STATEMENT OF MY EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY LIV MARIAH YARROW MY

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Educational Philosophy

Statement of My Educational Philosophy

Liv Mariah Yarrow

My pedagogic methodology is not so much a static philosophy as the present reflection of my educational experiences to date.

Students are products of their families of origin, and they themselves are modeling academic excellence for their own families.

I was raised by a single mother who put herself though the state university system while working full time. I spent a great deal of my childhood listening to lectures on child development and watching her study. She was willing to explain to me what she was reading in terms I could understand. She tried to apply what she learning in the classroom immediately. I want to know why my students are in my classroom and whether they have been conditioned by their home environment to think of themselves as academically able. I encourage my students to talk about their work with their families. Needless to say, children are always welcome in my classroom.

There need be little correlation between present ability and intellectual potential.
Repetition can be onerous, but it is a powerful educational tool.
When educators communicate and collaborate, learning benchmarks are reached more efficiently.

Based on early entrance exams I was placed in a gifted and talented public elementary school, but I was quickly diagnosed as having a series of neurological disorders, which were then labeled as dyslexia. I have vivid memories of the agonizing process of learning to read, a process that wasn’t complete until age 9. Similarly, I could barely write a sentence until fourth grade and my stutter was not completely overcome until I was about 12. Yet, at no point did anyone intimate that I was stupid. The team approach used by my classroom teachers, the special education instructors, and my mother meant I received consistent and constant help. Regular repetition and skills practice in the end brought me up to grade level and beyond. I encourage students not see themselves as predisposed to a certain level of attainment; I begin all discussions from the assumption that they can, and will, improve. I design short in-class exercises that frequently allow students to practice key skills. I demonstrate the intellectual benefits of rereading key texts. I regularly discuss the progress of majors and minors with my colleagues and I am becoming involved with the freshman learning communities in hopes of bringing the benefits of team education in general education as well.

Formal structures--be it for writing, research, or social interaction--provide solid foundations for greater creative and intellectual endeavors.

On generous scholarships I attended a private college preparatory academy. At the time I did not realize the extent to which it was the nature of the classroom lessons that were in fact college preparatory. I learned to diagram sentences, to create detailed outlines for different essay genres, to structure not only whole essays, but also individual paragraphs, and finally how to create and execute a research strategy, collecting and organizing information gathered from diverse sources. Just as these processes were taught to me, I break them down into small staged exercises for my own students. I seek to give each student a picture of how to write before they even begin the process; these transferable skills transcend not only disciplines, but also the walls of the academy. My peers at the school were from a radically different socio-economic background from myself and I lacked the appropriate cultural frames of reference. Over the course of years I was able to integrate and resist become disaffected largely through the efforts of compassionate teachers who took the time to converse with me and thus model the modes of discourse necessary not just for academic success, but also for versatile engagement in different social settings.

Even lecturing should involve active learning.

I began my undergraduate career at a large anonymous university. I was reduced to a number and through alphabetical misfortune found all general requirements closed when I registered fall of my freshman year. This was a blessing in disguise. I remember approaching one professor in the first week during office hours and asking how to survive in an upper level lecture class. He outlined a useful strategy for building a rapport with professors and integrating notes from classes and reading. Although I rarely lecture, I do work with my students on how to remain engaged with the learning process even in a lecture format. This involves developing note-taking strategies that move beyond dictation or outline, into a form of written response or dialogue.

Consistent descriptive praise brings about behavioral change far quicker than intermittent vague criticism.
The role of the educator is to facilitate students taking responsibility for their own intellectual development.
Reflective listening allows students to engage in self assessment.
Each conceptual leap must be anchored in the preceding lesson.

I arrived in Oxford in 1996 and was shocked to find a world in which all teaching is done on a one-on-one basis, only one topic is studied at a time, and students receive no summative assessment until the end of the degree program. The highly personal nature of the tutorial system ensures that students feel a responsibility to prepare rigorously for each teaching session and requires them to work independently in these preparations. In each tutorial the discussion, while led by the tutor, is base wholly on the student’s work from the past week; the objective of the conversation is not to convey information, but instead to stretch the conceptual framework the student is using to marshal the information on the given topic. In order to allow the student to observe her own thought processes it is necessary for the instructor to first listen carefully, re articulate the points, and then ask appropriate questions. This process involves the validation of the positive aspects of student’s work, but with an emphasis on qualitative assessment, not ‘this is good’, but ‘this is good because of how you…’. Rapid progress is possible because the students remain focused on a specific subject matter for an extended period of time; each week builds on the last. This pedagogic model, while radical, is largely transferable to the present US academic paradigm. I develop lessons in which the students share responsibility for the content of the teaching sessions. I model reflective listening in group discussion and use small breakout groups to allow students to practice this technique themselves. I explicitly draw the connections to the preceding material each time we move on to a new topic. I give detailed praise, both verbally and in writing, to all my students. I make transparent the difference between qualitative and summative assessment.

Teaching is at once both highly personal and highly political.

I have been humbled by the diverse challenges I have faced in the American classroom. By the middle of my second semester I had made a resolution to never be the ‘Marie Antoinette of Brooklyn College’, proposing to feed metaphoric cake to students who were starving for basic skills and socio-political literacy. I teach Euripides’ Medea nearly every semester, but I teach it along side journalism pieces typifying the debate over immigration. For what we do in the classroom to be meaningful, it must be grounded in the world in which my students and I reside. Most recently in informal dialogue with fellow educators both in higher education and the public school system, I have been reading and contemplating how to address issues of class, race and gender in the classroom. The best evidence I possess that I have reached any of my students came just the other week: a young man whom I taught the previous semester came into my office to loan me an academic book on a topic wholly unrelated to what I teach. He wanted to return the favor: to educate me, to continue the dialogue. I still have much to experience and learn.

First Drafted 2007

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