Teaching Statement

In practical terms that means I aim for discussion as the core of my students’ classroom experience. Even in courses that require specific knowledge as a learning goal (e.g., a required music history survey) students are often served best by the chance to discuss a specific work of music as an exemplar of various historical trends. Active learning practices such as discussion (small-group and full-group), exploratory writing, and targeted roleplay allow for a much deeper and more lasting understanding of the material. They also develop the skills of humanistic inquiry, a discipline fundamentally opposed to the idea of passively receiving information, in a way that lecture cannot—although lecture has its place as a starting point for many of these activities.

Because unstructured peer-to-peer discussion can be intimidating and disadvantage students who are less comfortable or familiar with the format, I also seek to scaffold discussions. This usually takes the form of formalized discussion leading responsibilities that rotate among the class, which help clarify requirements for participation and ensure we hear from all voices in the class. Students are generally reassured by a concrete list of responsibilities—and, in my experience, this comfort usually leads to organic participation as well. I also often turn to straw polls of the class, miniature paired discussions (“think-pair-share”), or more structured exercises on important topics that do not arise organically in the full group. Various forms of role-playing exercises or assessments can encourage students to try to hear with “period ears”—understanding and learning to hear why certain features of the music we study were striking or controversial at the time, even if they do not sound as surprising to us today. For example, see an excerpt from a brief quiz for a Baroque history survey that was required for the music major, which asks the student to rederive and support the arguments for and against the seconda pratica that we had discussed in class, taking the positions of Giovanni Maria Artusi and Giulio Cesare Monteverdi.

There are, of course, disadvantages to these methods. In particular, students sometimes struggle to prioritize and mentally organize the information in discussion, which inevitably wanders, hesitates, and digresses. With the mentoring of the Duke Preparing Future Faculty and Certificate in College Teaching programs, I am currently attempting to address this by being transparent about my learning goals, both for the overall course but also for each class session and occasionally even at the level of the specific exercise. A moment or two to explicitly articulate the main takeaways can be immensely helpful for students who do not yet have the contextual knowledge, or sometimes the habit of mind, to do so independently.

Such discussions are useful formative assessments for larger writing assignments, which do have similar challenges for inclusion and equity. Therefore, I prefer to treat papers as a process, rather than simply a result. A paper-as-process often begins long before the students receive the assignment (or at any rate before most of them start working on it). Like discussion, I scaffold papers in various ways, including requiring they be submitted in draft first (this is also a useful check on large-language-model “AI” tools, which do not edit themselves well or in a particularly human way). In writing-focused classes I also prioritize peer-to-peer workshops. In this way a paper grade can always be partially based on incorporation of prior feedback. The workshops, beyond improving the papers, foster an educational community, reinforce skills through peer-to-peer teaching, and offer students a place to practice intellectual and emotional techniques of professional collaboration that are required both in graduate training and the workplace.

I structure most heavily early in the semester. Later in the term, when students have built skills and confidence, reducing this scaffolding—for example, by removing restrictions on a paper’s content—can increase both inclusivity and engagement as well, ideally allowing a student a chance to pursue and take responsibility for an individual project that matters to them personally. In a more skills-focused course, students can be encouraged to pursue ideas for creative or alternate projects of similar scope to an essay, provided they demonstrate analytical understanding. One of my sample syllabi (a course aimed at non-majors concerned more with developing historical reading and listening skills) has paper assignments that follow this overall structure. In a more content-focused course, I have assigned shorter writing assignments, but still with a focus on student choice and ownership of work.

Recently, I have been experimenting with a model I call “grading your best work.” In it students can, at the end of the course, request that I disregard certain factors in their grade—provided they have, in other contexts, demonstrated that they have mastered the specific learning outcomes that caused their grade to suffer on that specific assessment. Explicitly announcing to students that the grading system rewards struggle, growth, and eventual mastery incentivizes commitment to the course and, ideally, a more general practice of reflecting on goals and learning.

See all sample materials here.