Teaching Material
I was accepted into a graduate teaching program, where I was responsible for teaching an undergraduate technical writing course. I collaborated with professors and peers to implement teaching strategies that were effective and engaging for my students. To help me achieve such goals, I developed a teaching philosophy, which I used to guide my lesson plans and class activities.
In the fall of 2022, I took a course focused on the teaching of technical communication, both to learn effective instruction strategies as well as to prepare for my eventual graduate teaching assistantship that I would take the following year. As a part of this course, we were instructed to create a teaching philosophy which we would revise throughout the semester as we learned new methods of instruction.
Downloadable link: Rentz 6070 Teaching Philosophy.pdf
In order to provide high-quality in-class experiences for my students, I created lesson plans in the form of Word documents to supplement any presentation material and to provide me with speaking notes to reference, ensuring that I would be able to cover all the material that I wanted to on any given day. These lesson plans were very effective at helping me manage class time. Below is an example lesson plan from a class day surrounding website accessibility features. During the lesson prior to the one listed here, the students were introduced to certain accessibility features and principles. On the day of this lesson plan, they were asked to search for those principles in websites that they used often.
Downloadable link: Rentz Teaching 3-6.pdf
I frequently made use of slideshows to have something to grab the attention of my students during class and to have a space to put important information that they would need to understand to be successful on their assignments. The slideshow below is for the same day as the lesson plan above, and shows how the two documents work together to create a successful day of class. To help break ice and humanize the discussion more, I often included pictures of my cat Milkshake to keep students engaged and entertained during class. As I believe in more experiential learning, the slideshows were usually pretty light in content as much of class time was focused on activities for the students to work on rather than lecture material for them to take notes on.
Downloadable link: Rentz Teaching Slideshow 3-6.pdf