Sarah Hochstetler

~Teaching: Philosophy~

My teaching philosophy is informed by my feelings about teaching, what I’ve learned about learning and how I bring that to the classroom. My graduate work has allowed me to put a theory to a feeling.

My teaching experience has been in the English classroom, teaching literature and composition. Working in a junior high and high school, a private college, research one university and the National Writing Project shows adaptability. I approach each course and group of students with clear objectives and a structured teaching plan to help scaffold learning, while employing flexibility to tailor my instruction to individual student needs.

I am a social constructivist. As opposed to a transmittal model of teaching, I work to create an inquiry-based classroom founded on the work of George Hillocks Jr. and my graduate advisor Sheridan Blau. In an inquiry model, students are in a community of learners where the instructor engages those learners through a coach-like teaching method. My classroom is built in a way that fosters student opinions, but requires evidence for such claims through critical thinking. I facilitate learning by recognizing others’ methods of uptake. In more concrete terms, I honor my students’ learning styles and interpretations of material so that they may challenge themselves while experiencing success while reaching the course objectives.

The way I have come to think about what teaching means has been shaped by academics who find the balance between dedication to one’s students and one’s studies and then bridges the two.
A challenge I have faced in my career has been to pull myself out of the equation of a student’s success and recognize that I am but a mentor in an individual’s learning. I present material in hopes that it is found relevant and engaging. It is a challenge to take issues deemed “dry” by students and turn such topics into opportunities of interest. An example of this can be seen in my literature courses, where I teach students about critical theory and how to apply it to texts. I will often begin a discussion on using different lenses to interpret a piece of literature by asking if a specific public figure is a feminist. Before answering, the students must ask themselves several other questions, which the class brainstorms together, such as: what is a feminist and how might a feminist act, which leads to a response of the original question. This reflects my use of inquiry in the classroom.

I am continually learning. As I expect my students to push themselves toward knowledge, I do too: a writing teacher has to write, a literature teacher must struggle with textual interpretation and a teacher of teachers should wrestle with the best ways of engaging within the discipline of education.

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