Friday, February 1, 2008

Philosophy of Teaching

As a teacher in a technical field, I have to provide students a foundation of technical skills, communication skills, troubleshooting, and problem solving skills that will allow them to be successful immediately in their first job. I have found service learning to be a solid foundation for my philosophy of teaching.

My first exposure to service learning at my college was in spring 2000 when all faculty and students participated in a campus wide day of service. My students and I went to the library for blind and sorted and shelved books on tape. This activity, I was told, was service learning but I soon found out that it was not.

At a faculty development workshop on service learning in the summer of 2000, I attended a lecture about service learning. I found out that just providing service, as we had done at the Library for the blind, was not service learning. The service provided needed to be tied to the learning objectives of course otherwise it was just community service. An idea from a student supplied a way to create real service learning for my technical classes in the fall of 2000.

One of my students was working for Albertson headquarters in Salt Lake City, he had an idea that we could take the surplus computers from Albertsons and donate them to needy families. The donations filled up two 23-foot rental trucks. I was not able to find storage space on campus so the majority of the surplus was sold; these funds were used to start the project and the project has had a strong history of providing service and learning. Since 2000 over 100 computers have been placed with the needy families and in 2007 computers were placed in a medical clinic in Africa. Although I view service learning as very important, I believe strongly in the value of soft-skills training for IT professionals.

Without needed soft-skills, IT professionals can have poor people skills and can be labeled as "IT trolls". My philosophy for addressing this issue can be summed as in every class something is written, and something is presented. This practice, writing and presenting, reinforces English and Communications courses, and just as important they practice real IT related writing assignments. The assignments that they write are training documents, analysis reports, memos, and technical information documents. Many of the documents are part of a troubleshooting lessons that I present.

Troubleshooting is a very difficult to skill to teach but I feel that I found a method that improves my students' ability significantly, and it starts from the first day of class until they graduate. My students are responsible for the health of specific computer throughout the term and are required to keep it operational. When their computer breaks I walk them through the process of researching the issue, identifying possible solutions, trying one solution at a time, and documenting the solution. After a few weeks my students understand, that I will respond to questions for help with the phrase "Have you Googled it?" They know that they need to work through the steps before I will help them. This is an important skill but not the final component of my approach to teaching.

Being formulistic in teaching is dangerous, I feel a need to be flexible and adapt in order be an effective teacher. In the past, I have required students not to surf the internet while I lecture. I have adjusted that recently due to a 1 minute assessment I did that showed a trend. Over 50% my students were struggling with the technical jargon and would like access to websites to decode all the jargon.

Finally, with flexibility, a method for teaching troubleshooting, a focus on communications, and active learning through services learning, I feel that I am an effective teacher.