Creating structured freedom
For
me, teaching is the natural consummation of learning. I love to learn and I love to teach. Consequently, I want to enrich others with
what I have learned and share my enthusiasm for learning.
As this natural love for
teaching has been complemented by my research, I have become passionate about
promoting two things: students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and their
development of coherent disciplinary conceptual frameworks. When students develop a coherent disciplinary
conceptual framework, they can learn new concepts faster and better apply their
knowledge to new situations. When
students are properly motivated, they learn more and are more willingly to
think deeply. These two goals mutually
support each other and powerfully accelerate learning.
To improve my teaching, I make
decisions through my own conceptual framework for good teaching and
learning: Learning and intrinsic motivation
are promoted when students have a strong sense of purpose, autonomy, and
competence. As a teacher I must
communicate and articulate the disciplinary purpose for why students must learn
the course content, but this disciplinary purpose must also intersect my
students’ personal purposes for learning.
I structure my courses to give students the autonomy to discover and
explore their personal purpose within the discipline by presenting them with
carefully bounded choices. I then
support these choices with carefully selected course structures to give my
students a sense of competence and a belief that they can succeed.
Finding the
intersection of disciplinary and personal purpose
At its core, each discipline is
built upon a core conceptual framework: Classical mechanics is built upon Newton’s
laws and economics is built upon opportunity cost. In my instruction of computing courses, I
discovered that state plays a vital role in computing’s core conceptual framework. When fully understood, these frameworks irreversibly
change the way a student understands a discipline and even affects the way they
view the world: Once students grasp
Newtonian mechanics, they never see the flight path of a ball in the same
way. Additionally, when students
understand these frameworks, they gain a powerful tool to organize the rest of
their learning in that discipline. My
goal is to identify these frameworks that define the purpose of the discipline and
then help my students find and grasp these frameworks that will change the way
they live. For example, I structure my
courses to reveal that a computer does two things: stores state and manipulates
state through computation. I also have
my students use concept mapping exercises to help them build their own
understanding of the framework.
As a complement, each discipline
also promotes certain habits of mind. In
order to develop the mind of an engineer, students must learn to think
analytically by interpreting project requirements, decomposing problems into
manageable parts, and assessing the quality of their final product. To teach analytical thinking, I model it in
class and give students time to practice it: I speak my thought processes aloud
without skipping steps, have students explain their reasoning to others in
small groups, and require that students document their solution strategies when
solving homework problems.
By setting a clear disciplinary
purpose that is bounded by the conceptual framework and the habits of mind, I
am able to strategically decide what content to include in the course and avoid
the temptation to “cover the material.” In
my introductory computing courses, I am ecstatic if my students understand the
pervasive nature of state in computing, because I know that I have equipped
them for careers in not only computing, but also signal processing, control
theory, systems engineering, and many other engineering disciplines. Because I establish a strong disciplinary
purpose for the classroom, I can create meaningful bounds for what activities
will promote students’ pursuit of disciplinary expertise. However, these bounds are not oppressive, but
they can actually provide more opportunities for students to discover how their
personal values and purposes align with the discipline.
Purpose and
autonomy
Students can only discover how their personal
values align with the discipline and discover their intrinsic motivation to
learn, if they are given a degree of autonomy to explore the discipline on
their own terms. This exploration requires
that students be presented with choices to choose the what, why, and how they
learn while being constructively bounded by the clearly defined disciplinary purpose. For example, in my computing courses, I want
my students to understand state and its centrality to computing, but I am less
concerned about the exact contexts of their learning. If one group of students is concerned about
sustainability and the environment, I let them focus on learning about minimal
design of state machines so they can learn about sustainable computing. If another group is more interested in
designing new computer architectures, I let that group focus on designing new
state machines with practical specifications.
Both students learn about the importance of state, but they also were
allowed to embrace their personal purposes.
Through classroom mechanisms
such as peer-review, online tutorials, and collaborative learning, I can
provide students with the choices to pursue these different learning goals and
activities. This freedom to pursue
personal purpose has motivated my students to pursue projects that far exceeded
the scope of the standard syllabus and become more interested in remaining in
computing.
Autonomy,
structure, and a sense of competence
As I
increase my students’ autonomy to choose what, why, and how they learn, I can
further promote my students’ intrinsic motivation by providing the classroom
structures that positively support and bound their autonomy. For
example, I let my students negotiate what topics and types of assignments will
be included in the syllabus of my courses.
I support this autonomy, by providing structure for the negotiations: I explain why certain topics or activities are
non-negotiable according to my disciplinary purpose, but I give students the autonomy
to choose purpose-driven optional topics and activities. I explain how these optional topics or
activities support the disciplinary purpose and can support different personal
purposes. I also provide clearly defined
rubrics and grading schemes that not only assess my students’ learning, but
also reinforce the disciplinary purpose.
These clearly defined course structures provide students with a sense of
competence (a sense of their ability to succeed) in a classroom environment
that is often radically different from their other courses.
To
further support each students’ sense of competence, I never grade on a
curve. I set clear expectations of what
abilities students need to demonstrate their expertise, and I communicate that
each student can exceed my expectations.
Because I want my students to fully realize their autonomy as
self-directed learners, I emphasize Socratic methods and focus on asking
questions rather than providing answers.
Finally, I emphasize team-based learning and teach students how to
create effective teams. While students
often feel uncertain when pursuing goals by themselves, effective learning
teams can increase self-efficacy and enable students to learn more and
accomplish more during their learning activities.
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I
believe that the three central goals of promoting students’ senses of purpose,
autonomy, and mastery will improve my students’ intrinsic motivation to learn
and help them develop those key conceptual frameworks and habits of mind that
can make them effective engineers. With
these frameworks and habits, I believe that my students can become the
self-directed learners that will become the researchers and innovators that can
change the world.
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