Pre-JMU Teaching Experiences
In this section, I'll discuss my teaching prior to coming to JMU–both in Japan and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). I've borrowed this narrative from my application for tenure and associate professor. The goal of this section is to convey to you my trajectory, depth, passion, and maturity as a teacher prior to arriving at JMU.
Teaching English in Japan
My first job after graduating from college was as an English teacher in rural junior high schools in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. When I took this job I still had no idea that my calling was teaching. At the time, I would have told you that I wanted to have an adventure in a foreign country where I couldn't speak the language. I chose Japan because I had been studying judo and zen meditation since my sophomore year in college. As an undergrad at the University of Richmond I majored in sociology and leadership studies, and minored in physics. My plan was to spend one or two years in Japan and then come back to the US and figure out what my "real career" would be. Regardless of my intentions, though, teaching in Japan made a deep impression on me and relating the differences between the US and Japanese educational systems may shed some light on how my teaching philosophy developed while there.
Before I do that I'd like to share part of a journal entry that I wrote on September 5th, 1996, approximately two weeks into my teaching job in Japan (one of over 200 pages I wrote that first year). At the time I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the job of teaching English while handicapped by my total lack of Japanese language ability. Using the self-reflective skills my mentors at UR had taught me, I drew upon my own experience to develop a plan for the future:
When do/did I learn the most? I have energy. I am engaged. I am challenged. I am confident that I can learn AND I perceive that what I’m learning is important to me. Therefore, my goals for my class environment are:
- Students are energetic
- Students minds are engaged
- Students are challenged
- Students believe that they can learn, and
- Students believe English is important to learn
It is amazing to me that my values at age 22 are the same as they are today. The major difference is that now I know and understand the science of teaching and learning that demonstrates why my then intuitive perspective is a sound one.
In Japan, unlike the US, the accomplishments (or failures) of the individual student are not that important. In the US, underperforming students must repeat grades. Westerners believe that individuals are essential and that each person must learn to perform as an individual. In Japan, however, students must learn to function as part of a group, and as such, the need to remain with one's age cohort trumps individual academic performance. That doesn't mean that Japanese teachers don't care very deeply about individual students' learning, but it does mean that students will always be promoted to the next grade regardless of their actual learning.
In practice, this was very frustrating for me. In the centralized Japanese system, all students study English from the seventh grade until graduation from high school. As such, you'd expect to find a lot of English speakers in Japan, but such is not the case. What I found was that about 60% of my students failed to grasp even the most basic English concepts during their first year of English study. Despite that, they were promoted to the second year which builds on the material from the first year. By the time they reach the third year of English, the number of students who are able to keep up is tiny. Teaching first year students was fun, but by the time they reached third year, they were so bored and demoralized that it was a very painful experience.
Despite their individual failures to learn English, however, Japanese students are constantly reminded of how important it is for each person to make a valuable contribution to the groups of which they are a part. Over time I began to see the wisdom of their way of education. While they may find a class like English boring, Japanese students are not particularly bothered by their lack of proficiency in any particular area so long as they are able to contribute to their classmates in an area of their own strength. They learn cooperation to an extent that adult Japanese can accomplish complex coordinated action with little, if any, exchange of words. In a world where we do most of the work in our adult lives in a collaborative, cooperative environment, the Japanese approach makes a lot of sense.
From the Japanese I learned a number of things:
- Cultural beliefs are deeply embedded in our education
- Be humble and open-minded when faced with a radically different approach
- It's tough to learn English when you don't have anything particular to say
- Not to have a dogmatic acceptance for the things I had grown up believing
I learned something about perseverance in trying to adjust my style of teaching to the students I am working with. Since then I've also learned that American researchers like Deming have recognized the power of the Japanese perspective and shown how their focus on groups and quality can lead to superior performance as was demonstrated by the Japanese auto and electronics industries' dominance through the 70's and 80's.
Teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
After five years in Japan, I moved my family to New Jersey where I was invited to complete my PhD in Information Systems at NJIT. What a culture shock! I was looking forward to moving back to my "home culture," but New Jersey was nothing like Virginia, and NJIT was nothing like the University of Richmond where I'd been an undergrad. As a full-time lecturer at NJIT and as grad student I had new transformations in store.
Given my background in sociology, I was assigned to teach a course called "Computers and Society," a 300-level required course in both the Information Systems and Computer Science bachelor's degree programs at NJIT. Many of NJIT's students were first-generation college students working forty-hour weeks while going to school full time. They were mostly unprepared for "college-level" work and didn't have a lot of confidence in their abilities. Not having any understanding nor sensitivity for this, I was very strict with my students and commiserated with colleagues about how unmotivated, and inarticulate they were. It took me a couple of years to realize that my inflexibility, and my preconceived notion of what students "ought to know" and "ought to be able to do" were not serving anyone well. In focusing on understanding my students, my Ph.D. studies stalled as I devoted more and more time to my teaching.
The energy I put into teaching led to innovation. I developed NJIT's first course on server-side web development and allowed students in the course to complete projects using their own choice of programming language: Cold Fusion, PHP, JSP, or ASP. I wrote a web-based system that taught students how to record and upload online presentations (in 2004 before people were doing this kind of thing), and deepened their learning through the peer-evaluation component of the system. My system was jury rigged into Blackboard before such systems had interfaces for 3rd party plugin developers like myself. I set up my own PHP server and tried out Moodle, one of the first free, open-source learning management systems. Because of that experience, I was tapped to serve on a committee under NJIT's VP for IT evaluating our options before renewing our expensive contract with Blackboard. Before I left NJIT I was nominated and took honorable mention for the university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award.
Given this experience, it is not surprising that my dissertation topic migrated towards the development of online systems to improve teaching and learning. Eventually I built and tested QuesGen, an online system to help teachers write better multiple-choice questions, but before I could get there, I had to dive into the areas of learning, pedagogy, assessment, and teachers' professional development. My dissertation studies set me up to have several realizations that have shaped the teacher and researcher I've become.
One of my first realizations was that college faculty receive little to no instruction or training in teaching and pedagogy, even though teaching consumes generally one-third to one-half or more of our professional lives. Teaching is a professional occupation which does not necessarily come intuitively to all of us who are asked to teach at the university level, hence the need for organizations like JMU's Center for Faculty Innovation, and books like Will McKeachie's Teaching Tips. As a web developer, I wanted to build rich online tools that naturally led professors to use sound pedagogy grounded in the science of teaching and learning.
The second realization was the potential conflict of interest that faculty experience between serving students and serving society. Ken Bain, who was the keynote speaker at the 2011 CFI May Symposium at JMU, articulates this conflict in his book What the Best College Teachers Do. In discussing how great professors prepare to teach, he describes a number of questions teachers ask themselves, including, "#9. How will I find out how students are learning before assessing them, and how will I provide feedback before–and separate from–any assessment of them?" (p57) In his discussion he makes the following observation:
The professor holds a dual role, first, to help students learn, and second, to tell society how much learning has taken place. The intent of this ninth question is to recognize the distinctions between these two responsibilities and restore the primacy of the first. (p58)
My reading of King's College of London professors Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black's book Assessment for Learning taught me how these roles can be in conflict. Grades become ego-involving, i.e. a student's sense of self-worth becomes dependent upon these external judgments of their work. When faced with a "negative" judgment, the need to preserve self-esteem leads them to put up defensive barriers against the feedback, compromising the learning opportunity. Alternatively, students may develop a belief in a fixed ability level, only alterable by outsiders–a problem when research demonstrates that learning is most robust in students who believe that they a) can improve their ability, and b) have the power to do it themselves. Wiliam and Black's research showed that grades tend to be more ego-involving than other feedback. As such, society's demand that professors grade may put them into conflict with what is known to be best for fostering student learning.
The third realization I made concerned class size. As a lecturer I taught large sections of eighty or more students, with semesters in which my total enrollments were close to 150. Such class sizes prevented me from employing the techniques and best practices I was garnering from the literature, and getting to know students as closely as I would like. Building on my experience as a distance learning student (the first two years of my master’s degree at NJIT were completed from Japan–I never set foot on NJIT campus), I began to develop online videos (tough when many people still used dial-up!) and software that would automate administrative, one-way communication, improving my efficiency and leaving me time to get closer to my students.
I was fortunate to get to meet Dylan Wiliam and work with him and other well-known researchers in the professional educational measurement world as an intern at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) during the summer of 2004. While at ETS, I saw firsthand how professional tests are developed, and how they are scored. I was able to observe teachers involved in scoring the AP English, Latin, and Studio Art exams. I worked as a developer on the MathTCA software system that attempted to automate the creation of high-quality math questions for standardized tests. Through these experiences, coupled with my reading in item response theory (IRT) and research into multiple-choice question generation, I became deeply skeptical of the validity of tests and other assessments that I had designed for my students.
The depth and breadth of my perspective toward teaching changed dramatically in my five years at NJIT. Unfortunately, the funding for my position dried up before I had completed my dissertation and I was thrown into the job market earlier than I would have liked. Fortunately, that happened to be the year that ISAT was looking for a new computing professor!