Learning is an intricate and amazing process that should be treated as such. While more effective teaching practices engage students, facilitating a desire to learn, less effective practices tend to frustrate and disengage students and, in turn, move the learning goals beyond reach. As a K-12 learner, I faced many challenges; engaging with the learning content was often difficult as I regularly became bored during the lesson when I was not challenged or my interest was not piqued. Those teachers who instructed with what I deemed as more purposeful lessons allowed further exploration of topics in safe learning environments. I found this to be more supportive of my efforts as a student and I was motivated with a stronger desire to learn and to continue learning. On the other hand, when faced with indications of a lack of confidence in my abilities, unsafe learning environments, or unsupported exploration of learning topics, I was demotivated and failed to attain the learning goals.

As an instructor, my ultimate goal is to make the learning process more engaging, enjoyable, and efficient while forming positive learning experiences that are challenging but not frustrating, supported with additional scaffolding but only if required, and in safe learning environments but not lacking indications of confidence in what students are able to achieve. To enhance learning efficiency and motivation, I aim to design a curriculum that is immediately applicable and demonstrates the relevance of learning content. This approach ensures that students see the value in all subjects, fostering a deeper engagement with the material. This, the foundation of my teaching philosophy, is based on my personal experience as a learner, an international learner, an international learner in an additional language, but also as an instructor, informed by best practices and applications of learning theories.

Safe learning environments facilitate the exploration of the learning content in a setting where questioning the learning content promotes understanding while instilling the value of exploration. As a shy undergraduate student, I always sat at the back of the class and avoided classroom interactions due to my fear of being challenged or embarrassed by misunderstandings of the learning content. Reflecting on my own experiences as a shy undergraduate, I recognize the importance of creating a classroom environment where all students feel safe to participate and ask questions. By providing various communication options and fostering a culture of respect and support, I ensure that no student is left behind due to fear of embarrassment or misunderstanding. This fear of asking questions prevented the instructor from realizing that I was no longer progressing along with the rest of the class. I attempt to ensure that this does not happen in classes under my instruction, I offer students multiple, anonymous communication channels for students to ask questions, ensuring that everyone feels comfortable seeking help without fear of judgment from their peers. These communications not only support the students’ advancement towards the learning outcomes but provide me with an indication of where my instruction requires enhancement. When designing instructional content, I ensure that my lesson plans are flexible and able to change instantly if additional support is required, or if the need for rephrasing and/or additional contextual examples is required.

During the first semester of my instruction in the Faculty of Forestry, I quickly realized that the students’ knowledge of Forestry and other related topics far outweighed my limited understanding. I encourage students, as holders of content knowledge, to convey knowledge with me and their peers, the audience, employing the communication strategies and tactics taught in our course. In this way, students can experiment with communicating content they fully understand using a method of communication that they may be experimenting with or simply less experienced with. This experimental learning process allows students to compare newly gained strategies and tactics to previous communication attempts. As communication is context-dependent, newly learned strategies may not always work as hoped. However, the new strategies added to their communication toolbox allow informed decisions to be made. In other words, students now have the ability to choose which type of communication strategy could be applied in a specific context, thus increasing the chance of successful communication.

During my undergraduate years, my passion for learning was clouded as my academic goals remained unclear. I took courses that I thought would be interesting but found that the learning content was not readily applicable. The courses with learning content that had an immediate impact on my life seemed to be so much more important and thus motivated my learning while reducing my desire to wander and explore alternative learning paths. From this, I believe that student motivation is dependent on the passion gained from the applicable nature of the learning content. My instruction of Communication thus focuses on the applicable nature of the subject. As I teach Communication topics and theories, I have students experiment with the production of communication using the newly acquired skills to ensure that all students learn more deeply about the skill and have experienced the applications of the skill. This in turn increases the level of their communication competency while boosting their communication confidence.

I believe that clarity in all aspects of instruction facilitates efficient and effective learning while reducing possible frustration. In other words, assignment instructions and parameters must be completely unambiguous while feedback given on completed assignments must clearly focus on specific issues encountered providing options for revision. I always try to provide assignment instructions that are easily understood, first as written text followed by class discussion of the assignment, and then discussions on how students are going to approach the assignment. At the end of the discussion, I make it clear that if any further questions arise, I am available for discussion at any time. I found that this approach worked best for classes with students from diverse educational, social, and cultural backgrounds. I encourage students to reach out while engaged in the production process, as it is often easier to provide guidance to students going in the wrong direction compared to requiring resubmissions from students disheartened by receiving unexpectedly low grades.

I have often struggled with providing efficient and effective feedback to students. I experimented with providing vast amounts of written feedback for students struggling with producing text-based assignments. I found that many of the students who required additional feedback on their writing were those less accustomed to writing for academic purposes, in particular, those who were studying with English as an additional language. The provision of additional amounts of textual feedback was indicated to be more frustrating than helpful. Here, students already struggling with the language, were being inundated with more text that highlighted the inadequacies of their communication in a language that they were already struggling with. To address this problem, I experimented with screencast feedback recordings, a form of recorded multimedia feedback. Screencasting allows me to offer personalized, constructive feedback by recording my screen as I review student work. At any point during the recording where my speech slows, pauses, or becomes choppy, the student can hear that there is a problem with the text at that point. I can then comment on the problematic area while providing options to address the problem. Screencast feedback also benefits students as they can more easily understand specific issues that I am pointing out and can judge from my voice, the degree of impact the issue under discussion is having. While producing feedback in this method is much more time-consuming, the payoff for students is heightened. I have received many comments from students as to how this type of feedback has positively impacted their learning and production of written assignments. I will continue exploring this valuable method of feedback while discussing my findings with my peers. Early indications suggest that screencast feedback also enables deeper student-teacher interactions, as my passion for student learning success and empathy for problems encountered can be more easily communicated through verbal feedback via screencasting.

Being an empathetic instructor demonstrates my understanding of the challenges faced along the paths to students’ academic goals. As I have studied for my Master’s degree as a distance student, I understand the challenges faced with isolation from the instructor and my learning peers. The lack of availability of instructors to discuss learning topics due to time zone variations and physical distance, highlighted the need for instructor availability and the quick turnaround of assignment feedback, as it often took weeks to receive important feedback, which, when received, I found frustrating as I had already completed the following assignment which suffered because I could not apply what I had learned. When faced with the global pandemic and the switch to online learning, empathy for students and the difficult learning situations they face became increasingly valuable. I shared my experiences with students who could readily understand. This show of support enhanced the degree of student/teacher connections while providing students with the affective support required to continue with their studies.

I strongly believe in supporting the positive social aspects of learning brought about by student-student and student-teacher interactions. This was never more apparent than after the move to online teaching due to COVID-19 restrictions. Prior to the move to online teaching, many students interacted with each other and myself before and after each class. This seemed to be the time in which students felt free to discuss all aspects of the course, highlight problems encountered, and/or compare their approach to the learning material and assignments with each other. To address this loss of social interaction and learning, I made myself available by showing up to the online classes 15 minutes prior and stayed after class, in case any students wanted to stick around and ask questions or simply chat. Students indicated this as a positive, enabling approach towards the lack of social interaction while lowering feelings of isolation.

While working on my Ph.D., I was faced with attending courses taught in Chinese, a language I was in the process of learning. I found that a simple three-hour class required a heightened amount of attention, often overloaded my cognitive abilities, and excluded me from attaining a deeper understanding and missing out on deep discussions of various applications of the learning content, as compared to those whose who were studying in their first language. I often had to nap immediately after class just to give my brain a rest. This experience has had a profound impact on the courses I instruct, as they are generally comprised of students with quite varied degrees of communication abilities. Many students are not only taking my course in an additional language but are being exposed to the study of Communication for the first time. Such students enter the course with a clear disadvantage as they are often less familiar with the context, styles, and practice of communication in Canada, as compared to those for whom English is a first language. To address this issue, I clarify that this is an abilities course and that, regardless of their current communication abilities, I am looking specifically for improvements in their communication ability, not simply ranking students according to their ability and applying grades according to the ranking. A common aim of my communication instruction is that if the learned strategies are understood and applied in appropriate contexts, one’s communication abilities will increase. To this end, I ask all students to focus on increasing their communication ability over the duration of the course, rather than solely focusing on grades. This leads to my philosophy on grades and how the grading system requires more attention.

I strongly believe in the provision of robust grading approaches. However, I am still striving to uncover the best way to facilitate learning that is not overshadowed by the oppressive nature of grading. Since I began teaching in the Faculty of Forestry, I have worked on providing accurate and robust grading methods that produce greater validity. One issue that has arisen is that some students believe that grades are given by instructors. This would indicate that instructors have the ability to alter grades based on subjectivity. Grades in my classes are measurements of how well the learning content has been integrated into assignment submissions. I would relate this idea to a thermometer. If one is unhappy with the current temperature, the temperature indicated on the thermometer cannot simply be increased, unless there is an actual increase in the temperature it is measuring. If the thermometer does indicate a temperature increase where none has taken place, the thermometer is broken and/or considered useless. I try to apply this same logic for grading. If a student requires an increase in the grade indicated, there must be an increase evidenced in the assignment submission.

To encourage students to enhance their work and better understand the problem areas encountered, I develop detailed rubrics that guide students through their assignments, helping them understand and meet specific learning outcomes. These rubrics not only clarify expectations but also provide a clear framework for self-assessment and continuous improvement. However robust this sounds, I still received comments that my grading was inconsistent and/or unfair. To further address this issue, I had my teaching assistants grade the submissions as well. We first calibrated our marking to reduce discrepancies. We then compared the grades and recalibrated the grading for each class and across all sections. This seems to have a positive impact. However; more work is required. As my instructional goal is to enhance students’ communication abilities and students’ goals, generally speaking, are to get good grades, there is a disparity. To address this disparity and have students focus more closely on the learning content rather than the grades received, I will continue to explore alternative approaches to grading, including student mastery and ungrading.

While teaching communication is my passion, the challenges encountered may be difficult to address, but not impossible to overcome. Communication is an incredible subject to teach, or rather to guide students through skill-enhancing opportunities. Challenges remain for me as a Communication instructor, but as I hone my instructional skills, I am witness to an increasing number of those ‘aha’ moments; the realization of how miscommunications can, with the application of strategies learned and practiced in my course, be applied to design interactions that foster greater success.

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