In five years of teaching, my pedagogical stance has steadily solidified. When I first began teaching, my goal as a teacher was pretty simple: make my students better writers! However, as my teaching career has progressed, my teaching philosophy has changed slightly. While I still aim to help my students become better writers, I find myself not only inviting students into the realm of college writing conventions, but also examining rhetorical flexibility and metacognition. Ultimately, at the end of every semester, I hope that my class has encouraged students to think about how they can use the skills learned in the course throughout their entire college careers as they navigate into the increasingly narrow rhetorical contexts in their chosen disciplines. In order to encourage my students towards this admittedly lofty goal, my teaching style relies heavily on flipped classroom discussion, scaffolded in-class writing activities, and ongoing professional development.

To me, classroom discussion is essential to foster student engagement and learning in a composition course. At York College and Queens College, I’ve largely preferred introductory composition courses. In general, the students in these introductory courses tend to be a bit reticent during classroom discussion, especially as they are geared toward finding the “correct answer” to their instructor's questions, rather than following a discussion. As such, I find that “flipping” my classroom gives students enough room to express themselves, challenge one another, and activate prior experiences.

I hope that my class has encouraged students to think about how they can use the skills learned in the course throughout their entire college careers as they navigate into the increasingly narrow rhetorical contexts in their chosen disciplines.

As my courses tend to be introductory courses, I also prioritize scaffolded in-class writing activities and digital composition assignments. I find that providing space in the classroom for both modeling and practicing every stage of the writing process is particularly helpful to students who are struggling. For example, I perform a thesis workshopping activity in the first third of my composition course, wherein we compile all of the working thesis statements produced by students in a previous scaffolding activity. As a class, we review the anonymized thesis statements based on a set of criteria I’ve drawn. By the end of the activity, students have been exposed to my requirements for thesis statements, common mistakes, and ways to fix those mistakes.

I believe it is my responsibility as an educator to stay abreast of current research in writing and rhetoric so that I may be constantly exposed to concepts that will further conceptualize my personal pedagogy.  As such, I've tried to avail myself of professional development opportunities. In 2019, I participated in the Active Teaching and Learning Institute run at York College, wherein I had the opportunity to learn about new techniques and exchange ideas with my fellow educators at York.  At the start of the pandemic in August 2021,  I also participated in the CUNY Online Teaching Essentials which gave me models and frameworks to supplement my own online teaching pedagogy and facilitate a more inclusive environment in my class.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope to get the chance to expound even further on my teaching philosophy with you.