# Teaching As described on my [[about me]] page, I started my career teaching K-12, higher-education, and teachers in China for 4 years. Afterwards, I returned to the US, pursued my doctorate and at the same time taught undergraduate pre-service teachers for 4.5 years. Being a classroom teacher is my foundation. It is something I often go back to when designing learning experiences or training, consulting experts who engage with leaners, and something that I tap into when leading others. Teaching across cultures and grade levels taught me a great deal. Furthermore, my combined teaching experiences completely changed the importance I put on education. Across my teaching years, the work, students, and colleagues greatly inspired me to always strive for more. Overall, leading a classroom taught me some of the following: - Empathizing with those I am speaking with and leading; - The importance of establishing, building, and maintaining **trust**; - The value of connecting lessons to real-world problems and making learning active; - Project management, educational technology, and organizational skills; - **Demonstrating leadership** through lesson planning, ways of listening, ways of speaking, willingness to experiment, concern for fairness/equity, and the value of providing meaningful feedback. There are a few reasons why I pursued my doctorate in education. One of those, was to eventually return to the classroom as a university professor. (Many years later.) After completing my doctorate I chose a practitioner path because I wanted to build products, and I wanted to gather experience across industries. At some point, I want to return to the front of the classroom and hopefully I will be able to do it also as a researcher so that I may really dig into the challenging problems with colleagues and students. ## Guiding statements This sub-section includes some core perspectives that I have developed over the years. These include 1) my teaching philosophy, 2) my research statement and scholarly direction, and 3) my view on the value of high-quality multimedia production. These have changed over the years as I have gathered professional experience and my thoughts have evolved. And I expect they will continue to change as time goes forward. ## 2003-2007, China This sub-section provides background and describes my teaching experiences while living and working in China. During this time I worked for 3 different schools and during 1 summer taught Chinese teachers about activities and techniques I used in class. ## 2009-2013, Texas Tech University (TTU) This sub-section provides background and describes my teaching experience with pre-service K-12 teachers in West and Central Texas. Over the 5 years while completing my doctorate, I spent 4.5 of those years teaching multiple sections of undergraduates each spring, fall, and summer term. In this time, I also created a teaching guide that other graduate students could pick-up and use when first practicing teaching. ## 202x-20xx, In the future For now, this sub-section may contain some ideas that I would flesh out for teaching, or something else. It is to be determined.