My primary goal as an instructor is to foster learning environments that are stimulating, motivating, supportive and participative. I want my students to enjoy and engage with my classes and the material I present to them. I want to encourage in them an interest in Classics and to recognize and appreciate the heritage of the ancient Mediterranean in our modern world. I like exposing students to people, places, cultures, and ideas they have never experienced before, which is one of the best aspects about teaching Classics and I believe that to do this it is important to design and provide courses that are interesting, challenging, and relevant.
I make an effort to create a classroom experience that is stimulating, supportive, motivating, and interactive. Depending on the course, I prefer a mixture of lecture and discussion in the classroom, with student engagement being elicited through conversation, debate and questions. I always stop during lectures to ask for questions and tell the students to feel free to interrupt me during lecture by raising their hand if they have a question. I try to foster group discussion by giving students questions or directions beforehand for which they can prepare.
I also enjoy using technology in the classroom and I am very comfortable with it. I think students appreciate tools like PowerPoint, Desire2Learn, course websites, etc., and I’ve found videos extremely useful for helping to explain more difficult or technical subject matter. Many students are visually-oriented and utilizing this sort of technology can often increase their ability to understand and remember. In a class like Greek Art, technology is key – PowerPoint presentations are a perfect medium for conveying the material. Some courses, however, I prefer to be relatively low-tech in the classroom. Latin, for example, I love to teach with just a chalkboard and an overhead projector. I feel the nature of the subject matter is best conveyed this way, by writing things out (both myself and the students), making corrections as we go along, and breaking things down more easily. These tools also get me up and moving around, which I believe increases the energy of the classroom. But either style can be aided by a ‘blended learning’ approach whereby concepts and knowledge conveyed in the classroom can be reinforced or expanded upon in the online environment. This allows students to consider the material in a new or different way, or to allow individual students to assimilate the information in their own time. I enjoy the flexibility a ‘hybrid’ course can provide and I am taking workshops on online learning to further my own abilities in this area.
In terms of evaluation, I like to provide different ways for students to be assessed. It often depends on the subject matter, but generally I use exams with various sections which test the student’s grasp of the material in different ways, such as multiple choice, identification, definition, short answer, and longer essay. I believe Classics is an excellent discipline in which students can develop their critical reading and writing and research skills, and so I have often assigned essays in ‘in translations’ courses I’ve taught in the past, with everything from longer research papers (e.g., Women in Greece and Rome) to shorter report-style papers (e.g., Greek Art and Architecture). I also find that periodic quizzes or assignments are beneficial for both the students (allowing them to “try out” the course material in a quiz before major evaluation, such as a midterm) and me (allowing me to judge whether the students are comprehending the material sufficiently and then, if needed, adjusting either my teaching or the quizzes.) Finally, when available, I also like to take advantage of local resources for teaching and evaluation purposes. For example, in Greek Art and Architecture, I have created an assignment around special sessions in the University of Calgary’s Nickle Arts Museum, which houses an excellent Greek and Roman numismatics collection. Here the students could learn about ancient coins and handle actual antiquities. I have had very favourable responses to this thus far.