Teaching Portfolio
Teaching Statement
I had my first masters degree in psychology; I have taught positive psychology-based courses to health care professionals, business students, and student teachers. I often say that I am grounded in Psychology, but keeping my right foot set in psychology, I may whirl around a hundred other disciplines. Individual acceptance comes naturally to me and leads me to inclusive teaching. I have widely applied theories of learning and motivation, as well as guidance and counseling, in my teaching repertoire. This is something unique; my students from various disciplines can always benefit. I still like to include psychological testing, measuring, and analyzing behaviors in my assignments. I want the projects I give to my students to be unique and helpful in reaching the top of the Bloom Taxonomy. My students value my teaching because I help them realize and maximize their potential. Later in life, my second masters in educational leadership and management introduced me to the fundamentals of teaching in a different fashion. I learned about the latest teaching methodologies that use information technologies, especially those invented for higher education.
However, being a teacher educator in a country with over 25 million out-of-school children is a huge challenge. One has to be an emancipator, a freedom fighter, or a deliverer; you face people indoctrinated in various schools of thought with a fixed mindset, not only in students, colleagues, and administration. How may I claim change and transformation? It is evident that my approach would be egalitarian, aimed at tolerance and peace, but how?
My Style
Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times Come, yet again, come, come.
~Rumi
No pedagogy suits me better than Rumi’s Pedagogy of love. Rumi taught me the pedagogy of love, i.e., To treat everyone equally with respect and never question anyone’s faith, living style, and mannerisms to promote tolerance, peace, and harmony. Most important is the matter of human dignity. Being an enlightened liberal, I have never allowed any bias or prejudice against gender, class, ethnicity, or faith between me and my students or colleagues. Everybody is welcome: liberal, orthodox, rich, poor, intelligent, dumb, veiled or head covering, bearded or clean shaved. I have earned more respect for this attitude than anything else.
I have noticed that the higher education teachers’ content knowledge must be vast and well-versed in moderating discussions to become goal-oriented and reach specific learning objectives. My research results have verified that teachers’ specific content knowledge about a discipline and flexible teacher-student communication are the critical success factors of higher education teaching and learning. In my career, I have focused on building these through a repertoire of teaching methods. I advise my juniors that teacher-student communications should be more open beyond the stipulated class hours. Students need a strong role model and professionalism so that they may take the lead in how they practice discipline in the future.
After mastering rapport and building a repertoire, I was ready to become a teacher educator. Fullan said that education change has a moral purpose. My first purpose was to get rid of the “banking method,” as titled by Paulo Freire. The second purpose was Marx Weber’s social change, which transformed traditional and fixed mindsets into rational open-mindedness. I organized my teaching according to the principles of Systems thinking, acting locally and thinking globally, as chalked out by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. These studies increased my interest in quality assurance, an emerging science. I began to develop standardized syllabi and increased my confidence in peer review and consultative approaches. I also learned about team building and participating in professional learning communities. Here, I would mention spending one whole year at LinkedIn participating in scholarly discussions with system thinkers across the world. I began to write blogs and encouraged my PhD students to do the same. We, the like-minded faculty, developed teams of students and teachers and participated in many local and international seminars. I want to end my story with a saying from James McGregor Burns: In the leadership process, both the leader and followers undergo change; the followers become leaders, and the leader a spiritual guide.
I have been lucky to be taught and mentored by teachers from diverse disciplines: psychology, business and management, education, and linguistics. Each had its unique style, and I developed my own by modeling them. That is how I grew old, but my teaching remained young. My students can model the principle of lifelong learning in me. The most critical aspect of being a teacher educator is that you cannot bluff your students. Many of them are already accomplished teachers, and they had joined the university for a piece of paper only. It remains a challenge how will you add value to their life. Moreover, we need to send excellent teachers to the market. We can’t risk the future of the nation and the reputation of our institution.
I follow John Biggs in teaching my graduate and postgraduate students. I appreciate Universal Design for Learning, and it approach of using cognitive framework. It is good to begin with an end in mind, and my goal is transformation of fixed mindset to growth mindset. Without knowing my students, I cannot plan of assessments. I found Integrated Framework (Fink, 2013) akin to my style for course design; in this design situational factors are not ignored; course material and assessments are designed side by side, corresponding to course objectives.
Evaluation Strategy
I actively support students in leveraging feedback by emphasizing its importance as a tool for growth. To achieve this, I encourage students to reflect on the feedback they receive, not just as a grade but as a resource for improvement. I guide them in identifying areas of strength and opportunities for development within their work. Moreover, I create opportunities for one-on-one discussions to delve deeper into the feedback, allowing students to seek clarification, discuss strategies for improvement, and set goals for their future assignments. Much of this guidance is in the rubric level formative feedback. For overall feedback, I encourage them to engage with feedback by writing something along the lines of, “Remember, your journey is a continuous process of growth and improvement. After you review my feedback below, let me know if you want to rewrite the assignment to address the areas I’ve noted. I’ll then provide another opportunity for you to resubmit the assignment. I’m confident that you can earn a higher grade on this assignment.” This proactive engagement with feedback helps students not only understand their performance but also empowers them to apply these insights for continuous learning and enhancement of their skills.
My Teaching Career
Teaching is my passion, and I characterize myself as an energetic, dedicated, and charismatic teacher who can influence her students with pedagogic skills, leadership qualities, and versatile content. To keep students engaged in and out of the classroom, I render as my prime responsibility. I am well versed in using ICTs, multimedia, Learning Management systems (LMS), and social media to manage student involvement in the course. I have vast experience of teaching in psychology, management, and education. I have taught undergraduate psychology programs since 1991, developed course outlines, took assessments and evaluations in my career. The courses which I have taught and developed for Business School UCP are, Human relations (for BS Nursing), Introduction to Psychology, Organizational Behavior, Interpersonal Behavior (for BBA, 2006-2013), and Social Relationships at Work (for MBA, 2008-2012). After becoming HOD psychology, I developed the programs and scheme of BS Psychology and MS Psychology studies.
Since February 2014, I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at UMT. I have taught MPhil & PhD students and developed many programs and courses. During my tenure as HOD, I revised and benchmarked all programs offered in the department, including PhD Education and Special Education. I developed and successfully introduced 2 undergraduate programs (BS Early Childhood Education and BS Science Education) and one MPhil program (MPhil Educational leadership & management).
I have taught research methodology at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels (Business Research Methods to BBA & MBA students, Qualitative Research to MPhil Education Students, and Trends in Educational Research to PhD Education & Special Education Students). I have developed courses, Socio-political Context of Education, Change and Education, and Psychological Perspectives of Education for PhD Education.
Recently, I have been teaching specialization courses of MPhil-ELM, Program Evaluation, and Research; this course introduces students to standards like ISO, Baldridge Framework for performance Excellence, EFQM, NACTE and HEC standards for accreditation and ranking. Students get hands-on practice to work with standards as well. I have been considered one of the most popular and respected teachers in the university among students and colleagues because of unconditional respect and acceptance, my non-traditional teaching methodology, apt use of web and other technology resources and creative and innovative assignments and projects, and constant effort for self-learning and improvement.
I believe that evaluation is the most critical part of teaching and learning, and teachers should test students on all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Classroom discussions properly moderated by the teachers give the students a collective understanding of a concept. The projects help students test those concepts by applying them to real-life situations.
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Sample Course Outline
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Sample Assignment