teaching | John Thorp

teaching observation fellowship

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

eeg markers of mind-wandering in the real-world classroom

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Paper coming soon!

lead teaching fellowship

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The lead teaching fellowship is an opportunity for current PhD students to lead pedagogical workshops and make resources from the Center for Teaching and Learning available to their home department. In the 2021-2022 year, my workshops focused on lessons learned from online teaching and a survey of approaches to ungrading. Below is a reflection handed back to the CTL that summarizes the work and lessons learned over that year

What goals did you have for your LTF role? What progress did you make toward these goals? What challenges did you encounter? How might these experiences translate more broadly?

A major goal I had for myself as an LTF was to continue to bring the graduate students within the Psychology department together in a meaningful way. I know I’m a better teacher when I have a strong support system of other teachers, and I was set up in a departmental administrative role to put together the kinds of events that might strengthen that network. This was relatively easy to work towards, it mostly relied on sending out some very comprehensive emails at the beginning of each semester making clear I could be a point person for any departmental or pedagogical needs, and then coordinating between students and the various staff to make sure we had time and space to meet up. I tried to make an opportunity for us all to see each other every two weeks – especially once it was warm and we could use departmental money to meet indoors.

The greatest challenge was in properly motivating people to get together. Weirdly – and I don’t know how generalizable this is – my biggest success in this domain was by hosting a methods workshop in Amity Hall in which we were all at a table and someone was presenting on the TV above the table, and then at the end of the workshop people just stayed in the bar and all caught up. Other events that were mostly post-talk receptions where people left from the talk and went to a separate locale – typically well attended – were far less popular. I really think there’s something about hijacking people’s training goals to get them to actually hang out with each other.

It’s that kind of insight that makes the LTF probably the most useful role I’ve been in for gaining skills useful to any professional context. Motivating dispersed groups of people, uniting them around a common narrative, and creating the space for genuine interactions is critical to any form of leadership.

What did you learn about modeling or leading as a result of facilitating your LTF events (or resource)?

I think probably what I learned most was how critical “putting in the work” is to both leading and modeling. That sounds very simple, but there’s so much about teaching that feels just about energy and tone and instincts that it’s easy to pass over how much of our pedagogical practices rely on being actively steeped in the method, literature, and practice. For my second LTF event on ungrading, this was obviously apparent during the portion that was mostly literature review I had done in preparation, but it was just as much true that I would not have had the instincts for leading any discussion on the topics had I not done the thorough literature review myself.

Please describe a resource that was helpful to you this year as you developed your LTF events (or online resource).

Having Ana DiGiovanni as a co-LTF was incredibly meaningful. From reading previous reports from the departmental LTFs, it seems the hardest part of this job was doing it alone. Having another LTF in the department felt like the interest in pedagogy was distributed, and all the more cultural rather than personal. I hope the department keeps the budget for it. It makes things easier on the individual LTFs as much as it tangibly demonstrates to the rest of the department just how committed we are and ought to be to the practice.

Lucy Wang, my SLTF, has been a bottomless and effervescent resource during my time, and has made herself available and made sure I was connected with my fellow LTFs in a way that really connected me with the role. Her and Emily Fitzgerald’s learning community was also incredibly impactful on my ungrading event as well as my line of research generally!

The last resource that was indispensable was the archive of LTF documentation. It was absolutely fundamental to how I contextualized myself within the LTF role and in regard to the other graduate students. It is a brilliant resource that provided me countless ideas and tangible materials.

If you were planning a third LTF event or resource, what might that event be, and is there something in particular you would do differently?

I was so inspired by Lucy and Emily’s learning community I would have a hard time not making a third LTF event about embodied knowledge! There were so many critical insights as to what exactly it was we all missed over Zoom and how we relate to our materials and each other that were so fun to pick apart together. It really resonated with my ungrading LTF event about how we can be so encouraged to consider one another and the objects of our study as abstractions of themselves, whose physical properties and phenomenological experiences are overwritable, exchangeable, and ultimately irrelevant.

Thinking about teaching programming, particularly, as teaching a craft is a really valuable insight. It resonates with earlier language classes I’ve had where the structural syntax and rules reign supreme over the meaning of the actual words or what they’re supposed to sound like to the ear. In a similar way, we too often think functions and syntax are all the students need, rather than the actual lived experience of understanding why things go where they go, trying things, having them not work, and overall building an interactive system that models how one might fix a bike or pot a plant or make dumplings. Brain research is beginning to show that supervised learning – the process of backpropagating errors onto the network that made the error – is enacted by the cerebellum, the area responsible for fine motor control. All to say that treating our material as a craft to be learned ought to enact those same areas that develop learning in a much more naturalistic way.

My primary goal was creating space for graduate students to connect after the pandemic. I knew I was in a relatively special position being an LTF with a departmental role that gave me access to some funds allocated for graduate students to use however we wished. Most of my liaison work was therefore spent towards organizing these relatively informal events, which almost invariably centered around teaching in the department.

Ana and I did manage to get some meetings with directors of undergraduate studies within the department to try to work out how graduate students could more readily become instructors of record on courses they wanted to teach. We compiled a list and are readying an open resource for future graduate students on what options there are and how to navigate them. Because there aren’t many strictly through Columbia undergraduate classes, it was all the more crucial to centralize and document opportunities in the surrounding area at secondary and other undergraduate institutions.

I think my LTF events acted as a scaffold for a lot of the discourse I saw happen at the informal events throughout the year. In the way that Greek dramas made explicit the moral standards of society in a way that structured individual relationships, the LTF events made explicit what the goals and means of teaching were in the department in a way that structured ongoing informal interactions. Everything we covered about empathy, self-care, and teacher-student relationships set a standard of what the graduate student body was generally invested in that I felt reverberated through the community.

What advice would you impart to an incoming LTF in your department?

My advice would then be to make sure those casual events and interactions keep happening. This department is full of students who will take on seemingly endless amounts of noble work that makes our department, university, and city a better place – very few of them will spontaneously put their feet up and spend time with each other. A year and however many months of Zoom has only fed into that instinct, with every interaction taking on the appearance and feeling of a business meeting rather than an interpersonal exchange. The thing about teaching is that it often happens best in moments that feel more like the latter, and leading people towards those moments means modeling that kind of behavior and creating the space for them to happen.

Another initiative that is gaining traction within the department is unofficially documenting processes and opportunities. These have been as simple as which appointments to register for, how to get access to the computing cluster, or what teaching opportunities lie outside Columbia. Up to now the process was that a generation of students might learn things like this, utilize it, never share it, and forget about it, leaving it up to the next generation of students to figure it all out again. Centralizing and sharing this information has been critical to the department feeling unified and progressing. The CTL figured this out early on with its documentation procedures, but it’s just as relevant to the life of the department. The LTF offers a unique position to document the resources and procedures as they relate to teaching, which have never been officially codified by the department to the same degree that, say, grant writing or research procedures have been.

2021-22 liaising

September:

Sent introductory email to department introducing Ana and I as the department lead teaching fellows
Represented the CTL at graduate student orientation, specifically promoting the teaching development program

October:

Held two graduate student receptions where Ana and I promoted our LTF events to the gathered graduate students
Attended Ana DiGiovanni’s LTF event that acts as a “Part 1” to my “Part 2”
Promoted my event through department-wide emails and individual solicitations.
Held my “Part 2” LTF event

November:

Mediated between departmental faculty and staff to allow graduate workers and TAs to gather using our allocated departmental funds.

January:

Reached out to the department to collect graduate student teaching needs that could be addressed in upcoming LTF events
Coordinated with the Directors of Academic Affairs & Undergraduate Studies about how to increase Instructor-of-Record opportunities for graduate students.

February:

Coordinated and executed a number of informal meet-ups with graduate students to talk about personal and departmental needs, typically mostly to do with teaching.

March:

Drummed up support and attendance for my and Ana’s LTF events through various emails, slack messages, and in-person reminders.
Held a department-funded reception for the incoming graduate students that also acted as a debriefer for our LTF events

April:

Held two more department-funded graduate receptions where students could informally discuss about personal and departmental needs in relation to teaching

quantifying bias in assessments of medical students

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000