For the past ten months, I had to put this blog on hiatus, and I thank all of you who contacted me to make sure I was planning to continue writing when I could.

Last year, I became Chair of my department on July 1st. This was not something I had anticipated happening, and the appointment was made after the end of the Spring semester, so I did not have any time to really prepare. Luckily, our department is a good department, with good people, and everyone was supportive and helpful. Still, learning to be Chair was a time-consuming task — enjoyable, but exhausting.

Added to my first few months as Chair was the fact that I was applying for promotion and tenure (P&T) during the Fall 2014 semester, so when I wasn’t attending to my duties as Chair, or teaching (Chairs get only 1 course reduction, which means we teach 9 credits per semester), I was preparing my P&T application folder.

All of this led to an extremely interesting, sometimes challenging, bifurcated existence. During my first semester as Chair, while I was being observed and evaluated for P&T, I was also observing all of our department’s adjunct faculty as well as our non-tenured resident faculty. I saw many different teaching styles — some more effective than others — and observed many different ways of organizing and teaching a class — again, some more effective than others. I would write up an adjunct’s evaluation, then turn to writing about my own teaching in the letter that needed to accompany my P&T application.

Very early on in the Fall semester, I realized that, while it produced a bit of cognitive whiplash to move so quickly from the observed to the observer and back again, the switching actually informed both my work as Chair and my analysis of my own teaching.

Then came the seminar. Working with our Education Department, I developed an upper-level seminar to help Education Majors with an English Concentration prepare for the New York State edTPA (a new assessment method for student teachers). The seminar focused on Young Adult (YA) Literature, and modeled many of the challenges the students would face with the edTPA. Because the assessment method is new, everyone (students and faculty alike) is learning what is required and navigating through what can often-times be confusing — even contradictory — information from New York State (imagine that, confusing information from a government entity!).

The Fall 2014 semester was the first time the seminar was offered, and it provided an amazing opportunity for me to learn from my students while also teaching them, often in the same class discussion. Talk about cognitive whiplash! Yet it was wonderful. We started out by reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, and then watching the film adaptation of the book. We discussed the work as a class, picking out themes that we found interesting and that we thought would resonate with junior high readers.

Then we developed a lesson plan, using edTPA guidelines (as best we could). We thought about ways in which the material could be presented at different levels, and for differently-abled students. Each of us picked one theme, then worked up a single day’s lesson plan using that theme. I was fascinated to see how, while each student integrated our classwork into her plan, each plan evolved differently, depending upon the theme the student chose, her classroom experience (or lack thereof), the grade level she was focusing on in her Education courses, and her own tastes and preferences.

This was a small class — 11 students — so we got to know each other very well and, I hope, to trust each other. When I didn’t understand something, or didn’t know something, I told them, and together we found the answers. This seemed to encourage them to express doubt or confusion themselves, which made for much more interesting and informative classes.

Then it was their turn to choose material for a lesson plan. Each student picked a work appropriate to the grade level she was planning on teaching when she graduated. Everyone worked out a day’s lesson plan for that work, then taught it to the class. Each student’s lesson was videotaped (just as it will be for the edTPA), and the class and I provided comments on how the lesson went.

The final stage of the seminar was a model of at least some of what a student will have to do for the edTPA. After reviewing the videotape of her lesson, each student went back and modified her lesson plan where necessary. She then wrote a reflective essay discussing the process of writing the lesson plan and watching herself on videotape, as well as what changes she needed to make to the plan and, perhaps, her teaching style. Then each student needed to write a literary analysis of the work she taught, again based upon edTPA requirements. These three documents (lesson plan, reflective essay, literary analysis) made up each student’s final seminar project.

As I was reviewing those final projects, I could see how far each student had come during the course of the semester. And I realized how far I had come as well. Like the three sections of my students’ final projects, the three sections of my semester (learning to be Chair, applying for P&T, developing and teaching the new seminar) provided me the opportunity to think about, and in some cases revise, the way I teach my courses. As Chair, I had an “outsider’s” view of what worked — and, more importantly, what didn’t — in composition and literature courses. I saw some instructors do things that I had done, things that I thought worked well, and realized that maybe they didn’t work as well as I thought they had. In the process of applying for P&T, I had an “insider’s” view of my pedagogy, and the opportunity to look long and hard, and extremely critically, at my teaching philosophy, at what I want to accomplish in my classes, and at how I might adapt my methods in order to become a better teacher. Teaching the seminar in a subject area I knew well, but with a focus that was very different from any I had used before, I became — in the best sense — a student again, learning right along with everyone else in the class, both “outsider” and “insider” at the same time.

As I finish my first year as Chair, newly-promoted and newly-tenured, I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead, challenges I will face heading up the English Department and challenges I will face in the classroom. What I hope to find, what I hope will continue to occur, are these disconcerting, enlightening and, sometimes, uncomfortable moments of cognitive whiplash.