After a career of more than 40 years of teaching, 38 years at Georgia State University, the core of my teaching philosophy centers on learning.  And, learning for me has become centered in communities of learning.

The first of these learning communities is my professional discipline.  As a faculty member in a research university I am committed to professional scholarship and scholarly teaching (Schulman, 1999). That is to say, the way I organize my classes and advocate good practices to others is grounded in the professional literature on teaching and learning.  Or, to be more precise, the literature on learning.  My approach to the classroom and the students who work with me has evolved to be a student-centered approach (Barr & Tagg, 1995 and Spence, 2001) in which my role is one of collaboration and designing opportunities for students to engage in activities and assignments which will bring about meaningful learning (Weimer, 2002). This is in line with the expectations of the Georgia Board of Regents policy on Scholarly Teaching and reflected in the requirements of the courses I teach.

Within the learning community of my courses we use a Problem-Based Learning approach. That is to say, students are presented with an authentic problem which they will face upon completing their program and are expected to develop an appropriate plan of action. By initiating instruction with a problem that students understand they might confront in the real-world, they become more motivated to engage in the work of the course and discussions of theory and research into practice have immediate meaning. This approach also enables me to assess students' prior knowledge related to the learning outcomes of the course.

The consequences of using a learner-centered problem-based learning approach is that my classes have become less predictable, less structured and more active than they used to be.  I firmly believe in that in applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Instruction (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), students must interact with me and with others in order for learning to occur effectively (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).

Of course, not only is it important for the community of my students to learn, but I should learn as well.  That is to say, each class provides me the opportunity to observe the impact of my teaching on student learning and from that to revise and improve what I do in subsequent courses to facilitate student learning. I use feedback from the end-of-course Student Evaluation of Instruction reports as well as mid-semester formative assessments, such as the one-minute paper and GIFT assessment.

The result of this inquiry is that my courses are constantly changing. You will see how I incorporated a more learner-centered emphasis by comparing the course syllabi for Facilitating College Teaching from 2007 and 2008. Because I want my students to emphasize "deep learning" in their own classes, I work to provide them the tools to do so, and use those tools in the courses they take with me (e.g., Anderson and Krathwohl's modification of Bloom's Taxonomy; the use of a rubric to assess complex projects; and demonstrating "backward design" in structuring the course content).

Because I work in a research university, it’s important that I share what I learned what the broader community of professional competence, i.e., the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  Through my work with the Research University Consortium for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and as a reviewer for the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, I am committed to promoting both implementing and producing high quality research on student learning.