I chose to enroll in this course as, beyond time spent in the New Graduate Teaching Assistant Institute each fall, I had no prior formal teaching training. I did have some experience with being an Undergraduate Learning Assistant (ULA) for a few courses at Michigan State University during my undergraduate years though my leadership was limited to weekly course review sessions which regularly saw low attendance from my peers. Most of the time it was up to me to determine effective teaching strategies for Sociology (SOC) and Integrative Social Science (ISS) courses.

​

The course design of EAD 866: Teaching in Postsecondary Education incorporated a variety of perspectives on teaching adults, which includes emerging adults of the "traditional" college-going age (18-25) and older adults (25+) who may be attending college for the first time or returning to finish a degree. I found the addition of teaching older adults, who tend to juggle more responsibilities outside of courses and be more self-directed in their learning, helpful as I am considering teaching at a community college level in the future. Well known in college access literature is that because community colleges are more affordable and flexible in their course schedules, they tend to serve larger numbers of older adults.

​

One teaching strategy that EAD 866 focused on was backwards design. Backwards design in postsecondary education is a method of course creation where instructors consider the learning outcomes at the end of the course before choosing content materials and methods of assessment. I found the attention in EAD 866 to the strategy of backwards design particularly useful as it's easy for me to get bogged down with the minute details - which reading will I reference this week? when will the midterm occur? - which can easily distract from focusing on the larger purpose of the course. In sociology 

​

The Scholarly Identity Snapshots, one completed at the beginning of the course ("Initial") and the other at the end ("Final") allowed me to longitudinally track the change in my beliefs, attitudes, and values around teaching and learning. Quite a bit of my teaching philosophy is drawn from my own sociological imagination that I continue to develop, where that "aha!" moment is priceless. As I wrote in my "Final" Scholarly Identity Snapshot, my foundational beliefs continue to ring true, while the practical teaching skills are much more refined thanks to the time spent in EAD 866. 

​

A unique element of EAD 866 was the inclusion of COIL, where groups of MSU and ICU students in the course worked together on a research-teaching project. My group's project linked participation methods to learner-centered teaching (LCT) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). Additionally, our project includes the technology acceptance model (TAM) to suggest that technology can facilitate participation to achieve better learning outcomes during emergency remote teaching as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic during Fall 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic has eased up when it comes to its effects on postsecondary teaching, the lessons learned regarding the incorporation of active learning and participation methods  in my teaching methods has remained.