Between 1998 and the present, I have been involved with teaching a total of six courses at four institutions. I have TA'd for Introductory Sociology, Sex & Gender, Criminal Justice, and Research Methods (one section each). Independently, I have taught two sections of Juvenile Delinquency, Introductory Sociology three times, and Marriage and Family once, ranging in class size from twelve to fifty. Student evaluations for the courses I have taught have ranked me well overall, and furthermore have shown consistent improvement over time. As I have gained experience, so too have I acquired a strong philosophical commitment to the ongoing development of student learning.

At its most simple, I believe that all of my teaching efforts should be centered around student learning. Although this seems common-sensical, it is a difficult ideal to achieve. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have occasionally found myself guiding students to use a research method that am familiar with or a substantive topic that I find compelling, rather than identifying methods or themes that would enhance their understanding of sociology. Similarly, my lectures sometimes veer off-topic, giving way to my own personal interests.

However, the more often I remind myself that student learning should be my primary goal, and the more resources I employ to achieve this goal, the more attainable it becomes. Consistent with the literature on teaching and learning, I devote a great deal of effort to acquiring and utilizing a diverse repertoire of teaching tools at every step of the teaching experience. Resources such as the TeachSoc listserv and the ASA teaching manuals give me a sense of what other teachers consider relevant, helping me to outline the course goals and objectives from which the rest of my course develops.

These tools also help me develop other course components. My reading lists draw from journal articles, book excerpts, and popular press articles (please see the UIC Summer-06 Syllabus Pt.1 and Pt. 2). I also try to develop assignments that challenge students to incorporate different course elements in a way that helps them understand them in relation to one another. In the classroom, I consciously work toward incorporating techniques that suit students of diverse backgrounds and abilities. In addition to some time spent lecturing, I consistently employ paired discussions, interactive activities, and peer reviews, all with the aim of fostering student learning of sociological concepts. As one example of trying to merge different components of the course, I developed the Flash Research Assignment for my Marriage & Family course (please see the Flash Research Assignment), in which each student chose two projects over the course of the term. The due dates corresponded with the topic of the class, so that the students who completed that project were the "research experts" of the day, and their findings provided context for the day's discussion. My pedagogical techniques, then, are designed in tandem with one another in order to maximize student learning.

If the most basic lesson of Sociology is that human behavior can be systematically and critically appraised, then sociologists ought to be particularly well-placed to evaluate to their own teaching with the goal of achieving measurable pedagogical improvement. To that end, as is true of any social research question, teachers should look to three sources for information: their subjects, their peers, and the relevant literature. In this case, the goal of improving one's teaching is best achieved by gathering data from students, seeking input from peers, and reading the literature (though not necessarily in that order).

As the most common indicator of student attitudes, the institution-sponsored course evaluation has the methodological benefit of being administered consistently, such that responses can be reliably compared across time. This is a powerful tool when considering the question of improvement. In my own case, having evaluations from three separate schools with three eclectic student bodies, I can only approximate improvement across courses. However, data comparing student responses in my first class with my most recent one do suggest that my overall technique has improved considerably: averaging across individual items in my first course's evaluation, (please see the Cortland Evals) approximately half of my students ranked me above average, 39 percent ranked me as average, and over ten percent ranked me below average. Alternatively, in my most recent course (please see UIC Summer-06 Evals), over ninety percent of students ranked me above average, about five percent ranked me as average, and less than two percent ranked me below average.

I can attribute this improvement to at least two factors. One is the course-specific surveys that I have developed in several classes. Depending on the area I am working to improve, I regularly supplement the school-wide evaluations with my own survey instrument. Most recently, I administered a survey (Please see ) to my Marriage and Family students at the end of the term. Because this was my first time teaching this course, I was interested in students' reactions to the new methods assignments, and readings that I employed in the course. This survey provided fantastic data that I can apply to future classes.

In response, I slowly collected ideas from different sources (e.g., teaching sessions at conferences, empirical research on pedagogical strategies) and merged them with my own teaching style and finally arrived at a strategy that I can replicate in every class. Specifically, I made the decision to explicitly align my course objectives with my readings, in-class activities and lectures (Please see Sample Lecture Notes), such that at least one objective guided everything I did. As a way of evaluating my success in this area, I modified these objectives into essay questions for the final exam (Please see UIC Final, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2). Again drawing the comparison between my SUNY-Cortland evaluations with those from my most recent course at UIC, similar questions assessing my adherence to course objectives show a striking improvement. In my first course, approximately 45 percent of students rated me as above average. After implementing my alignment strategy in my most recent course, 100 percent of my students rated me as above average in this area.

While this is but one example, it does speak to my interest in, and ability to, improve future courses based on evaluative data. This is, I hope, the core of how to focus my teaching on student-learning outcomes in a way that is both flexible and sustainable.