My goal as a teacher is to challenge students to work harder and achieve more than they may think is possible by creating an environment in which they are both motivated to learn and provided with the opportunity to learn. I became a teacher because I wanted to share my love of reading, writing, and learning with others. By bringing energy and enthusiasm to the classroom, I encourage students to commit themselves to practices of lifelong learning and exhibit my own dedication to the same principle.

As an instructor of composition and literature courses, my job is to help students develop tools for reading, analyzing, thinking, and writing which will aid them throughout college and after graduation. In practice, to meet these responsibilities, I focus on particular goals: to set an example of effort, energy, and interest in the subject matter and in each individual student’s progress; to create a positive learning environment for all students; to clearly present students’ responsibilities for the course; to provide specific and timely feedback to students’ work; to teach revision techniques as central to the writing process; and, to enable students to analyze and interpret texts by providing supporting evidence. These goals best represent my teaching philosophy.

In order to help increase students’ level of interest in the subject matter, I focus on exhibiting my own genuine enthusiasm for writing and for reading and interpreting various texts. My enthusiasm may help motivate students to invest more time and energy in course work. As I plan classes, I enjoy finding different ways to present material in order to stimulate thought and discussion. In order to maintain student interest and appeal to different learning styles, I incorporate brief lectures, independent work, small and large group discussions, and peer review of written work within class sessions. I also believe that my demonstrated respect for each student as an individual increases his or her desire to take an active part in the class. It is important for me to learn and use students’ names early in the course and to learn information such as major and minor fields of study; these are subtle yet concrete indications to students that they are the focus of the course.

To create a student-centered classroom, I also focus on developing and reinforcing discussion skills. Since discussing techniques for writing and literary analysis is central to active learning, at the beginning of each course I invite students to join me in creating a class environment which encourages all students to participate. My syllabi include a description of class participation which recognizes active listening, participation in small group discussions, and demonstrating respect for other speakers’ ideas as integral components of such an environment. As a class, we address the responsibility of each student to respond to others’ ideas, use eye contact to indicate interest, and work toward creating an atmosphere in which everyone is given an equal opportunity to participate.

In order to explain the emphasis I place upon learning discussion techniques, I underscore the importance of each individual’s contribution. The questions, ideas, and analyses of one student will enhance the learning of another. This is especially true in classes where the students represent a diversity of life experience, heritage, and linguistic background. When shared in the classroom, different understandings of grammatical concepts, writing tools, or literary texts enhance everyone’s education. This emphasis on discussion makes the classroom student-centered. Rather than seeing me as the repository of all knowledge, students understand their own ability to learn through trial and error, and also recognize that each of us has insights which may help others to understand.

A positive learning environment demands that my actions and words encourage student questions both within class and during scheduled office hours or other appointments. For many students, approaching a teacher with a question at any time may be intimidating. I frequently remind students that my role is to assist them. I encourage students to utilize office hours or to make an appointment outside of these times to discuss questions or concerns, responses to texts, essay ideas, or difficulties they face in the writing process. Whenever possible, I require an individual conference with each student at some point during the term; a positive experience in this situation may help a student to see the ease with which one can approach instructors. E-mail provides another way for students to contact me or others in the class in order to continue a discussion, receive a reaction to an interpretation, or elicit a response to a draft. Fostering the continuation of discussion outside of the prescribed limits of the class meeting allows students to become more actively involved in the course.

In order for students to be motivated to maintain this active involvement it is important for me to present their responsibilities clearly and to provide pertinent feedback to their work. To this end, I include on my syllabi the relative weights of each assignment and the grading scale that will be used. Additionally, I devise and use a point system for grading which includes assignment-specific grading rubrics. These rubrics provide a concrete guideline of the aspects students need to pay attention to in their writing. The number of points allotted to a particular category changes for each paper, reinforcing that as we progress through the term we are working on different skills; for example, while having good paragraph structure is always important, the ability to integrate source material into writing may be more important in later assignments. Finally, since students receive not only textual comments on their paper but also a numerical figure and marginal comments explaining that figure, the grading process is clarified for students who learn best in different ways. For revision and work on future writing assignments, the use of this system provides students with a solid sense of which areas in their work need the greatest attention.

Consequently, using these grading rubrics in composition and literature courses ties in with my emphasis on writing as a process. As a class, we discuss techniques students already use to begin a written project. After generating a list of various approaches, each student can consider incorporating part or all of the alternative methods for brainstorming, outlining, pre-writing, free writing, and drafting into their own writing process. My class schedules reinforce this concept of the process by requiring students to complete certain tasks (choosing a topic, completing a rough draft) by a certain date, at which time they will receive responses from peers or from me.

Revision is the aspect of the writing process which I emphasize the most. Many students have difficulty distinguishing between editing and revising. For this reason, my discussion of revision usually includes a brief example from my own writing experience. I show students a sample page which I have revised, thus demonstrating how revision may involve writing new sections and deleting others. We discuss revision and editing as processes which work on various levels, using skills related to analytical thinking, argumentation, organization, paragraphing, sentence structure, grammar, and spelling. Whenever possible, I discuss grammatical issues within the context of student writing, using outside examples or grammar handbooks to reinforce or clarify rules and practices.

A focus on revision techniques is also important because finding and fixing problems within one’s own work challenges many writers. To attack this difficulty, we practice revising one paragraph as a class and in small groups. Gradually, students move from small groups to peer revision sessions where they make suggestions regarding one individual’s work. Eventually, students are able to see aspects of their own writing which merit revision. Finally, I also focus on revision because students often seem to believe that learning to write means learning the trick to writing something perfectly the first time. Instead, I emphasize that learning to write means learning various techniques or tools for managing language in order to convey meaning in a particular manner. I present drafts of a famous document, such as the Declaration of Independence, or comments by a famous writer about the struggles he or she faces in writing and rewriting to prove that strong writing occurs only after several intensive revisions.

I strongly believe that revision techniques can best be developed by returning papers as quickly as possible. When planning course syllabi, I realistically examine my future schedule and attempt to plan class assignments which will allow me to read and respond to students’ work within one or two class days. When students receive feedback while they are still intensely familiar with what they have written, they are able to analyze my comments more effectively. All of these techniques used for teaching the process of writing are also useful in literature classes. In addition, in literature classes I encourage students to develop and exercise the critical analysis skills needed to present interpretations. Discussion and written assignments emphasize the importance of being able to support an analysis with evidence from the text or from outside sources. As a class we note the merits of understanding the genre and historical period of a text in order to accurately interpret it. While I may present one analysis as an example of how to structure an argument, I avoid presenting my analysis as "the" interpretation. Whenever possible, I allow student input to direct class discussion; my role is then to guide students’ use of analysis techniques. As students move toward formulating an interpretive argument of their own, they learn the necessity of supporting evidence and gain confidence in their ability to explore multiple interpretations of a text.