Teaching

Teaching philosophy

I am a passionate instructor who cultivates her students’ individual strengths. Through the past thirteen years as a lecturer in American, German and Swiss university classrooms, I have developed into an engaging teacher who puts her focus on individual student development in all her courses, fostering students’ attention in a way that enables them to identify how a course’s learning outcomes may be applicable to their lives beyond the classroom.  

With respect to the foreign language, culture and history classroom, this means that I want my students to understand the imperative tie between language and culture in their native and foreign languages because I think that the successful learning, or acquisition, of a language cannot be separated from the language’s culture and history. Due to the digitalization in the field of education, one engaging method to achieve this is through a virtual teaching collaboration, implementing international, cultural exchange at home. For example, in a four-week virtual teaching collaboration between my students at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and the University of West Georgia in the US, our students were partnered up with international peers. They were co-taught by a colleague and me, and they were working through several assignments together. I conducted another virtual exchange between students at ZHAW and Penn State University focusing on global competence development in future teachers. Such small-scale projects are beneficial to everyone involved and exemplify the important link between language and culture and how it contributes to a well-rounded education across the disciplines.

While I feel that course-specific learning objectives must be met, I also think that my responsibilities as a university teacher exceed the course’s content and include challenging, guiding and supporting students in order to encourage them to become better at what they do, no matter how difficult, foreign or useless the course topic may seem to them. I find it important that my students comprehend that course-specific skills are not limited to a specific field, but that they can be applied and implemented across the disciplines. These beliefs are reflected in my student-centered teaching methods that I use with the intention to assure individual accountability and interdisciplinary development. One example to achieve this is to implement Wikipedia education into the course’s syllabus. Throughout the semester, the WikiEducation platform is used in the classroom and for homework assignments, guiding the students toward the course’s final project, a Wikipedia entry.

Not limited to but encouraged through the use of WikiEducation, I see writing as the most powerful tool to achieve student learning, particularly, the use of writing assignments as means of self-assessment, self-reflection, or simply as additional support to help understand specific topics. In a course on contrastive grammar (English/German), students were frequently asked to reflect, brainstorm, and comment on numerous topics either directly related to the content of the course, or related to their personal progress in the course (sometimes, the assignments were as simple as What are the three topics from our course that you like the most and why? What are the two topics that you did not quite understand?). The students and I benefitted greatly from such assignments because they helped everybody in the class anticipate or identify problems and, as a result, address them early in the course of the semester.

In my student-centered classrooms, my lessons always involve group work and little projects encouraging students to work with one another and to hold each other accountable for the outcome they produce. Depending on the course content, I make use of the discovery approach by providing groups with riddles that will lead them to a new concept or rule. In a foreign language class, this works great when introducing new grammar or idiomatic expressions.

As part of my lesson planning, I thoroughly think about how to divide the students into groups because, dependent on the activity, I can anticipate how well the students will work together with regard to both their personalities and course-related abilities. This way, I achieve an open and respectful classroom and I subtly force interaction between all students, no matter their backgrounds. I also try to create a rather fast-paced environment, i.e., in order to avoid boredom and to stay within the students’ attention span, I usually create four or five different activities over a 50-minute period instead of one or two long activities.

Furthermore, I feel that giving students structured choices facilitates their learning progress. I have implemented that by providing them with several homework assignments, essay prompts, or presentation topics to choose from. This way, the students know that I trust them to choose what they think is right for them, and we can focus on their strengths and preferences.

Assessing students’ progress plays a major role in my day-to-day lessons. I find low-stakes assignments essential to a successful course. Not only does the instructor receive an insight into her students’ progress, but they also make the course’s goals more transparent to the students, granted they are designed accordingly. When thoroughly planned (ideally as part of the syllabus), these low-stakes assignments may not be graded at all, but could, instead build up to big-stakes assignment like a term paper. Every one of these assignments requires timely, written feedback, ideally in combination with student-instructor-meetings during which the feedback can be discussed more thoroughly. In the past, my students’ evaluations always stressed their appreciation of my quick and helpful feedback. They also responded positively to the many ungraded assignments by saying that they encouraged them to review and work on the feedback rather than just checking their grade and putting them away.

To conclude, I would like to add that, while I have very specific ideas, high expectations and specific concepts of an ideal class period, I am, at the same time, a very open-minded and outgoing instructor who thoroughly enjoys teaching. In anonymous evaluations, my students have always pointed out that I deeply care about their learning progress, that I made the topics authentic and interesting, and that I possess an energizing teaching style. Many have called me their favorite teacher on campus, and just as many stressed that, even though they had difficulties with the content, they always felt that my main goal was for them to take away something from the class that they will one day be able to use outside our classroom. Because non scholae, sed vitae discimus.