University teaching
At twenty-three and only a year out of college, I found myself with the opportunity to teach in the Liberal Arts department of an art school in Philadelphia. At this point, I had not considered teaching and was pursuing an archival career and a degree in Folklore. However, I was bored and broke by the museum work I had been doing, and I am constitutionally unable to say no to an interesting opportunity, so I took the position days before the semester began. This turned out to be a humbling and life-changing decision.
I spent the next six years teaching First Year Writing classes at this university. This time was devoted to experimenting, reworking, and honing my curriculum. Each semester I would draw on the lessons learned the prior semester and go back to the drawing board and try again. Discourse and collaboration with wonderful colleagues and invaluable feedback from students helped me develop stronger materials and a more thoughtful, organized approach to teaching writing at the college level. |
Screenshot of a student evaluation from my final spring semester university course. This student describes a positive experience with the organization of writing assignments in the course, writing, "The manner in which Prof. K. breaks down each assignment into parts makes the process much easier… By breaking down assignments into stages, the final product of the completed assignment was much easier to put together." Feedback like this from students has influenced my approach to writing assignments in my current practice.
|
In the beginning, I unintentionally tried to replicate the college classes I had thrived in as a student and assigned mountains of outside reading assignments, reserving class time for seminar-style discussions of literature and essays and writing workshops. I didn't understand why this method worked beautifully for some students but seemed to leave many others checked out. As my comfort level in my teaching role grew, I learned how to scaffold reading, discussion, and writing assignments to challenge students at different levels rather than simply reinforcing the skills certain learners brought with them into the classroom. I also found ways to set up structures that allowed me to step back and let students take the lead in discussion, workshopping, even choosing material and assignments. Over the years, I developed a writing curriculum (for more information, see my ePortfolio on Digication) that used fairytale theory as a focus for student writing, which I found to be a wonderful vehicle for generating both academic and creative writing (see Writing Curriculum for a description of how my experiences teaching fairy tales at the university level influenced my unit design for my 12th grade class). I was also given the opportunity to help develop the objectives for the course with my colleagues, which I will share below because these objectives continue to shape how I approach teaching writing at the secondary level in order to prepare students for writing at the college level and beyond:
Successful students will be able to:
Successful students will be able to:
- Demonstrate the critical reading and writing skills needed to construct academic essays -- describing, summarizing, analyzing, applying, and basic synthesizing.
- Compose a question-based research paper and support a thesis in the body of the essay in properly structured paragraphs.
- Apply source material avoiding intentional or unintentional plagiarism through direct quotation and paraphrase, and cite in MLA format (in-text citations and bibliography).
- Synthesize source material to support a deductive argument.
- Assess scholarly sources (locate the author’s thesis, evaluate evidence, and weigh credibility).
- Recognize and edit patterns of grammatical error (sentence fragments, run-on sentences, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, punctuation, and spelling) to write clear sentences.