Drawing from my experience as a professor working with graduate students in the Graduate School of Education, I have created a list of strategies for teaching in higher education here. While this list is not exhaustive, it does outline some key components of teaching and learning in higher education that have worked well for me. I hope that the list is useful to others as we support our students on their academic and professional trajectories.

Voice Matters

Our students have funds of knowledge (see references below) that must be leveraged in our classrooms. When we solicit and honor their stories and experiences, we become better instructors. If our students are given the opportunity to authentically connect the texts and pedagogical strategies that we teach to their own lives, then the abstract becomes concrete, personal, and actionable. We need to encourage our students to speak up in class and we need to value their voices and experiences.

Authentic Discussions are Critical

Our teaching should be grounded in the nexus between theory and practice. It is critical that we not only teach content, but that we also frame this knowledge within broader conversations about the historical, political, economic, and social contexts that influence the teaching and learning process. We should push our students to grapple with the tensions that arise in their professional and academic lives and we need to encourage them to connect these insights to the academic texts that they are reading. This way we know that they are learning through personal connections and with each other through dialogue. And if we listen carefully, we have the chance to not only teach what we know, but to also learn with our students.

Big Questions Lead to Meaningful Learning Experiences

We need to provide our students with a thematically unified and cohesive framework for learning. We need to seek texts and activities that challenge our students to critically unpack how their beliefs about the topics that they are studying connect to their professional and personal identities. Given this, our syllabi should contain guiding questions that wrap the course content into a broad conceptual framework. In doing so, we are not only asking our students to make sense of what they are learning, but we are also asking them to synthesize how their learning relates to broader bodies of knowledge.

Social Justice, Diversity and Equity Matter

The alumni and graduates of Touro are shaping our society. We have to be clear with our students that our collective learning experiences are connected to the health of our civic society.

We also need to be aware that what we teach, how we teach, and what we prioritize in our classrooms influences how our students learn. We need to be mindful of what we implicitly and explicitly teach our students. Given this, we need to be sure that our students not only walk out of our classrooms as experts in their respective fields, but that they are also reflective and socially justice oriented experts.

Pace and Rigor

In our classes we need to set a pace for learning that is rigorous and laden with high expectations. We need to gradually release the responsibility of learning to our students as the semester progresses. We can do this by providing students with clear and specific guidelines on how to explore, present, and think deeply about academic content early on in the semester. We also need to provide them with specific feedback and scaffolds so that they can become  onfident and independent learners in our classrooms. In doing so, we create a pace of learning that requires intense and meaningful student engagement. This also requires that we, as instructors, are active learners throughout the course of a semester.

References:

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into practice, 31(2), 132-141.

González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.