Taking College Teaching Seriously - Pedagogy Matters!

When I joined the project, what I wanted back was the energy of collaboration, the challenges of feedback, and finally the creativity that comes from conversations with passionate teachers who love what they do. I wanted to get out of the office and talk to really smart people who delighted in imagining the best way to teach paragraph development or factoring polynomials. I wanted to be 'forced' to reevaluate the routines I'd developed over 37 years of teaching, and I wanted to be challenged to try new technologies that might have some value to add in today's classroom. For me, the process was heady and humbling. The weekly posts about what we did in one lesson in one class, and the reflection about that class, were powerful meditations on what I was doing in the classroom. I had to be an honest reporter of my own practice by using the categories of reflection required by the project. I gained a deeper understanding of pedagogy and what worked (or didn't) in the lesson I'd taught and recorded. The very humbling part of the process came when I 'entered' my colleagues' virtual classrooms and watched them teaching via video excerpts or read their posts. Then I noted the amazing proactivity of their lessons that demonstrated their knowledge of individual student issues and careful planning to enable student success. Many of us completely restructured our lesson plans after we saw how powerful our colleagues' lessons were in ensuring students mastered a concept in our discipline. --Rosemary Arca, faculty participant, English professor