Last week was a bit of a summary of the weekly learnings for me. So, as not to repeat myself, I decided to consider what we discussed in class this past week, our duties as instructors. The comments I created in class included, "because my relationship with my students is like the Chimp and Owl, I have a duty to..."
listen, engage students, be prepared with active learning activities, be inquisitive, be respectful of their knowledge, encourage them to share their knowledge, share my teaching philosophy with them, model my teaching philosophy, be consistent even when it is difficult (actions need to be consistent with words) and learn from the students and be open to the co-construction of knowledge.
I noted in the margin that the duties or obligations we wrote are dependent on how we define our values and beliefs, not anyone else's definition. How I observe myself as an instructor, the paradigm or world view I subscribe to, is my compass. The compass we each use will lead us down the discovery path reflective of that world view, if we are engaging as instructors with honesty and integrity. I use to think how great it would be to teach like so and so and get the reaction from students as they might, but I have discovered through this process that once we are aware of our compass, the question of discovery is much easier, particularly when we maintain consistency between our values, beliefs and actions.
Thank-you to our instructors and our peers for the thoughtful and engaging weekly feedback. Inquiry based learning can be challenging and I can see that the journey for me was a nice self-discovery, in addition to getting closer to my original inquiry question. Engaging in this process from both a student and instructor perspective was really interesting and provided some helpful insights for me that I can use in the classroom.
