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My primary goal as a teacher is to ensure that my students become independent, responsible problem solvers in their own rights. I believe that the best way to achieve this aim is through emphasizing inquiry and collaboration in balance with the range of pedagogical methods, an emphasis in which the classroom becomes not teacher-centered or student-centered but learning-centered, an environment focused on active engagement of course materials that encourages drawing connections across fields of knowledge and with the broader community. As a teacher, my role is to provide rich opportunities for inquiry and to facilitate the students’ process of learning to ask questions and build their own answers. Instead of merely transmitting to students what I know and think, I am — simply and profoundly — a partner in their educations, offering them purposefully structured environments in which to develop their own critical awarenesses of thinking and learning as they connect content knowledge with their own lives and intellectual and professional needs.

Rather than focusing on a view of learning in which the endpoint of instruction for the student is mastery of a static body of knowledge, I aim for a dynamic approach to learning in which any body of knowledge is only the beginning of a student’s education. While more traditional approaches to teaching concentrate on simpler thinking skills such as summarization, interpretation, and, perhaps, analysis, I believe that we must push students to develop their critical thinking skills beyond analysis, to encompass integration and synthesis, so that they can understand their individual education in the broader contexts of the academy and their home communities. One of the best ways students can develop these critical skills in the classroom is through engaging a range of meaningful learning activities which encourage them to develop the self-reflective capacity to make meaning for themselves in real contexts across a range of specific disciplines. For example, much of my practice as a writing teacher and writing across the curriculum consultant is founded on the recognition that specific values for writing reflect the underlying function of writing in a given community, marking the framework for thinking and reasoning in that community. Enabling students to develop their understanding of how they synthesize their own perspectives encourages them to develop the critical consciousness required to actively engage intellectual problems across the curriculum, a consciousness which will ultimately draw them to being life-long learners.

I wish to offer my students rich opportunities to develop sound thinking and problem-solving skills that they can transfer to a variety of situations they will encounter throughout their college careers as well as their day-to-day lives. This approach to teaching is also important in that it inherently recognizes the diversity of classrooms today and plays to that diversity as a strength. I encourage classroom atmospheres in which diversity is an opportunity to examine the complexity of opinion and experience, an opportunity for students to seek sophistication in their arguments and the complexity that results from considering varied opinions. Diversity, both cultural and socioeconomic, offers abundant ways for students to encounter multiple perspectives and to learn to consider points of view different than their own. This is essential not only for creating effective learners but for creating capable community members in the broader sense. Students are the source of diversity in the classroom; their diversity is the greatest strength each brings to the learning process. As a teacher, recognizing this diversity itself and the range of different needs it implies is essential in creating classroom environments that promote diversity and the resultant dialogue as a vital part of learning, rather than seeing it as an obstacle to overcome.

Much current research, including my own work in brain and language, suggests in increasingly stronger ways that these integrated approaches to learning are effective, fundamentally, because they employ and help develop the widest possible range of cognitive processes and underlying neural functions and structures possible, resulting in the actual physical construction and integration of the neural connections which constitute patterns for thinking and learning. This insight is one which constantly informs how I think about my teaching: learning is about making connections — at the neural level, cognitively, linguistically, and socially.

Office: Administration 107
Office Phone: 282-4024
adkistep@isu.edu