When I first started teaching over 15 years ago, I saw the job primarily as sharing knowledge and skills in order to empower others to lead fulfilled lives. However, as my understanding of learning has evolved, so too has my teaching philosophy. Over time I have come to see that, while I still see teaching and learning as social activities, teaching is more relational, active, strategic, and political. This document is a snapshot of my ongoing personal and professional learning about teaching both specifically and generally, and that the statements apply equally to K-16 classroom teaching, teacher education, and graduate student mentorship. I hope that through my teaching, I will continue to change and grow.
Because all learning is social, teaching is relational. We are always learning from our social environments, which means that in every interaction teachers have with students, our actions “teach” the others about ourselves as people. Teaching is at its core humans working with humans, and if we take that view, then teachers should meet students where they are, talk to them in a language students understand, and address their human needs. If teachers treat all students the same, no student is served best. Classrooms are unique, almost sacred spaces, where students trust that the work they do there will lead to success in their social and professional lives. However, that will not happen if teachers don’t first know their students and make genuine efforts to learn about their multifaceted and ever-evolving identities, interests, and aspirations. Teachers have the immense responsibility to create safe conditions, meaningful opportunities, and culturally appropriate situations for learning. In my classroom, the students come first, and my job is to understand where they are and what they need. This means I may need to listen more than I speak. In my classes, I strive to get to know students beyond a superficial level, and regularly take stock of student needs and interests. Both types of information help me interrogate my syllabus for topics and tasks that do not meet their needs. By attending to my students’ needs and interests, I can curate activities and topics that will resonate with my students.
Because learning is embodied, teaching is about creating spaces for doing. In my experience, learning rarely happens in my mind. Instead, meaningful learning is always encoded with physical spaces, people, activities, and events. We internalize and truly understand new ideas when we do something with it. Students succeed when they are valued and supported in a community that encourages them to challenge themselves and work together toward a common goal. In my classrooms, whether about research methods or intermediate language use, students actively think and talk and write and share. I prioritize “doing it” over “talking about it”, recognizing that students learn best while engaged in the work of a task. For this reason, I make a point to limit lecture activities in favor of collaborative, interactive, creative, and productive classroom work.
Because learning is complex, teaching requires strategic planning. Recent theories of language help us make sense of the complexity and dynamism involved in teaching and learning. Our ability to communicate and succeed in professional contexts depends on our knowledge of the genres of text and speech in our lives. Functional models of language like Systemic Functional Linguistics help us understand that genre knowledge can be systematically modeled and scaffolded in the learning process. When teaching writing, I tend to follow genre pedagogy’s teaching and learning cycle that includes presenting accessible examples of real-world texts, giving ample, meaningful practice that increases in complexity, and providing extensive feedback to guide the students to improve. Similarly, task-based pedagogy prioritizes the doing of meaningful, communicative, real-world tasks over activities that target specific language structures. This approach has inspired me to adjust my teaching and learning cycle to organize topics by communicative task (e.g., writing a reflection, giving a conference presentation) rather than by linguistic topic (e.g., concision, paragraph organization). Importantly, I strive to make the learning process a regular and explicit topic in classes. I see this as a way to partner with students in their learning goals, to make transparent my expectations for our class, and to show them the rationale behind my pedagogical decisions.
Because learning is personal, teaching is political. In classrooms, a loop occurs countless times every day—read, process, practice, feedback, adjust. Alongside learning to read and write or speak a new language, students are learning which language practices and social identities are valued by their teachers. As these lessons and experiences compound, we create and recreate our visions of society. Therefore, schools and teachers have a serious responsibility to critically examine the values that underpin their curriculum, teaching activities, and personal interactions with their students. Schools represent a space where we model what a world without injustice, discrimination, and inequality might look like. Simply by occupying a place of authority, a teacher’s values–even those left unexamined–are part of the curriculum communicated to students. For this reason, it is imperative for teachers to tackle social issues head on, and to set an example by modeling critical reflection, vulnerability, and advocacy for minoritized people. Good teachers shape the academic lives of their students by helping them develop the habits of learning, such as curiosity, imagination, and persistence. Great teachers go one step further and accept the responsibility to use their work to improve the personal lives of their students and to make a small contribution to making the world more just and equitable. In my classroom, I model critical reflection of my historical privilege as a white, L1 English, heterosexual, able-bodied man, and I explicitly encourage students to ask hard questions that challenge their assumptions about power and privilege in their learning and in their life outside of education.
D. Philip Montgomery 