Approach to Teaching

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Students come to the Joint Master of Social Work Program wanting to make a positive change in the world and needing to know how. I believe that it is my job as a Social Work educator to bridge these students’ professional goals with the essential content they need to know in order to do their jobs well (e.g., how to evaluate one’s own clinical efforts through rigorous research designs). I prioritize this role of bridging their authentic motivations for learning with essential content by focusing on three aspects of my teaching: (1) creating a safe space, (2) translating content, and (3) giving students time to practice. 

 

Creating a safe space where students feel encouraged to try on new ideas. I believe that students are not be willing to engage with new material unless they feel safe and supported in the classroom. I focus on safe and supportive spaces in a few ways. First, I build classroom communities, even in online spaces, through icebreakers and supported student-to-student discussion. To create an additional layer of safety through routine, I am consistent and organized in my approach to lectures, activities, and classroom flow, so that students know what to expect each week. Important to creating safe spaces, no single assignment in any of my courses is worth more than 30% of the final grade. I structure the course to have many low-stake assessments, as opposed to solely one to two major assignments, so students have room to try on new ideas and make mistakes. These three approaches (community, consistency, and low-stake assessments) allow students to feel safe and supported in the classroom and willing to take on new material. 

 

Translating content from the textbook to real life. I believe I have a responsibility to translate key foundational material from textbook or academic jargon to real life applications, so that my students can see the bridge between the course and their own career goals. To do this, I integrate all types of learning in each of my courses. In addition to traditional lectures and discussions, I employ videos and experiential activities to attract the aural and visual learners. I appeal to the logical learners through flow charts and acronyms whenever possible. When teaching the densest of materials, I require the class to produce at least one question before moving on to a new section, encouraging a discussion for the verbal learners. In each course I teach, students spend time with the full group, small groups, and pairs. All courses also include both presentation and written forms of assessment, to again support individual learning styles. By translating the content from textbook jargon and delivering it through numerous modalities, I strive to make the content accessible to students. 

 

Time to practice and apply new material. A major task of bridging classroom material with each student’s authentic career goals is providing enough time for active learning, wherein students can apply material and not just hear me lecture on it. When talking to my students about this, I describe the metaphor of how our society teaches young people how to drive. You first listen to a lecture on what stop signs mean and how to brake. You then get in the car while supervised by an instructor in the passenger seat. You finally demonstrate your basic knowledge on the subject and graduate to getting in the car by yourself. My courses are much the same. By the end of the semester, my students are running groups in my Social Work with Groups course, proposing research projects reflective of their own interests in my Research Methods course and running data in SPSS in my Research Methods and Data Analysis course. This application helps drive home the connections between classroom material and their own goals.

 

I evaluate my ability to bridge content for students by the degree to which students truly engaged with the course material, as evidenced by open conversations among their peers and class time with diverse activities. Supplementing the required course evaluations by the JMSW program, I also continuously evaluate through anonymous course evaluations, both half-way through the semester and at course end. One aspect of my teaching that I continue to invest in is striving to create a truly equitable classroom for students of all different kinds of backgrounds. I believe that truly equitable classrooms are marked by full engagement in activities, equal representation in the cultural-relevancy of examples given in the lectures, and a continuous and concerted attention paid to group dynamics. 

 

All students deserve to have an instructor who is committed to supporting their individual motivations for coming to our program by bridging these to essential course material. If we do this well, we will empower effective agents of change and advocates of social justice. I am deeply committed to these ideals and look forward to a teaching career based on this foundational pedagogical perspective.