Goal Statement

After completing my undergraduate degree in German Language and Literature, with the intention to find a career in education, I worked briefly as a substitute teacher for several grade levels. This was my first taste of both classroom management and the variety of learning styles among students.

As a graduate student of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), I held an assistantship as an instructor of Freshmen Rhetoric and Composition. While classroom management was no longer an issue, I was able to observe knowledge acquisition over a longer period of time. I learned the value of monitoring my audience and realized how difficult facilitating a discussion can be.

These two early experiences helped me realize how much I needed to learn, not only in my subject areas, but also in the areas of leadership, training, and presentation, before I could become an effective educator.

Later in my graduate studies, I worked as a language lab assistant, tutoring several students in English as a Second Language (ESL). My pupils ranged from a doctoral student from Israel, seeking to fine-tune the grammar and wording in his dissertation, to a Chinese woman who wanted to improve her early English skills by role-playing everyday situations such as grocery shopping and arranging carpools. Not only did these teaching experiences vary in target language goals, but in methodologies (rules-based ESL lessons and full immersion verbal/aural practice) chosen specifically to meet those goals.

Other non-work-related experiences added to my understanding – or to a realization of my lack of understanding – of learning theory, training methodologies, and other strategies for information exchange: a dozen years of teaching Sunday School lessons to first graders, a brief stint as a Girl Scout leader, my current volunteer position as a church group trainer, and the joy and worry of watching my own children both struggle and excel within the public school system.

After completing my master’s degree, I became a technical writer for a global building controls company. Outside of occasionally training a new writer on company processes, my post-graduate career did not initially offer me much occasion to use my background in education. After about four years, however, our department began using an entirely new method of creating, maintaining, and publishing our documents; this change allowed me the opportunity to first learn and then teach the new software and processes to other writers.

Though I was training writers who had all used the previous documentation method and software, and who were all experienced technical writers in the same company, I realized that here, too, learning styles and educational goals varied much more than I had expected. Each writer processed (and later retrieved) the new information in different ways, and I soon found that I struggled when training more than one writer at a time. Although one-on-one training was on the surface more time-consuming than teaching in a group setting, it also proved to be far more successful in this circumstance. Determining the other writers’ learning styles also allowed me to more effectively answer their subsequent questions and provide ongoing education when necessary.

In the last several years, because of these and other experiences, I have become interested in educational psychology and learning theory. While my knowledge of this field is minimal and comes only from what I’ve seen, read, and experienced, I find myself eager to begin formal study in this area of education.

My specific interest is centered around the writings and theories of Alfie Kohn, an  advocate for education reform, and critic of such “common sense” aspects of schooling as letter grades, standardized testing, and unnecessary homework. While I agree enthusiastically with Kohn’s theories and analyses, I struggle with the one aspect that affects my own career and educational pursuits.

Kohn often criticizes the American educational system for working as a graduation factory, cramming facts and information into students’ heads without teaching them critical thinking skills, and without fostering a love for the things they are learning or for learning itself. The goal of this factory methodology, Kohn worries, is that students are being primed for “Corporate America”, where the competition for the best grades, awards, and letters of recommendation will finally pay off with the best college scholarships and later, the best job offers and bonuses.

How do I reconcile my strong belief that this dependence on external motivators is not the best way – or even among the better ways – to educate students with the fact that many of them will in fact end up working for large corporations who may seek out award-winning graduates with excellent grades? Further, and more immediately, how do I reconcile my new educational philosophies about intrinsic motivation, standards, and evaluation with the fact that I work for such a corporation where I occasionally train employees and am expected to develop curricula and standards for evaluation?

The MATD program at Roosevelt University matches not only my research interests, but also my career needs in a surprisingly unique way. I expect that the program’s focus on critical thinking and problem solving, the overall application of a constructivist philosophy, and many of the courses in the master’s program, such as Adult Learning Theory and Application, Organizational Communications, and Human Performance Technology will help me answer the questions I’m already asking, as well as the many others I will form as I begin formal study in this area.

I seem to have come full circle with regard to my relationship with education. I began my college career as a tentative student of education, focused strongly on TESOL methodology during graduate school, and then found myself coming back to the field in small but exciting ways throughout my career and non-work life.

While my current intention is to stay in the corporate world as a technical writer, I find myself enjoying the parts of my job which allow me to work with my passion for teaching and training. My longer-term goal is to either move toward a career in training, or to carve out a place in my writing career which will allow me to continue to use that passion to motivate and educate my peers. I expect that the challenges and experiences I find in the MATD program will guide those goals.