In my second year of teaching in K-12, I taught AP US History to a group of 11th grade students. One student was diligently taking notes and asking questions about the schedule, workload, and extra credit opportunities. I commented that she must be eager to pass the test. She responded, “Oh, I’m not going to pass.” I could not comprehend how a student taking an AP class, who was clearly a hard worker, didn’t have confidence in their ability to pass this test. When I think about my teaching philosophy, I think about this student and how I wish I had known then what I know now.
I have similar goals now as I did then, but as my education has progressed and I have gained more experience, my approach to teaching has changed. One of my goals is still to have students build up their academic confidence, and I will accomplish this by facilitating students’ epistemic abilities by centering constructivist pedagogical theory. Students learn by doing and by participating in knowledge creation. Epistemic skills take time to define, explore, and develop as a class. This exploration takes different forms. It could look like class discussions where students negotiate the meaning of a curated selection of texts where I act as a guide to keep the discussion on topic rather than the enforcer for a particular interpretation.
While my teaching prioritizes constructivism, expressivist insights inform it. Students write best when they write reflexively; when they write about what they know. To guide students to this place, I use a process-based curriculum, centering a path towards reflexivity with exploration and self-reflection. In first-year composition, the subject that students can most readily access and discuss is themselves. Students keep a writing log, collecting primary evidence of their writing process. They will explore their writing influences, and they will write about their experiences with writing. All these assignments culminate in a final writing process paper where students lay out everything they have learned about their writing process. By examining their relationship with writing and their own writing process, students develop the skills and identify the patterns that lead to their best writing, but it also opens the door to deeper exploration of not just the self, but the self in relation to the world. This reflection leads to a deconstruction of students’ preconceived notions and biases, which opens the door to identifying these realities in the information ecosystem that they inhabit.
Feedback is essential to my curriculum and pedagogy. In my class, feedback is a two-way street. One side of the street comes from the instructor. I use multimodality in my feedback to facilitate deeper engagement with the revision process, focusing on content over mechanics, and finding the successes in a paper as well as the areas of improvement. The other lane comes from the students. I encourage students to participate by utilizing feedback reflections in which students identify why and how they would or would not use a piece of feedback on their next draft. In this process, feedback is a dialogue that students are a part of rather than something that is dictated to them. Students have engaged more thoughtfully and deeply with a piece of writing while simultaneously practicing the work of revision.
While I am not the same teacher as I was years ago, I am still informed by those experiences. The time in K-12 gave me valuable insight into the educator I want to be. Now I am equipped with the theory and pedagogy that will allow me to nurture student growth at the college level.
Jordan Cagle 