Pedro E. Alvarado Teaching Philosophy When I think about my teaching philosophy, I start by thinking about the teachers who have had the most impact on me as a student. The vast majority of the teachers I’ve had throughout my life have been very good, but there are several who stand head and shoulders above the rest. What differentiates those exceptional teachers is that they didn’t just teach me the materials we were supposed to cover in class, but they also taught me skills I’d need to be a wholly successful student, whether in their class or not. Many of these “extra-curricular” skills translated to life in general and have helped/are helping me to live a more successful life. As a result, my teaching philosophy considers not just the material that I teach, but also how my teaching of that material can impact my students beyond our time together in the classroom. I call this group mentoring. Obviously, my primary goal as a teacher is to make sure that course objectives and learning outcomes are met. And in order to achieve these objectives and outcomes I provoke my students to engage in critical thinking. This is accomplished by asking students open-ended questions and gently challenging their answers by “playing devil’s advocate.” I make sure to advise them, prior to drilling down on their answers, that I am doing that intentionally for the purpose of causing them to think more deeply. I pose interrogative questions without treating the student as if they are in an interrogation and I make the student feel comfortable by using an encouraging tone and words. By boosting critical thinking skills in the courses I teach, I believe my students are more prone to meaningful learning because they are not just learning to regurgitate information, they are learning to transform information into knowledge. Another way that I encourage transformational learning is by use of humor. I subscribe to the theory about humor in the classroom put forth by the late Dr. Melvin Helitzer. In his book Comedy Writing Secrets, Helitzer shares the story of an experiment he conducted at Ohio University where in half of the sections of his lecture classes he intentionally avoided using humor and in the other half he intentionally injected humor. Helitzer states, “Humor promotes learning and makes it memorable. [These] [s]tudies have found that students who attend lectures that include witticisms and anecdotes achieve higher test scores than students who attend the same lectures minus the humor. When learning is fun, everybody benefits. ‘When the mouth is open for laughter, you may be able to shove in a little more food for thought. – Virginia Tooper.’”1 So far in my teaching history, I have intentionally used humor and my students have consistently done very well. Further, I believe that the use of humor also makes students more willing to speak in class and more at ease when their answers are challenged. At the very least, my student evaluations almost unanimously mention the use of humor being a good thing. With regards to student evaluations, I read each of them and take them seriously. Of course there are usually one or two evaluations that destroy my teaching ability, but ironically, the number of negative evaluations I get typically coincides with the number of low grades in the class. Nevertheless, I do take into account all student feedback and do my best to implement it. For example, I received an evaluation that stated I talk way too fast. I know I talk fast, but I assumed that the students would ask me to slow down if I was speaking too quickly for them to keep up. I was wrong. As a result of that evaluation, I make every effort to slow down my rate of speech and tell my students that if I’m talking too fast to ask me to slow down. Then I blame my rapid-fire speech on being Puerto Rican. Another criticism I received one time was that the student enjoyed my stories, but sometimes I got so caught up in telling the story that I lost my place in the lecture. This, too, was a fair and accurate evaluation. As a result of this evaluation, I began marking places in my lecture notes where it is safe to detour onto a rabbit trail. If there isn’t a mark in my lecture notes letting me know it’s safe to stray, I stick with the script. In conclusion, my teaching philosophy is a mixture of group mentoring, provoking critical thinking skills, using humor effectively to help students learn the material and feel at ease when speaking in the classroom, and using what my students say about me in their evaluations to improve upon my classroom management skills and teaching techniques. 1 Mel Helitzer, Comedy Writing Secrets: 2nd Edition (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2005), 11 --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------