Teaching Portfolio

Kye S. Hedlund



Introduction


The idea of a Teaching Portfolio grows out of the concept that teaching is an integral part of academic scholarship and should be documented as such. It includes both work samples of one's teaching (class handouts, student evaluations, etc.) and a reflective commentary explaining the philosophy of teaching, serving in part to put the work samples in a meaningful context. Teaching Portfolios are widely adopted tools for evaluating teaching that are used extensively both within UNC-CH and around the country. In fact, searching the web for "teaching portfolio" can yield over 100,00 hits!

This portfolio concentrates on my past two years during which I taught Comp 114 (Foundations of Programming), Comp 121 (Data Structures), and Comp 130 (Databases). I explain my philosophy of teaching,why I do things the way I do, and give a few examples of putting the ideas into practice. During the majority of my teaching career I adopted a conventional, lecture style approach to my classes. During the past four or five years, my approach to teaching has changed considerably. Many of the points addressed in the following section will show how my teaching has evolved. I also indicate some future goals for my development as an instructor.


Teaching Philosophy


For me teaching is great fun and hard work. It is trying new approaches and continuously revising to more effectively guide the students. It is constant reassessment, updating, and adjustment of both the content and presentation, searching for a more effective way to challenge my students to achieve their full potential, to encourage them to thoroughly learn fundamental concepts, and to develop their skills at designing, writing and documenting software. It is the joy of seeing the best students excel, seeing the pride of the average student in completing a term project that is longer, more challenging and better crafted than they thought possible, and seeing the satisfaction of the lesser student persevering when they thought they couldn't make it.

I start every semester with the Chinese proverb: "Never confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself." A teacher can only point; learning is done entirely by the student. I also draw the analogy:" Suppose this were a course on swimming." I could lecture about swimming and show you videos of great swimmers, but you would not expect to learn swimming from this. To learn how to swim you simply must log many, many laps in the pool, swallow a lot of water, and get a lot of chlorine in your eyes. There is no other way - no shortcut.

During each class I lecture but I also throw the students in the pool and coach them while they swim laps. Active learning is an essential component of every class. Sometimes it is as simple as peppering a lecture with questions thrown out to the class - questions that depend not just on recall of factual material but require the students to apply, analyze and evaluate the material (per Bloom's taxonomy of education objectives (Bloom, 1984)). In addition, in-class exercises are regularly used. After presenting a new topic and addressing any questions the class has on this material (often not many), I pose a problem for them to solve using the new concepts. We devote from 5 to 15 minutes for the class to work on the problem. Students are encouraged to talk to each other, and I circulate around the class helping where requested. These students who didn't have any unanswered questions when we started the exercise are now full of questions, clarifications, connections to other topics, etc. At the end of the exercise we go over the solution. This form of coaching on small, simple problems is excellent preparation for the more challenging homework and programming assignments. It is also beneficial to "strike while the iron is hot" and have the students apply a new concept immediately after they have been introduced to it.

Many of these in-class exercises are done collaboratively by teams of four students that submit one team solution. The pedagogical benefits of teamwork are well documented (McKeachie, 1990). By as signing teams with students who have a mix of abilities and experience, I end up in effect deputizing numerous coaches - virtually every team has at least one "lead" student who can explain the concepts to the others. Not only do the weaker students benefit, but the bright students more thoroughly master the material through explaining it to others (Meyers, 1993). Work in teams is also good preparation for the real world. In industry, how often does a supervisor come to an employee and say: "Here is an important problem. You have 50 minutes to solve it. Don't open any books, and by all means don't talk to anyone else about it." The end of the semester course evaluations show that teams are judged by the students to be a valuable learning experience.

Throughout a course (often in every single class) I use a variety of teaching approaches to reach students with different learning styles (Felder, 1993). Some students learn best from visual presentations (pictures, diagrams, etc.) and others from verbal explanation. Some are sensors who respond best to what is seen, heard and touched while others are intuitive learners (ideas, memories, possibilities). Inductive learners build the big picture out of examples while deductive learners take a principle and deduce the consequences. Not all students learn most effectively the same way I learn. In fact, research has shown that undergraduate students and faculty members usually have different learning styles (Felder, 1988). Since there is a natural tendency for me to teach in the way that I could best learn the material, I make a conscious effort to vary my presentation and teaching techniques to "connect with" as many students as possible.

I strive to take potentially dull, technical material and bring it alive for the students. Interesting examples, visual aids and demonstrations are used whenever appropriate. In Comp 14, for example, I find that many of the incoming students are aware of my campus wide reputation for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in class. Early in the semester (before they have written their first program) we do an in-class exercise in which the students program a robot to make a PB&J sandwich. I collect their solutions, don a chef's hat, and proceed to execute their programs. Peanut butter, bread and sometimes knives fly everywhere. We end up with lots of laughs and thoroughly mangled sandwiches resulting from their incomplete or imprecise robot algorithms. This brings alive the important point for beginners that the computer does not understand what you really mean and interprets its instructions literally. Perhaps even more importantly, we spend the next several classes developing an algorithm for this task which incorporates looping, branching, procedures and parameter passing - the basic elements of computer programming. Throughout the remainder of the semester, when we encounter a major new concept, I can often remind the class "You already know how to do this with PB&J. Now we just have to learn how to express it in the programming language."

Before a course begins I explicitly and as precisely as possible state the instructional objective of the course. One component of this is stating exactly what the student will be able to do at the completion of the course. This becomes a contract between the student and myself; the student knows just what to expect, and I know what material to include on test and assignments. These goals are repeatedly communicated to the students so that throughout the semester they know where the class is headed, why we are covering each topic, and how it supports the course objectives.

I motivate students by a combination of push and pull. The pull is the enthusiasm I show for both teaching and the course material. Enthusiasm is contagious, and the students end up wanting to learn and succeed. The push comes from highly challenging assignments plus the high expectations that I have for my students. My courses are usually rated amongst the most demanding at UNC (perhaps too much so), but despite the heavy workload, most students are very satisfied with my courses. They find that they learn a great deal and achieve more than they thought possible. I try to foster a positive attitude amongst my students and empower them to succeed.

Taking a course should be a personal experience, and students should not be just bodies in a large lecture hall. I put considerable effort into learning every student's name and some personal background about them. This is quite a challenge. The Student Information Sheets (see attachments) help, and I use them to quiz myself daily on student names.

Finally, I demonstrate to the students that I care about them and their success in my course. This is an effective motivator and at times serves as a safety net for a student who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

Efforts to Improve My Teaching


I have taken a number of steps to improve my teaching performance. A voluntary review by the department's Teaching Tune Up committee was helpful (and the first voluntary review in the department). Participating in the department's Teaching Seminar for graduate students exposed me on a weekly basis to advice from some of our senior instructors.

UNC's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has provided assistance. Five different semesters I have had a pair of classes videotaped. Senior personnel from CTL review the tapes and offer suggestions for more effective classroom presentation and organization. It is a humbling experience to see yourself teaching! The Director of Faculty Development, Ed Neal, has been of invaluable assistance providing not just teaching tips but connecting the practice of teaching to the large body of academic research on learning and teaching. I call on Ed's advice several time during each semester.

I have attend three seminars (each one to two days long) on "Effective College Teaching", "Evaluating College Teaching" and "Engaging the Learner in Small Group and Large Group Teaching."

The courses I teach seem to undergo almost constant change and revision - not an uncommon situation in computer science. Even though the course titles and numbers stay the same, their content changes so quickly that it is almost like teaching a new course. A capsule summary of my course development work over the past 2 years is presented below.

Comp 114 - Becoming a data structures course. Emphasis on using Java Collection Framework.

Comp 121 - Object oriented design

Comp 130 - Design of databases. Information modeling. Hard to teach. Not covered effectively in any textbook.


References


Bloom, B.S. (editor), 1984. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York, Longman.

Felder, R.M. and L.K. Silverman, 1988. Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education. Engineering Education, 78(7): 674-681.

Felder, R.M. 1993. Reaching the Second Tier - Learning and Teaching Styles in College Science Education. J. of College Science Teaching. 23(5): 286-290.

McKeachie, W.J., Pintrich, P.R., Lin, Y-G, Smith, D.A., and R. Sharma, 1990. Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom: a Review of the Research Literature. Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan Press.

Meyers, C. and T.B. Jones, 1993. Promoting Active Learning. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers.