I see my students as whole people first. Everything else follows from that.

I'm going to show up to class as myself. That means I'm real, I'm honest, and yes — on more than one occasion — something colorful is going to come out of my mouth. Not because I'm trying to be edgy, but because that's genuinely who I am. And I want students to feel like they can do the same. What I won't tolerate is anything that makes other people in the room feel unsafe, disrespected, or unwelcome. We're a learning community. That means everyone gets to be here, and everyone deserves to feel like they belong.

I designed the course. I wrote the learning outcomes. I selected the readings. Sure — that comes from some degree of expertise. But it would be pretty arrogant to walk into a room full of people with their own expertise, their own lived experiences, and their own ways of knowing, and act like I'm the only one with something valuable to say. I'm not. I'm a facilitator. My job is to create the conditions for learning, not to perform it at people. When we're together in a room, I want that time to actually mean something — conversation, activity, reflection — not a PowerPoint someone could have read at home.

I learn best by doing, and I think most people do. But doing alone isn't enough — you have to understand what you did and why it worked for the learning to actually stick. That combination of active engagement and reflection is where real learning happens. It doesn't always happen within a 15-week semester. Sometimes I'm just pushing the rock and hoping the momentum builds later. That's okay. I'm planting things, not harvesting them.

I've never given a multiple choice summative assessment and I don't intend to start. Low-stakes knowledge checks? Sure, fine, useful. But anything that actually matters should produce something — an artifact, a project, a demonstration of real understanding that a student can take with them when the course ends. I want students to be able to point to their work and say "I made this." Better yet, I want them to be able to talk about it in a job interview.

I always know students are taking a course for something that's coming next — a job, graduate school, a career pivot, sometimes just personal growth. I don't always know what that is. But it shapes how I teach. The content matters, but so do the transferable things — how to communicate, collaborate, present, think critically under pressure. I want what happens in my courses to actually prepare people for wherever they're going, not just help them pass.