Douglas H. Kelley: Teaching Philosophy
Education, at its best, is lens-making. Our teaching must be more than a hard-drive copy of factual data from one brain to others, more than robotic repetition of a choreographed motion to be performed by students. Instead, we must lead our students to form conceptual lenses through which they can examine their work, their lives, and their world in a new way, empowered by relevant facts, critical thinking, and scholarly exploration. As a high school student, I became vividly aware of the lenses I was forming in my senior physics class. Suddenly the world showed order, causality, and accessibility it had never before revealed. I could hardly believe that such simple rules might govern so much! Though my majors and my career have taken turns since then, I have always been a physicist at heart. I love teaching physics because it offers the opportunity to help my own students develop those same lenses—if not better ones. Three general principles inform my teaching style, my attempts at lens-making: ownership, audience, and the scientific method.
First, if there is a lens to be made, it is the students who must make it and in that process take ownership of it. My actions are meaningful only to the extent that they induce student response and ownership of the learning process. Interaction is crucial: moving around the room while lecturing, asking students direct and frequent questions, incorporating demonstrations and hands-on activities. A person understands a concept only when he or she owns it and knows it well enough to teach it, and so the questions I ask my students, both in class and on assignments, must require them to teach what they know.
Second, a teacher must always remember his or her audience and imagine the world from their point of view. What knowledge have they already built and what concepts are likely to be difficult for them? New concepts are almost always best introduced by analogy to something familiar to the audience. Technical language can convey intricate ideas clearly and concisely—unless it is unfamiliar to the audience and therefore confusing. Often, a picture really is worth a thousand words, since human quantitative abilities are so rooted in our spatiotemporal skills. For all audiences, organization fuels intuition; charts, comparisons, and well-structured lecture notes eliminate much confusion as students form their lenses.
Finally, the lenses of science are nearly always formed upon the scientific method. I want my students to ask questions and to propose hypotheses—guesses—as they work to solve a problem or understand a concept. Thomas Kuhn and many others have shown us that the process of forming a hypothesis is mysterious, nonlinear, and creative; students need plenty of practice! Subsequently the hypotheses that students form must be tested empirically and reconciled to their existing knowledge, always keeping causality at the center of every argument. Here group discussion again becomes a key part of classroom interaction. Exposure to the history of science, emphasizing the story of how past scientists hypothesized and tested their own guesses, can also help students hone their guessing skills and see how cause-and-effect relationships are discovered.
I hope that through a teaching methodology centered on constructivism, audience, and the scientific method I can bring my students to form lenses, to view their work, their lives, and their world in new ways.