Educator

I have been very lucky throughout my education to have been taught and mentored by some fantastic teachers. While I have not trained formally as a pedagogue, I've learned that I have strong instincts as a teacher, and I've been able to translate those instincts into some very effective teaching methods.

My work as a teacher started when I was pursuing my bachelors degree at the University of Delaware. I worked as a resident assistant for two years and a residence hall director for a year, and those paraprofessional positions required me to create and oversee educational programs for my peers. Simultaneously, I was also working with my own summer theatre company, and I was learning how to make theatre by doing it. These two experiences, grounded in constructing knowledge outside of traditional classroom settings, continues to affect my approach to teaching today.

When students enter my classroom, we are colleagues. I do not pretend to be the only one in the room with knowledge to share. We work together to construct knowledge about the topic that we are exploring in the course. To help facilitate this constructivist approach, all of my courses at NYU are self-assessed, which means that students assign themselves a grade for the course, but that grade must be supported with their own evidence of learning. At the top of each course, students are required to outline goals and questions for their own inquiry, and they are urged to journal throughout the experience as a way to gather evidence of learning. In a final self-assessment, the students articulate what they have learned and how they have learned it, and then state why they have assigned themselves a particualr grade for the course. As long as the grade is well-supported, the student receives that grade. If I have questions, I converse with the student, and the student has the option to modify the grade or provide more evidence of learning.

Self-assessment may sound like an "easy A" or less work for the professor, but it actually requires significant 1-on-1 communication with my students, as each student has a personalized set of goals for the course beyond the goals that I have outlined for the course. However, since I tend to teach performance courses and pedagogy courses where students have varying levels of experience, I believe that it's imperative that each student has the opportunity to assess their own work, particularly they will be assessing the work of their own students in the future.

Beyond self-assessment, I believe that respect and sincerity go a long way in the classroom and in the rehearsal hall. I work hard to model both of these for my students, and I hope that it makes a difference in their learning. Overall, my goal as a teacher is to shift the traditional power dynamic that dominates many classrooms and place the power of learning into the hands of my students.

I've included addtional information about my work as an educator in five other sections on this site: courses, conferences, publications, coaching, and research. Click on the words in this paragraph or on the links in the menu bar at the left side of this page to see more detailed information about each of these areas.