teaching observation fellowship

The teaching observation fellowship is an opportunity for graduate students to observe other teachers across the university as well as be observed teaching themselves. Through this program, I was given thorough feedback on my teaching strategies and classroom dynamics. Observers ran focus groups with my students to collect anonymous feedback on their experiences and I was directly observed teaching on multiple occassions. Below is a reflection on my experiences in the program.

Development as a teacher this year

One thing I really wanted to build over this year of teaching was making the preparation more efficient and myself more fluent in the actual teaching process. In previous years, my preparation for a simple discussion or lab section was taking more time than it should have, be it in preparing the visual materials, questions and activities, my verbal lecture, etc. Part of this preparation was then spent (over)thinking where to stand in the classroom, how to behave around students, and the other kinds of skills that simply aren’t present yet without more experience in the classroom.

Both of these aspects felt a lot more natural by the end of this year. My preparation for discussion and lab sections felt much more efficient, such that I was able to feel prepared on a much more reasonable time budget. Much of this was due to my increased fluency and comfort within the classroom, such that moments that may have felt stilted or forced in previous years felt more natural and comfortable. I really think I was able to create an environment of camaraderie and community in my classroom that was centered around the student experience, and I think a lot of this was due to my firmer identity as a teacher this year. This sense of identity directly arose from the fluency and skills I’d developed as a teacher.

How this program contributed to this development

Nothing had a greater impact on this fluency than the TOF program. For the first time, I knew I’d be observed teaching my own classes in front of others who cared about teaching themselves, which pushed me in a way that no other system at the university has. This was also my first opportunity to dedicate time towards thinking and reflecting on the act of teaching generally, not simply my own specific material or activities. This holistic view brought with it the instincts of teaching that would be the backbone of a fluent teaching style, an eye for visual materials, and an intuition for roadmap and structure that wouldn’t require top-down effort.

The system of reflection and observation was also absolutely imperative to reframing and reattributing causes from the teaching episode, which I take to be a primary feature of the CTL reflections. In other words, what may have seemed to be an ambiguous network of events – why didn’t that activity work, why did that question get derailed, were my slides clear ­­– could often only be clarified and properly understood after reflection on and reappraisal of the myriad causes at play.

Challenges and lessons learned in the program this year

It felt like a serious challenge for me to provide meaningful feedback to the instructors during the debrief sessions. The people I was observing were all committed pedagogues dedicated to centering students, structuring a class around a clear roadmap, using space in an engaging way, etc. So, during debriefs, I often felt much more comfortable bringing up things they had brought up having trouble with, or just decisions I had noticed they made (using lots of devices, standing in a particular place, building slides around certain aesthetics) and asking about the motivations that went into those decisions from a relatively open-ended and valence neutral way. In a capacity where I’m observing instructors who have requested to be observed, I would imagine there’s more basic issues to address that have certain clear answers. In the current context, though, I felt much more comfortable coming from a place of open-ended curiosity that would give instructors a moment to reflect on their decisions and why things might be the way they were.

Building on strengths in teaching

My enthusiasm for the roadmap was invigorated over the course of the year, and if there’s anything I want to focus on making more central to my teaching style it is the roadmap and the returns of the roadmap. By the end of my tenure in the TOF program, there was no advice I was giving more often than to bring the roadmap back after every break or opportunity. Earlier in my career, I had a tendency to lean more towards open-ended narrative that was less heavy-handed. When practicing being a student in the classrooms I’ve observed, though, I was reminded just how confusing and clueless one can feel at the other end of the classroom, and more than anything wanted to be overtly oriented more often.

Advice to future TOFs

One piece of advice to future TOFs would be to coordinate teaching in both semesters, which I probably could have done for the program and would have made the semester I didn’t teach a bit easier. I loved observing the rest of my pod a few times, but from a purely developmental standpoint it would have made sense to keep practicing teaching throughout the whole year.