Teaching portfolio

Combining more than 10 years of teaching experience with academic work, curriculum development and educational policy I strive to have a positive impact on my students, colleagues and the educational practice in general. My educational background is highly interdisciplinary with studies in the fields of history of ideas, political science, social sciences, communication, ict and learning sciences. This background is also reflected in the diversity of my teaching experience (see overview below).

I believe that theory and practice should be combined in an interdisciplinary setting that reflects the experiences of the students and that actively engage them in the learning process in a co-constructive manner. Central to the teacher profession is the question of the purpose of education and the diverse ways in which technologies, pedagogies and subject matter is arranged in relation to this. The use of authentic and appreciative dialogue constitutes the core of my teaching philosophy.

My position as senior upper secondary teacher at Aarhus Gymnasium in combination with a PhD fellowship at Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Aarhus University has presented me with the opportunity to further develop on the dialogical teaching approach and to engage both students and colleagues in teaching development.

The aim of the course is to give an introduction to the upper secondary school system in Denmark (gymnasium) and to introduce the students to didactics and pedagogy of teaching.

The learning goals of the course is focused on enabling the students to plan and teach one lesson of 90 minutes. Specific learning goals include ability to gain knowledge of the existing level of student’s skill and understanding, knowledge about methods for planning a lesson, thinking in terms of sequencing, taxonomy, scaffolding and formative assessment and knowledge of how to engage students though active learning.

The course is a part of the profile course The Teaching Profile (da. Underviserprofil) and is designed specifically for the students who participate in internship at a upper secondary school. The course is also open to everyone who seeks employment in The Rolling University programme or any upper secondary school related projects.

In this course there’s no exam but the students must hand in a course plan. The students will receive formative feedback on their plan from assigned upper secondary teacher in their chosen school subjects.

A lot of things influence the participation of students in classroom dialogue. As teachers we want our students to be active in the learning proces. We want them to speak and to have a voice in the classroom and we want them to contribute to the common learning process by supplementing and commentating, to put forth arguments and to challenge positions in the classroom.

The learning goals of this one lesson could be stated as follows:

1. Be able to recall types of questions from their previous learning experiences that did or did not further participation in dialogue
2. Be able to identify the types of questions that fosters participation
3. Be able to construct questions that are engaging students in dialogue.

The majority of the students attending the course expresses a wish to become teachers in the upper secondary school. I hope to enable them to identify common barriers to participation in classroom dialogue. This in turn should help them avoid common pitfalls in the phrasing of questions and be able to reevaluate previous course material and to reformulate types of question that foster dialogue and reflection.

Steps

To achieve the first learning goal I would ask the students to try to recall a situation from their previous learning experiences from their own upper secondary education and to write it down. Then I would ask them to place them in groups of three and let one interview the other while the third acts as an observer taking notes. Choosing the interviewer (I), the interview person (IP) and the observer (O) should be quick and simple, e.g. the tallest or the youngest etc. I would instruct the (IP) to briefly describe the situation and instruct the (I) to focus on the details of the situation and asking the (O) to focus in on the factors that might influence the engaging and the non-engaging of the students in the described situation. The group will have time to discuss the notes of (O). I would ask the group to report back by writing in a Google Document or something similar.

Since this is just a minor lesson in the over-all course I would evaluate the lesson formatively and individually through a simple written reflection answering the following questions:

• What is the most important thing or things that you have learned today?
• How will you incorporate that into your own lesson?

The question focuses on both the knowledge-part and the application-part of the lesson. In answering the questions I hope to create some sort of transfer from one domain (the lesson) to another (their own lesson).