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Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy comprises six interconnected components: three fundamental principles and three underlying practices, all rooted in contemporary pedagogical theory.

Principles

Practices

Inclusive Teaching

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Inclusive teaching entails recognizing, celebrating, and leveraging diversity within the student body, with respect to both personal backgrounds and learning preferences.

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Examples: 
- Providing a variety of learning opportunities, with both passive modes (lecturing) and active modes (activities), that are group-based and pair-based.
- Relying on different assessment strategies, both synchronous (in class) and asynchronous (at home), allowing students to leverage their different strengths (such as writing, presenting, or debating), and providing personalized feedback.
- Building course materials that offer a multitude of voices and rely on different cultural and intellectual perspectives.

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Active Learning

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Active class plans include opportunities for students to engage in the independent application of course concepts, through exercises, discussions, and varied activities.


Examples: 
- After a lecture on the empirical challenges associated with measuring the democratization of a polity, student groups are presented with a hypothetical country and asked to provide concrete steps through which they would assess the regime type.
- A reading response may ask students to find examples in current news that match theoretical expectations from the week’s readings (e.g. politicians’ interviews about election fraud during a week on illiberalism and democratic backsliding). 

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Backward Design

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All course material, class plans, activities, and assignments stem from learning objectives, designed for a specific target student body and articulated at both course-level and session-level. 


Examples: 
- A research seminar may have as course-level LO the development of research skills, which can then be addressed through specific assignments, such as a semester-long research capstone project.
- A class session may focus on a specific aspect of a broader topic (e.x. measuring the level of democratization) that caters to the session-specific learning objective.

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Building Community​

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Create a positive, collaborative, and fun class environment where students feel part of a cohesive and supportive community, allowing for spontaneous participation and intellectual risk-taking.


Examples: 
- Establish at the beginning of the semester communal discussion class norms.
- Devise group activities that encourage peer feedback and mix up student pairings.
- Employ humor to create a relaxed class environment.

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Embodied Pedagogy​

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Enhance the student learning experience by integrating movement, intervening in the classroom space, and allowing for interaction with objects in class plans. 


Examples: 
- For a fuller description of this specific pedagogical approach, please see here.

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Instructor Reflexivity​

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Maintain a practice of reflections on one’s teaching, updating both specific class materials, as well as improving the broader pedagogical toolkit with novel teaching strategies. 


Examples: 
- Keep an instructor’s diary to briefly annotate course material after each class session, recording what worked well and what could be improved in following iterations.
- Employ student surveys at both the beginning and the end of class to better understand the effectiveness of pedagogical strategies.

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