I wrote the attached pages for a previous course about what makes an effective teacher. Rereading what I wrote then, and reflecting on my subsequent learning and teaching experiences, I think I would change little about what I think constitutes an effective teacher. I would add the following preface to this statement:

An effective teacher must maximize teaching effectiveness for the individual student as a member of a larger community of learners in a common learning environment. Conventionally, this learning environment, or the "effective environment," is the classroom, but this should probably be best considered as an extended classroom that encompasses larger and larger portions of the world beyond. Because each student is complex and unique in terms of their needs, situation, personality, etc., the effective teacher must develop as much depth insight into the individual's life-world as possible, through formal and informal assessments, interviewing, interaction and observation. This must be done with one hand and one eye to managing the rest of the class, or rather, the entire class as a whole. The class as a whole constitutes a system, a human machine, that attains its own dynamic equilibrium. The teacher must then try develop for each student a key strategy for teaching that is optimal for each individual in the class, and short of this, at least a blanket covering strategy that is as optimally effective for as many students in the classroom as possible. To go further, the teacher must provide and use those tools that will enable one to implement those strategies, or teaching designs, that will lead to the realization of success. In this case, success must be measured not in terms of state standardized test scores, but in terms of the quality and quantity of cognitive, emotional and behavioral development that the student achieves within the aegis and framework of the class--development that can hopefully be carried and effectively transferred beyond the class to other frameworks later in life.

It is the case with young elementary age school children especially that the requirements of primary acquisition, including aspects of socialization and enculturation, are not yet deeply ingrained. Young children do not enter into the classroom at the beginning of the year, or at the beginning of each new day, with well defined or realistic expectations about what they are going to derive from the time they spend in school. Neither have they the sense of discipline, structure or framework for organizing their experiences in a manner that will be developmentally productive. Nor do they have, in a naive and unpreconditioned sense, the means by which to implement or put into practice new skills or knowledge by which they can achieve a sense of adaptive success in their environments.

The effective teacher therefore serves as an instrumental mediator in the developmental cycles of the growing child, cycles linking increasing cognitive sophistication, integration and differentiation, with adaptive and appropriate behavioral repertories and skills--repertories that are usually articulated in social contexts that demand communication, interaction and cooperation for the achievement of common objectives. The effective teacher thus bridges an important gap that occurs in the child's first experiences of the world, and that is the gap between the largely undifferentiated and primary life-world of the child, and the larger adult world in which that child is situated and headed toward developmentally. The adult that the teacher is and presents to the child then becomes a part of that child's own growing up.

As I look back through my school days and remember all the positive school experiences, I would say that for the most part all my teachers were good and effective in some manner or other. Each had their own style, their own talents and special expertise, and each also had their own idiosyncracies of character, which was also part of the learning experience. I would say that an effective teacher is capable of reaching the individual student, each student, and hopefully every student in a class, in a manner that is personal, compassionate, objective and interesting. The lessons I remember most and best are those that challenged me to think about something differently, to learn a new skill or to make some new kind of connection in the world that I had not previously made before. I think that learning requires work on the part of a student, and a teacher who can encourage and motivate students to work hard to learn, either by hook or crook, by the carrot or the stick, is being more effective as a teacher than otherwise. Effectiveness relates indirectly to teaching efficiency, I suppose, and efficiency requires effective organizational and integration techniques on the part of the teacher. My own limited teaching experiences, especially in China, confirms this. An effective teacher must be organized, challenging but not over the top in difficulty, interesting and not boring, and capable of reaching the interests and needs of each student as a unique individual with their own learning needs.

I cannot say that I had a single favorite teacher. I think one way or another I liked most if not all of my teachers. I did not start disliking certain teachers until I got into a university and began meeting professors who, in hindsight, were biased, authoritarian and relatively mediocre either as instructors or scholars.

The strategies that made the greatest impression upon me as a student in my K-12 years were when the teachers, in the course of their lectures, could elaborate narrative stories on subjects that made a particular subject come alive for me in my imagination. In science, it was challenging me to try to solve basic science problems without the aid of textbooks or other informational sources except the conditions provided by either the observation of nature or the conditions of an experiment. Some teachers, especially in social studies, presented us with the prospects of a dilemma for which there were no clear solutions, or alternatively, had us construct our own scenarios in a given situation. In math, it was explaining the basic theorems in a theoretical manner that made sense, and offering me the extra incentive of working beyond the book in extra-credit areas that were tangential to the main subjects of algebra and geometry. In different literature and English classes, it was almost invariably reading a book, a play or a short story, either as a group or individually. In a communications class effective learning was having to write and give a speech on a topic of my own interest and choosing. I think, in looking back on it, an effective teacher was probably able to befriend the members of the class on one hand to the point of mutual affability and familiarity at least. With the other hand they were able to maintain a sense of objective distance in regard to the knowledge being taught and the related contextual understandings that were associated with that knowledge, whatever these may have been. (For instance, experiential connections by either the student or the teacher, theoretical or general knowledge connections to the subject, peripheral or miscellaneous connections or spin-offs to a topic.)

Strategies that got us to think deeply about basic issues, or that forced us to try our hands at new skills, or that put things together for us, were the most effective in my mind and memory. Often, especially in the college years, this included some kinds of hands-one experiential work, as in labs, field classes or exercises that went beyond the typical lecture format. A great deal of lecturing in college went into notebooks, only to be subsequently forgotten or left unused.

My web for an effective teacher would be as follows:

My web conceptualizing my ideas of an effective teacher is not so much a semantic web as it is a symbolic knowledge system that entails certain critical feedback processes and provides the template for a certain kind of working organization or system to be developed. This system engages both students and teacher in positive relationships, not just between students and teacher, but between students themselves, within students, and outside of the classroom with the student's families, friends, community and the wider world.

The work in positive discipline that was the outcome of the psychological approach of Alfred Adler has had a strong impact on my attitude about teaching and education. I believe such an approach needs to be tempered by a balanced subject-centered/student centered approach and by realistic understanding of the personalities, experiences and relations of children, especially children who demonstrate special needs.

It is important to me that students come to think of themselves as members of a class-team, and to think of the class-room structure in a non-traditional sense as being something that can be manipulated and refashioned to fit a variety of learning goals or knowledge-skill frameworks. It is important to myself at least (a value that may not necessarily be shared by students, other teachers or the parents) that knowledge has an intrinsic value and even beauty that can be appreciated for its own sake and is worthy of pursuit and understanding regardless of other considerations. Providing students the opportunity to be exposed to and experience both esoteric and exoteric forms of knowledge and active involvement that they would not otherwise get in their normal lives seems to me of critical importance in the educational process.

My description of an effective teacher is therefore as follows:

An effective teacher is one who can organize a class in a variety of modular ways, and who can engage the student as both an individual and as a member of a larger group upon a number of levels and in a wide variety of ways. An effective teacher will strive to expose students to new and hopefully unusual kinds of experiences that are constructive, and will in turn encourage students to build upon their new knowledge and experiences from their own lives and from the sharing of experience with other people in their world. An effective teacher takes the effective life-world of the child and extends this in different directions, enlarging it in its size and compass, and elaborating it in terms of the detail and resolution.

Flexibility of a classroom context enables working with the physical and temporal space of a classroom in such a manner as to permit its fullest potential to be realized as a learning framework. An effective teacher will allow the classroom to be effectively and efficiently reshaped in a variety of ways to suit these needs, and permitting the students a hand in helping with this shaping process. If all the world is a stage, then the classroom is the background scenery and setting for this stage, and the students are the many actors and actresses who can adopt multiple roles and play different parts upon this stage. The classroom is both a microcosm of the larger world, and a lense through which the larger world beyond can be safely explored.

Enlarging the effective life world of the students entails that the teacher build upon the students' experiences and knowledge base, individually and collectively through sharing, and to add new dimensions and content to this knowledge base. An effective teacher permits students to safely live in alternative worlds than the one's they may otherwise have known, without fear, hostility or the insecurity that comes from the threat of violence or punishment, and playing upon the natural curiosity that all children have to explore and experience their worlds. An effective teacher therefore cannot oneself feel threatened or insecure about their own knowledge and experience in the world, as these feelings will rub off on and shape those emergent relations that the students are building for themselves.

An effective teacher is therefore a kind of mediator of the experiences of the student in their daily lives, and in a technical sense this role of symbolic mediation of experience occurs at multiple levels at the same time. An effective teacher is therefore necessarily a teacher who has achieved in terms of their own life-world a considerable degree of integration of understanding and behavior. An effective teacher will engage and invite the student into the learning game, and will encourage students to not be afraid to try new things, to move out of their comfort zones, and risk making mistakes in learning new skills, etc.

In conclusion, I would say that all teachers are more or less effective teachers to the extent that they can accomplish these kinds of goals, whether they do this intentionally or unintentionally in the course of their instruction. Of course, some people are better at it than others and there is case to be made for some who have a knack, a talent or some strange kind of natural ability for teaching others. An effective teacher must be capable of working at multiple levels dynamically and flexibly.

Finally, an effective teacher will learn to set realistic goals for one's students, and to provide realistic means for students to achieve those goals. In order to be realistic, an effective teacher much be capable of learning from and about one's students as much as possible, and to reach them in ways that really count. There is an important sense that a teacher assumes a basic ethical sense of responsibility for the learning of the student in the class. This will complement this by providing the discipline and context to transmit this sense of responsibility to both the individual student and to the class as a whole or in its many possible permutations.

My educational philosophy has been influenced by my training, education, experiences, research and writing over the years. I have entered education professionally in strong part because it is necessary in the world today to promote alternative human development, and education remains at the center of this critical issue. From the standpoint of the question of a student centered (construed in class as "constructivist") and a subject-centered approach (construed as behaviorist), I would claim that I would adopt a working balance between both approaches. I would expect to also develop a "class centered" approach that deals with the class as a whole system or in part as components of a system that is designed for learning. Learning is cooperative in the context of the school and even the entire society in which learning is promoted.

From a metaphysical point of view, I have adopted and developed theory in relation to various fields of the sciences, and have a strong naturalistic inclination towards knowledge and our understanding of reality. I see the classroom, the students, and the society in which the school is situated as part of a complex series of interacting processes that achieves and maintains over time a dynamic equilibrium between variables.

From an epistemological point of view, human apprehension of reality is symbolic and constructed socially, culturally and psychologically. Doctoral and post-doctoral research in symbolic framing, issues relating to cognitive development and acquisition, has provided me a body of empirically robust methods that are directly applicable to the challenges of promoting learning upon a number of levels. It has provided me the foundation for the development of active approaches upon a number of levels, as well as for a theoretical framework by which to interpret and organize approaches.

Aesthetically, because I have been an artist, and remain so, I believe strongly in the development of human creativity through a variety of means in the development of personality and character, as well as intelligence. I believe also that there is a natural aesthetic in the appreciation of nature, in all its verities and aspects. Even death, as it is said, becomes the mother of beauty.

From a humanistic point of view, I believe each student remains a unique individual with keen intelligence, talent and experience that remains dormant until awoken by the right conditions that a teacher in an effective learning environment may provide. Mentoring relationships remains, even for very tiny babies, a critical component to the human mediation of experience. The challenge in a classroom for a teacher with 30+ individuals to teach on a daily basis is to learn and understand the needs, interests and personalities of each child in order that the teacher may most effectively assist them.

My choice in coming to APU was not that I am a very religious person. I was born and raised within the Methodist church. After my father died, our family fell apart and we did not any longer go to church. Through anthropology, I have studied various religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and spirit animism, and even various aspects of Christianity itself. I had the opportunity to attend a teacher program through a secular public university. I chose APU because, I believe at the heart of the issue of human development, must be a fundamental doctrine of love, charity, forgiveness, tolerance and trust. This doctrine becomes reflected in how people deal with one another on a day to day basis, and how they interpret the actions of people. I have determined that APU probably provides a kind of humanistic framework and approach toward education that would probably be lacking in other programs. I found this to be true of my work in China, with the realization that at the core of most human development issues are fundamental commitments, or a lack of commitment, as the case may be, to certain core value orientations that are implicit to one's attitudes, relations and behavior in the world. China has been a world in which religion has been outlawed for more than 50 years now, and its people have paid for this a price, the cost of their souls, that is incalculable by any earthly standards.

Ethically I am bound by my profession to behave in certain ways in certain contexts in relation to people with whom I work. I take these professional obligations quite seriously and strongly, regardless of whether they are interpreted or shared the same way be other in my field of study or not. This sense of ethics would extend to a fundamental respect and appreciation of the student in the classroom.

Education is no longer just vital to the perpetuation of our system, our cultural way of life or for the achievement of personal success in life. It is critical for the future of all of humanity. Finally, to conclude this brief statement of my educational philosophy as this has so far developed, I will recite the first four lines of Walt Whitman's poem There Was A Child Went Forth:

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

Classroom Discipline Plan

Rationale: I would attempt to utilize a watered down version of a positive discipline plan for my class that would allow students to convene in weekly class meetings to decide on appropriate rules for the class as a whole, and for allowing them to make collective choices and decide plans of action. This would be set for either the first period of Monday or the last period of Friday. Students would elect their own class leaders and helpers, and would hold elections during these meetings. I observed an impromptu and informal class meeting that seemed very effective during observation, and I believe that class meetings can be convened at a moment's notice to take care of pending issues that effect the status of the class as a whole. If students know what to expect and how to behave, then such meetings can be quite effective in inducing appropriate behavior.

Set Rules: Set rules would include those school-wide policies, like no running in hallways, no chewing gum, no mechanical pencils, bring a note for absences, etc., designed for the management of all members of the school. They would also include those basic class rules that I would set in my class, which would include some combination of the following:

1. Obey all school rules.

2. No cheating, lying, stealing.

3. No talking during silent time.

4. Always follow procedural guidelines: Raising hands to ask a question, etc.

5. Respect people, property, life and yourself.

6. Work hard, and do homework.

Negative Rewards: Negative rewards would include those sanctions designed to reinforce proper conduct by making improper conduct unrewarding. The first set of negative rewards would include verbal admonitions and questions as to proper behavior. If a student needs to be reminded too many times, then a mark will go in a column of my daily spreadsheet. If a student misbehaves in relation to other students, then it is possible to post the grievance for discussion at the next class meeting. If I cannot design a strategy for modifying and managing students behavior in a timely and appropriate manner, by moving students to new seats, assigning extra duties to students, etc., and if a student gets three check marks next to his/her name, then that student will be destined to soon have a talk with the principle and the parents would be notified at the same time. Severe misbehavior at any time will be automatically stopped and dealt with immediately.

I am not great on negative discipline and do not believe it, on the whole, to be very effective towards the goal of socializing students according to appropriate normative rules of behavior and social relations. Negative reinforcement and over-reliance on punishment demonstrates issues of authority and over-control by the teacher, and undercuts the student's self esteem and sense of social respect vis-a'-vis the other students of the class. My only criticism of the teacher I am now working with is her over reliance on the threat of punishment and actual punishment by means of detention for what amounts to fairly minor infractions of her rules. I do not think this is completely necessary in maintaining appropriate response and discipline by the students. There are severe instances of course that demand special consideration, but I would predict that 98% of the time, most cases can be effectively handled in a constructive manner that refocuses the student's attention and behavior away from a negative mode toward an alternative framework that eliminates the problem in the first place. For students who are hyperactive in class, I believe they can be effectively managed so as not to interfere or disturb the work of the other students, and also so as not to reflect negatively upon themselves.

Positive Rewards: Positive rewards will be for the class as a whole, for individuals and for smaller groups of students. These reward structures will apply at the same time at all levels. Students who are proficient in their work and behavior in class will receive positive marks by their names, and an accumulation of these marks will warrant special awards and rewards. Students who are proficient in their schoolwork and diligent with homework will receive extra privileges and incentives. A ticket, award and credit system for rewarding appropriate behavior could all be effectively implemented at the same time, though I think an overemphasis on these kinds of rewards demeans and misplaces the incentive and motivational structure for doing constructive and positive work in the first place. I would promise weekly and monthly rewards for students. Weekly rewards might consist of some set of school supply items: pencils, binders, notebooks, books, etc., that I would keep on hand for the purpose. Monthly rewards would be to allow the students to have a game or movie period, during which time they will get to have a constructive activity that they find fun.

Beyond this kind of framework, which I would strive to further develop and refine in the course of my schoolwork, I would also create basic management strategies in the classroom in order to disambiguate the structure of appropriate behavior for students in the class. Positive and negative consequences of behavior would be clearly evident to all students, and the operational routines would be developed to allow the students to navigate in the class with ease and comfort. These would be coordinate to and congruent with the operational structure of the classroom arrangement into various activity centers and areas, and various special periods of the week.

Beyond this, I believe that the constraints and sanctions of behavior should be left implicit to the cultural background of the class, and made flexible enough to accommodate the individual and cultural diversity that is characteristic of contemporary classrooms. I believe students can be given extra duties and responsibilities, and delight in fulfilling these. As a teacher, I recognize clearly how important the teacher's role is in maintaining proper reinforcement, conduct and discipline in the classroom, and I see as I observe how much the student's reference point and focus of attention is on the behavior of the teacher. A kind but not overly "sweet" approach is good for all people of all cultural backgrounds.