In the summer of 2010 I assisted Miguel Lara in delivery of the online course Computer Mediated Learning (R547). In this capacity I participated in asynchronous discussions regarding the course readings and synchronous video-based formative critiques of projects in progress. My resultant evaluations were positive overall but pointed to specific areas for improvement as well.
Evidence 2: While working as a Teacher of English as a foreign language in South Korea for more than two years, I worked to learn the Korean language. This proved difficult as I found few educational resources which met my needs even after speaking with my native English speaking colleagues. As a result, I determined to share what I was able to learn in a format designed for native English speaking foreigners like myself. The result is this podcast-based course.

Course design and development experience

Evidence 1, Evidence 2, Evidence 3: In the fall of 2010, I was asked to deliver Technology Issues: Computer-Based Education (W220) the following semester. This implied a brand new course design from scratch as the objectives had changed significantly from the last time it had been offered. This first evidence is a hard copy of the syllabus I developed and taught in the spring of 2011, while the second is the syllabus I used in 2012. The third evidence is a a live link to the syllabus.
Evidence 4, Evidence 5, Evidence 6: In the fall of 2010, I was asked to deliver Multimedia in Instructional Technology (R341) the following semester. A significant redesign was required to teach students to effectively integrate multimedia in instruction. This first evidence is a hard copy of the syllabus I developed and taught in the spring of 2011, while the second is the syllabus I used in 2012. The third evidence is a a live link to the syllabus.
Evidence 7: As the summer of 2010 approached, I enlisted a colleague, Dabae Lee, to collaborate with me on the design of a course to be proposed to Indiana University's Collins Living & Learning Center. Every year they accept applications for new and interesting classes to offer their residents and we are currently waiting to hear the results.
Evidence 8, Evidence 9, Evidence 10: After having assisted with Survey of Serious Games (F401) for two semesters, in the summer of 2009 I updated the course syllabus (in the form of the linked website) to clearly focus it on the design of educational games.
Evidence 11: As Lead Curriculum Manager for the middleware division of Red Hat, I was responsible not only for design and development of their professional training curriculum, but I also constructed a lifecycle model to be applied to each course. Later, internal iterations of the model were built to tie into a document management system to provide high levels of transparency with respect to development status to the greater organization.

Learning theory and andragogy

Evidence 1: At the Master's level, I have taken courses in both learning theory and andragogy.

References

Oakley, B. A., Felder, R. M., Brent, R., & Elhajj, I. (2004). Turning student groups into effective teams. Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2(1), 9-34. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.6791&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Vygotsky, L.S (1978). Mind in society: Development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

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