“Professor McClain brings herself fully to the class, so I am motivated to come prepared to class, as well” -Anonymous student feedback, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Small Group Analysis, Spring 2019

As a teacher-educator, my goals for teaching and learning operate at two interrelated levels. At a basic level, I want my students to become effective teachers who create inclusive classroom communities that value the voices all learners, enact dialogic pedagogy that connects students’ diverse backgrounds with rigorous disciplinary content, and design meaningful and authentic assessments that are clearly linked to desired learning outcomes. However, it is not enough for me to simply tell my students how to do these things. At the meta-level, I must both demonstrate what effective instruction looks like and explain how and why it is effective in order to accomplish my basic level goals. Over the course of the past fourteen years, I have taught students ages 5 to 65 in spaces ranging from a cart in the hallway of a Title I elementary school to the fully equipped seminar room of a private university, and I have learned that if I want my students to bring themselves fully to a learning community, I must bring myself fully to the learning as well.

My goals for effective learning begin with establishing an inclusive classroom that values the voices of all learners. When I worked as an elementary school language and literacy specialist, I learned from my students classified as English learners that what could potentially be read as “error” often allowed for a different way of seeing things, in addition to a different way of saying things. However, my students’ perspectives and ideas were too often overshadowed by the English learner label that emphasized what they lacked, rather than the valuable perspective they brought. Our pull-out sessions became a space of mutual respect and trust, where students had the opportunity to highlight the resources—linguistic and otherwise—that they could leverage for learning. As a teacher educator, I want pre- and in-service teachers to learn to honor the voices of everyone in the classroom, not just the voices that sound like their own. In order to accomplish this goal for my university students, I have to model by facilitating an inclusive classroom community in my university classes, as well. In the spring of 2019, I taught a course on methods and materials of ELL education at Vanderbilt. My students ranged from a sophomore with no teaching experience to a reading specialist master’s degree student who had spent five years as lead teacher in a first grade classroom. Some students were monolingual English speakers, and some were international students who confessed their own struggles with mastering the intricacies of academic English. However, over the course of the semester, I intentionally explained the importance of creating community for overall learning while demonstrating mechanisms for fostering that community, underscoring how each student brought rich background knowledge and ideas to the learning, and ensuring that everyone knew they belonged. In the end of course evaluation, students not only wrote comments about my teaching, but also wrote about “our learning” “our community” and “our team, ” and all students who completed the survey portion strongly agreed that I “created a welcoming and inclusive classroom environment.”

My goals for effective learning continue with the enactment of dialogic pedagogy that connects students’ diverse backgrounds with rigorous disciplinary content. Because dialogic pedagogy places conversation at the heart of learning, there is an element of risk involved. As a teacher, you can never be certain of how students will take up your bids for participation. What happens if they say nothing? Say something confusing? Or even worse, say something hurtful? However, it is the challenge of this relational aspect of teaching that I find most invigorating: the possibilities of back and forth within the group, never anticipating fully how someone will connect (or not), and the magic when collective connections are made. My favorite moments in classrooms have been when students fully engage in the material, building ideas off of each other, and though we may not reach full agreement, everyone, including me, walks away changed, having thought of the readings a different way. As a teacher educator, part of my responsibility is not only facilitating effective classroom discussion, but teaching my students the mechanisms behind discussion facilitation so that they can do the same. For example, in the theories of second language acquisition course I taught at Lipscomb, I not only explained the theoretical rationale for increasing students’ opportunity to talk, but also demonstrated and debriefed multiple instructional strategies for mixing up classroom discourse structure: turn and talk, jigsaw, talking chips, peer consultation, passing the page, and gallery walks, among others.

My goals for effective learning come full circle with designing meaningful and authentic assessments that are clearly linked with desired learning outcomes. While it is important to connect with students’ prior knowledge and invite student voices to the dialogue, we can’t call what happens in the classroom “learning” unless the students change or grow as a result. Effective instructional design begins with the end in mind: what do I want my students to be able to know or do as the result of my teaching? Students must be made aware of these goals, and instruction must support students toward their achievement of those goals. For teacher-education, my desired outcomes for university students are the implementation of effective teaching practices. For this reason, the major assessments in my courses have been linked to the real work teachers will be doing in the classroom: clearly defining language and content objectives, designing unit and lesson plans to meet those objectives, rehearsing lessons with peers and receiving feedback, analyzing student spoken or written language samples and offering feedback based on that analysis, reviewing video of their instruction to strengthen their ability to notice and respond to student confusion, or revising their existing curriculum to better support the needs of linguistically diverse learners. Because connecting theory and practice is at the heart of my work as a teacher educator, I have also asked students to write up theoretical rationales to accompany their practice-based assessments.

There should be no division between a drive for excellence in the study of effective teaching and a drive for excellence in the enactment of effective teaching. While I want to continue rigorous research in teaching and learning with diverse student populations, this research should not come at the expense of demonstrating and explaining to pre- and in-service teachers how to actually do the kind of teaching I advocate for in my research. By pursuing excellence in practicing what I preach, I hope my influence ripples beyond the pages of my writing, first to the university students in my classrooms, and finally to the many young learners they serve in schools.