Ph.D., Kent State University (2008), Curriculum and Instruction (Science Education)
MA, Kent State University (2003), Physics
MS, University of Akron (1998), Education
BS, Kent State University (1988), Physics

My philosophy of teaching and learning is consistent with a liberal arts philosophy.  Education opens up new possibilities for how life can be lived.  It shapes how we see the world, how we think, and how we interact with others.  Career training might be part of one’s education, but to my mind it is much more--education is about who we become, not just what we can do.

Given my history as a science teacher, a whole-person approach to teaching might seem out of place.  Isn’t science teaching about steering promising students into STEM-oriented careers, increasing U. S. global competitiveness, or producing informed voters?  Some may be motivated by such goals, but these aren’t enough for me.  I get out of bed to teach every day because the world is amazing, and it would be a shame to go through life without knowing something about it.  I’ve found that this reason resonates with colleagues and students alike.  When discouraged students ask “when will I ever use this,” I answer: “I don’t want you to use it; I want you to see the world in a new way.”  To my enormous pleasure, students are usually satisfied with this way of looking at education.

Despite my admittedly high-minded motivation, high school teaching (18 years) and university-level teaching (6.5 years) have taught me humility.  Mostly because of questions from interested students, I have repeatedly learned that I did not understand something that I thought I had mastered.  For example, in my first year as a high-school teacher, a student was questioning me about what I considered to be the simplest of ideas—Newton’s Third Law.  To my surprise, the student and I learned together that my understanding of Newton’s Third Law was simply wrong.  Decades later, I regard this experience as normal in teaching: Engaged students think for themselves.  As long as I stay humble, I experience the enormous joy of learning along with my students.

As Deborah Meier put it some time ago, “Teaching is mostly listening; learning is mostly telling.”  Yet in my early years of teaching, I did nearly all of the talking in my classroom.  The result?  I assumed that students must really understand what I was saying because the act of explaining made the ideas so clear--to me.  A combination of education literature and listening to my students has, over time, disabused me of this notion.  Since my early years I have learned (albeit imperfectly) to set up a classroom in which students do a great deal more talking and I do a great deal more listening.  Wonderful ideas surface when we’re at our best, including insightful ideas that just happen to be incorrect.  This is not to say that I do not bring experience, insight, and correction to the classroom.  But if students are to learn these insights, they must come out of students’ minds rather than my own.

I have also learned that despite what many students might tell themselves, students aren’t really motivated by grades.  Instead, students are motivated by understanding.  They love a surprising result, an engaging discussion, and the opportunity to think about the world in a new way.  I’ve found that even the most utilitarian, career-minded students can become captured by interesting ideas, and this interest in the world slowly changes who the students are.  They just don’t know it--yet.

One might expect that my personal-growth orientation to education might leave me isolated in an outwardly business-oriented, global-competititveness-motivated time in U. S. history.  In fact I have found the opposite--colleagues and students alike embrace the ideas that education should be about seeing the world in a new way, that students learn more by working with ideas than by listening to them, that students learn more when faculty adopt a stance of teacher as co-learner/colleague to students, and that students’ fundamental motivation is understanding rather than credit, grades, or careers.

Paul J. Wendel, PhD

Education Department
Otterbein University
1 South Grove Street
Westerville, OH  43081
614-823-1840