The Perfect and Effective Instruction begins by creating a Lovely, Worthy and Excellente Teaching Atmosphere. All about Enabling and Fostering the efficiency of the Pedagogical Relationship. Click above to see more pics.//
MY PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING STATEMENT.
My philosophy of teaching articulates two critical concepts: teaching and learning. Teaching fellow students and learning from them. The interaction teaching versus learning is all about constructing a positive vision together with my students. This begins with the effort to setting up a genuine “learning community”, an authentic academic entity based upon Respect of each other I mean the students and their instructor. One of the founding points I used to hammer out during the first day of class is to let them know that “I am not more intelligent than you are; but, definitely, I have more experience and expertise at dealing with what we are entitled to learn during the quarter or semester. So, my duty is to foster and to channel the way you’re going to build yourself in academics; to help you be responsible of your academic blooming. Consider the instructor I am; your classmates; the library and all meaningful web-based materials as tools to accompany you throughout your adventure to get knowledge you need to understand the world and to ethically impact on it”. This is about CONCEPTUALIZING THE VISION.
To make the vision becomes reality, our “learning community” led by the instructor I am will absolutely need to set up goals. Everyone MUST be advised that these goals are practically unachievable without a rigorous principle of method. To know what we have to do is not enough; to know how to do it is critical and essential. From my perspective as instructor, importance is given to two states: (1) the level and the nature of my students’ knowledge before each new lesson; and (2) the level and the nature of knowledge attained after completion of the assigned lesson. This establishes the interaction teaching versus learning as a complex and dynamic experiential process that, definitely, leads to instinctively feel whether your students have gained scholarly education or not. So, each component of our learning community, each one according to their duties needs to take the time to consider one’s goals, actions in order to fulfill the vision. The triangulation Vision-Goals-Action is absolutely paramount. This is about MY GOAL FOR STUDENTS AND THE OUTCOMES OF THE LEARNING PROCESS.
The vision, the goals/outcomes ideal is a complete non-sense without taking into account the context. The principle of personal responsibility to foster acuity and discernment depends on the principle of creating a powerful and worthy “class situation atmosphere”. Don’t mess with the seriousness given to construct a relevant, comprehensive, and unambiguous syllabus and don’t miss the first class session where and when the very first class contact takes place. Sociology and the array of social sciences are completely different in nature from mathematics and the array of physical sciences. The firsts are about manipulating abstract ideas whereas the seconds are about manipulating objective things and materials. That is why aspect of my philosophy of teaching statement is to set up interaction at the heart of the learning process. Once we have defined what we will be talking about, once I have defined the framework to scientifically approaching the topic, once I have shown what the concept(s) is (are) and eventually what the method is, students need to be a dynamic part of the discussion stemming back from the presentation of the issue. This fosters their understanding of the issue and their critical thinking ability. The best example of engaging students into the learning process is the tool I have constructed for students to be trained to know how to grade their classmates during the presentation-sessions. [http://georgesgomag.squarespace.com/teaching-excellence-evaluatio] This is about the DYNAMIC OF CLASS-SITUATION.
Once the genuine class-situation has successfully been established, the goals clearly made explicit, comes the complexity component of the academic learning process. This concerns the importance of theories to explain social problems. My students need to know that all endeavors at conceptualizing in sociology are to make sense of the concrete social life, our day-to-day life. The complexity in Sociology comes from the fact that sociologists and numerous social scientists deal with such complex social phenomena. That, there is no unique way to explain these phenomena but numerous perspectives most of them controversial while trying to explain the same social realities. Social theories such as Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology, Semiotics, Social constructivism, Psychodynamic, Grounded theory, etc. are certainly complex but convey a deep understanding of our society. Lastly, the Journal Entry is an unavoidable assignment. I assign it to my students to implement complex theoretical knowledge drawn from class discussion within their own lives. This is about the COMPLEXITY COMPONENT OF THE LEARNING PROCESS.
