Thank You and Goodbye for now, Fresno Pacific
If you don’t live in California’s Central Valley, you may not have heard of Fresno Pacific University. After somehow being involved in teaching or attending for 15 of the past 18 years, I’m stopping my involvement with the University this year.
Background
I chose it for a variety of reasons — the main reason was I wanted to be the best teacher I could be, and reasoned that with small class sizes and an excellent reputation for teaching, it would be the best choice. (A half tuition leadership scholarship certainly didn’t hurt either!)
I had a great experience as an undergrad, where I really found myself as a leader, scholar, and non-scholarship athlete. I got out of my introvert shell and ran for and won student body vice president for two years, which exposed me to the leadership of the university as well as my peers. In many ways those experiences shaped me to be who I am today.
Yet, it was the years following undergrad that truly shaped me. The academic and social experiences had prepared me to mentor and teach students well, and I loved it. I often count 2006–2008 or so as the truly best teaching years of my life. I was not married, so spent way too much time working on lessons, coaching kids in sports, and being far too dedicated than could be reasonably sustained. Once I got married things slowed down as they should, but I was still coaching two varsity sports plus running a non-profit concurrently for teaching kids how to do triathlons.
Masters Degree
In 2011 I first approached Fresno State with a colleague (Jeff Rooney) about a masters degree, but the one my colleague was going for was the Admin Credential, which I wasn’t sure about. Then a friend I’d done my teaching credential with, Matt Abajian, told me he was going to do the FPU Curriculum and instruction Masters degree program. After an interview with the program director, I applied and was accepted.
The key class that changed the trajectory of my career was one that involved Curriculum Mapping. At the time, Common Core was being rolled out in Fresno Unified, and I’d gotten myself involved in unit planning as the district rolled out a textbook-less curriculum in 2013 in middle school because they wanted to give us a year to try without relying on outdated textbooks. I thrived on finding and aligning OER materials and getting a Masters Degree at this time was extremely timely — I felt I was using everything I was learning in my courses as we paved a path for a new type of pedagogy to support the different kinds of standards. Right or wrong, we felt the CCSS were not just about teaching to a test but actually about TEACHING. Those experiences of finding and mapping curriculum eventually led to my work at OpenEd and now my work with CASE/OpenSALT at ACT.
After finishing the program (thesis was on “technology vs analog based formative assessment”), Matt was actually approached first about coming back to teach at FPU but wasn’t sure with kids etc. I took it on — first teaching the Tech class for the Teaching Credential course. I still remember feeling too young to teach credential students (I think I was 28), but quickly found my groove. Courses then were in person every other week, with online in between.
Adjunct Professor Brandon Dorman!
Eventually I started teaching in the very same Masters Degree program I had graduated from, then for a few years an Edtech Masters Degree program as well. I was fortunate to be given a chance to significantly revise several of the courses — I used OER as often as possible or resources that I had personally benefited from such as Hyperdocs and H5p.org . Teaching at FPU even online allowed me to keep a pulse on what was happening in classrooms near and far, as well as gave me a chance to connect with adult learners in ways I wouldn’t have been able to as a peer teacher.
A few things I learned teaching graduate students online that I’ll leave you with:
- Students always appreciate attention to detail — they notice if you hand back papers with comments or just grade and forget
- Authentic discussion is hard (I used Pi App and Slack to help create community)
- Teaching adults is still about relationships before it’s about academics — but if academics aren’t challenging relationships won’t be created
I am grateful to everyone at FPU and while I’m not ruling out returning, right now I need to focus on my family, my primary job and myself!
