My Instructional Design Philosophy

As an educator my goal is simple: to transmit ideas in a meaningful way so that my students may use what they’ve learned to better themselves and the world around them. It is relatively easy to show students Power Point slides bulleted with important concepts and then give multiple choice tests over those exact concepts, but how do they know what the broader context of those ideas is, or how those ideas influence other ideas more immediately relevant to their daily lives? It is far better to include students in the classroom, to connect big ideas with personal stories, to assess what they have learned in a way that continues and complements the learning.

Students should experience politics in the classroom as it is in real life: contentious, a little heated, but always open to interpretation (in every syllabus I write, I include a disclaimer about proper behavior in class in order to avoid offensive statements and petty infighting). This is why my teaching style is lecture-based sprinkled heavily with open-ended questions and small group time- so that my voice is not the only voice students are hearing when we are talking about important and often touchy issues. I also like to have the students do projects for hands-on learning; for example, in my Civil Rights Law class, the students participate in a mock court utilizing current civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, and in Law and Society, we hold debates over important issues in our criminal justice system. Each student plays a real-life person that could be involved in the debate- for example, in the debate on whether society should work toward social justice, someone plays John Rawls- and in this way they learn the different views of an issue and how various institutions interact in real-life lawmaking.

As a result of this experience in the classroom, I would say my overall instructional design philosophy is closest to Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) Backwards Design, in which the learning goals are specified first, and then appropriate learning material and activities are chosen that will help students achieve those learning goals. I always think about what I would like my students to achieve by the end of the semester, and every reading, lecture, or activity that takes place during the semester is designed to lead to that final achievement. I have also recently begun using more problem-centered instruction, particularly in my public policy classes, inspired by Merrill’s (2002) First Principles of Instruction. For example, following our class discussion on immigration, students were tasked with designing a new immigration system for the United States. They had to devise policies for refugees, family reunification, work visas, and more. It was a great way to demonstrate how complex the immigration sytem is in the United States, and students came up with some really interesting solutions!