Kimberly Rombach’s Reflective Statement

February 12, 2009

 

I have just completed 4 ˝ years as an assistant professor in the Department of Childhood/Early Childhood Education at SUNY Cortland and continue to find this job to be one of the most intellectually rewarding and yet challenging endeavors of my lifetime. This reflective statement highlights my past two years’ accomplishments as a teacher, researcher and educational community member.

 

Teaching

In the past two years, I have taught seven different courses in three different programs within our department. The courses include topics such as undergraduate social studies methods, undergraduate social and academic curriculum, online graduate research, and utilizing effective Internet resources for classroom instruction. The topics vary widely, and, as such, they have taken a considerable amount of time to plan because resources can’t always be used for multiple course preparations. I have continued to keep the courses rigorous in design and have been pleased that students regularly report that they find them challenging to complete but well worth the effort. For example, some recent students commented, “I have never been so encouraged to work so hard for another professor” and “I feel that Kim wants all of her students to succeed and does everything in her power to ensure that this happens. She also expects the best from all, which truly prepared us to become great educators.”  My course teaching evaluations remain very high across all courses with an overall mean consistently around 4.8 out of 5.0. For me, the true measure of how well I am doing with students is when they report that I have made a difference in their own teaching. Recently, one of my previous students emailed me to thank me for making a difference in her own elementary students’ learning because I had helped her to become an effective teacher. A letter such as this helps to remind me that my own teaching can have the far-reaching impact on my students’ students that I initially hoped it would when I first became a professor at Cortland. It is in this way that I am most fulfilled with the outcomes of my college teaching endeavors. In January 2009, I was nominated for the campus-wide Excellence in Teaching Award.

 

Last spring I had the opportunity to teach online courses for the first time in my career. I was excited and apprehensive about this venture because I had never taken an online course myself and as such, was unsure of what might work best for students’ learning. Therefore, I spent some time meeting with a student who had taken many online courses in the past to help me plan for effective course design. I also spent some time with our SUNY Cortland technological support staff to learn about online classrooms and online teaching tools. Planning took so much more time than I had anticipated! However, I always believe that strong planning helps to ensure success, so I planned everything as well as I could prior to the courses beginning. I created discussion directions for potential first-time online students, online discussion lessons and online assignments, grading rubrics and grade books. The biggest surprise that came from my online teaching was the wide range of students’ opinions about online learning. Some students reported that they liked online courses and seemed to really open up during online discussions and participated often in one-on-one email conversations with me. Other students seemed to minimally participate. One of the students frequently skipped assignment submissions and discussion posts and subsequently failed the course. It was the only time since being at Cortland that I had a student fail one of my courses. I believe that this was largely due to the online modality of instruction and believe that the student’s outcome might have been different in a typical, face-to-face course.

 

While reflecting on teaching online, I soon came to realize that students must rely very heavily on reading text to achieve their learning goals. For example, In EDU 647, I provided students with weekly class notes (modules), PowerPoint files, supplemental Internet websites and required student-to-student written dialogue discussions. Although I did work to include some images, video and sound clips, those resources were supplemental to the core teaching tools, which were text-based. Since that time, I have been searching for tools to incorporate more of a personal feel into the online environment. In January 2009, I began participating in a pilot implementation of a software application called Mediasite that offers online instructors with the opportunity to simultaneously record themselves speaking while also recording screenshots of computer applications. While I have just begun to use this webcasting application (click here for a sample of my work), I realize its potential benefits and can imagine that those who may not like online learning may feel different after being introduced to such technology. I am always looking for and implementing new teaching innovations and I will be studying my current (on campus) students’ perceptions of this application throughout this semester to determine some of its potential for future students. My goal is that I will learn how to effectively use this application and implement it in future online classroom environments.

 

As the semesters have passed, my course teaching assignments seem to be varying less, which has tremendously helped me narrow my focus so I can concentrate more of my attention in other areas of my professorship. For example, in the Fall 2008 semester, I was assigned to teach EDU 510: Inquiry into Teaching, Technology and Research and EDU 379: Inquiry into Curriculum, Technology and Teaching. These two courses may be best understood as introductory courses for our Childhood Education initial certification programs. Although one course is an undergraduate course and the other is a graduate course, they offer similar inquiries for students and as such, I find that I am able to use some similar resources and activities in both courses. Since one is an undergraduate course and the other is a graduate course, they differ in quite a few ways, but these courses do have overlap regarding some content and that has helped with streamlining my planning. For the first time since working at Cortland, I have the same course teaching assignment for a second semester. This semester, I am finding that I am not spending as much time planning for classes as I had to do in previous semesters. Because of that, I have found that I can utilize some of the time that I usually spend on teaching preparation in the area of my scholarship.

 

Scholarship

Throughout the past two years since my last reappointment, I have written or co-written five papers that were presented at regional and national conferences and authored or co-authored two publications with an additional one in press and another currently in review. My papers include topics of inclusive education, diversity awareness and technology applications. I am most proud of my paper titled, “Learning from Parents of Students with Disabilities: Informing Teacher Preparation” that is currently in review because it is a paper that has undergone numerous rewrites and in it’s most recent revision, I framed the findings in current inclusive educational policy, which is a significant shift from its original form. As I reflect on my scholarship, it has helped me to recall a conversation I had with another colleague who once told me “it’s the re-writes that are important when writing. It’s the rewrites that make the difference.” Rewriting takes so much uninterrupted concentration and I now realize that it can take me a few years to turn an initial conference presentation into a publication.

 

I have been awarded three internal grants and two external grants since my last reappointment. The internal grants included an award for (1) creating an online course; (2) purchasing and implementing handheld technology devices with preservice teachers and elementary students; and (3) collaborating with other colleagues to develop and implement a professional development school initiative called the Unified Teaching and Learning Initiative. The two external grant awards provide me with the opportunity to serve as a co-liaison for the New York’s Mid-State Regional Taskforce for Quality Inclusive Schooling. I am so proud of this accomplishment because it exemplifies the aspects of teaching that I find most important, compelling and challenging. The external grant unifies colleagues in our mid-state region so I have been able to widen my professional community and now regularly meet with professors from LeMoyne College, Syracuse University, Binghamton University and with many New York State Department of Education staff members. In our meetings, we discuss ways that inclusive education practices are currently being implemented in public K-12 schools and discuss ways that higher education preservice teacher preparation programs can be better designed to meet the needs of all students in today’s classrooms. Last summer, the grant supported a Summer Symposium to highlight inclusive practices that show promise for positively impacting students with disabilities in general classrooms. Participants included regional classroom teachers, support staff and administrators. This year, we have planned for the Summer Symposium to be implemented in late Spring 2009 so our college students can attend it as well. The external grant was initially awarded in Fall 2007 and renewed in Fall 2008. As a result of my external grant activity, I was awarded with an all-college Excellence In Research, Scholarship and Outreach Award in Spring 2008.

 

In early February 2009, I submitted an application for the Nuala McGann Drescher leave award. The application required a carefully planned project to be developed and implemented during the one semester’s leave from the college. My proposal titled, IMPACT2: Inclusive Models: Promoting Aligned Collaboration Through Technology”, combines my internal and external grant activity into a larger project aimed at studying the collaborative efforts of general and special educators who work alongside each other in inclusive classrooms. If awarded, I plan to create video case studies of meaningful planning conversations to highlight the necessary collaboration inherent to successful inclusive practices. The video case studies will then be published online so I can use them with my preservice teachers and have them available as a resource for other interested instructors and/or classroom teachers.

 

Service

I continue to serve on many different committees at the department, school and college level. At the department level, I continue to serve as our Master of Science in Teaching (MST) in Childhood Education Program coordinator. I have currently begun to have conversations with other colleagues who are interested in revising some of our current graduate programs to either begin to offer some courses online or as hybrids and to create opportunities for potential students to earn degrees and be certified in more than one teaching area. With today’s increasingly diverse public schools, it is so important that we provide every means possible for making our graduates as strong and as qualified as they can be. As I reflect on this area of service, I realize that it is because I have become experienced as a coordinator that I can now reconsider and reconceptualize graduate school curricula.

 

At the department level, I continue to serve on the Research and Technology committee. We continue to sponsor Scholarly Socials and this past December 2008, held a meeting highlighting many of our faculty members’ research endeavors. It was a meaningful and worthwhile event because we were able to learn about each other’s research and identify ways that some of us are connected in our work. Also at the department level, I am currently serving on the Personnel Committee. In this role, I am learning more about college policies and practices including reappointment, promotion and tenure.

 

I also serve on the Long Range Planning Committee, the Faculty Development Committee and the College-wide Scholarship Committee as well as numerous other college committees. I enjoy the service work that I do because it provides me with opportunities to get to know other faculty members who share similar interests goals.

 

My work as a professor at SUNY Cortland continues to be a very professionally rewarding time of my life. I continue to be very proud to be part of the SUNY Cortland faculty and am hopeful that my portfolio will provide the reviewers with evidence of my teaching, scholarship and service that supports a decision for my reappointment as assistant professor in the Department of Childhood/Early Childhood Education.

Thank you in advance for your careful review of my work.


Sincerely,
Kimberly Rombach