Ludmila V. Smirnova, Ph.D.

My dear mother who passed away a few years ago was a talented engineer for her first career. But then she found her true calling as a teacher and spent the rest of her working life instructing college students in mathematics. I grew up bathed in her passion for teaching and made it my career as well.

In this essay, I explore the nature of this passion and how at Mt. Saint Mary I have directed it toward the betterment of our students’ preparation for their own teaching careers. I am innovative by nature and have applied my creativity to improving myself, my courses, and my program. In the attached documentation, I elaborate on the following broad points:

1. I am an experienced educator in multiple roles, ranging from teacher and administrator at both the K-12 and university context. Before coming to the Mount, I had twenty five years relevant experience, had held the rank of Associate Professor for many years, and as a Dean, was working at the equivalent of Full Professor rank for seven years. The portfolio contains complete copies of my VSPU records as well as letters from colleagues and my former Rector (University President) Valeriy Danielchuk.

2. My strength is primarily in my study of and adoption of major educational innovations, ranging from experiential education, educational technology, Montessori, and design of specialized schools. I model an ability and passion for learning that welcomes new challenges.

3. I have been able to adapt my teaching to the Mount and to apply my skills in ways that advance and strengthen the educational program, excite students in new ways, and constitute new and in-depth scholarship in my primary areas of instruction. At the Mount, I have developed and taught a significant number of new preparations at both the Undergraduate (Reading in Content Areas, General Methods of Teaching/ Adolescents, Methods of Teaching/Childhood, Social Interaction, Basics of Planning) and Masters Level (General Methods of Teaching/Childhood, Reading in Content Areas/adolescence, Curriculum Planning and Development, Nature of School and Society). I have also quickly mastered areas of new technological application not available to me in Russia, including on-line teaching through WebCT, webquesting and use of web pages and am mentoring colleagues in the use of these technologies.

4. I bring a solid record of pedagogical scholarship in both traditional and applied modes. I have found new avenues for this scholarship, and have developed major new scholarly initiatives.

5. My professional development is evident in my prodigious course development, my mastery of technology and other emerging pedagogical tools, as well as my scholarship. It is also seen in my work in new areas of concern, my attendance and participation in diverse conferences, and in my mode of continual lifetime learning.

6. My service to the Mount is evident in my work in the educational program on our NCATE certification and program integration and on committees of the college as a whole.

In sum, I more than meet the qualifications as set forth in the guidelines for associate professor.
Moreover, my work closely embodies the same themes as Mount St. Mary’s mission, based as it is on four core propositions.

7. To help students “find their roles in an ever-changing cultural, intellectual, psychological and social climate.”

As an educator, I have had the rare opportunities to innovate experimental schools to meet social needs and highlight specific student roles. I personally introduced the Montessori method to the Volgograd region, helping to create and sustain two Montessori schools. I was also involved in other projects in innovative education, including the design, establishment and staff training for an Ecological Gymnasium, as well as contributions to creating an Aesthetic Gymnasium, Agricultural Gymnasium and the Law Gymnasium. I also developed a program in English language teaching for rural areas of Volgograd region.

I also attained extensive experience in cross-cultural learning as an educational tool. At VSPU, I was a leader in establishing international exchanges with Nijmegan University in Montessori training and in social work, the Character Development Program with Character Development, Inc. Texas, USA, and the exchange with Ramapo College of New Jersey in American and International Studies. And I also ran a study abroad program in England and ran summer programs in Russia in association with the American Teachers Abroad.

At the Mount, the students are not abroad, rather it is I. As a faculty member from a different nation, culture and, historically, type of society, I offer Mount Saint Mary students an opportunity and even a challenge to broaden their understanding of the world around them. I take every opportunity to share constructive differences. These help to prepare students for the fact that their own classrooms will contain children of diverse backgrounds and their communities will confront them with differences that they must respect, accept, understand and learn to work with. I believe in the inherent richness of diversity and the centrality of learning to cope with heterogeneity.

Moreover, my instruction is focused on innovative learning. Students must be capable of addressing novel situations in a manner that anticipates learning needs and involves learners. Behind my student-centered pedagogy is a concern with social learning, or the ability for institutions and society to innovate as well. Parallel to Dewey’s concern with preparing good citizens, my background puts in sharp perspective the challenge for education to make democracy work.

8. “...through the deeper probings of the major...for an approach to education that emphasizes interrelationships and ever-widening interests.”

As a learner, and thus teacher, the essence of my approach is to pull knowledge from all directions toward the question or problem at hand, to integrate this information, to explore the implications, and to reflect. In this manner, when I arrive at the trunk I am nurtured by all the roots and uplifted by all the branches. I continually plow the fruits of my own growth and learning into my courses, as is fully evident in the evolution of my syllabi in terms of design, process, and content. I am not concerned with knowing just enough to get by, but with truly understanding any topic. I have a true sense of inquiry that I wish to impart. For these reasons, I am a demanding teacher, seeking to help students reach their highest level of achievement.
As a teacher, I engage in and push my students to use critical thought. My experiential approach is all about stimulation of active learning. My course syllabi clearly state outcomes and measures of success set in detailed rubrics. I employ multiple outcome assessments in order to steer the course toward achievement of these outcomes. This approach both assures that my classes are well constructed, in and of themselves, and also models for the approach that my students must take as future teachers.

As a result, my students learn not just to act as teachers so as to simply meet the demands of standards or a subject, but to explore their subject broadly enough to motivate themselves as learners and thus engage their own students. The goal here is meta-cognitive learning, learning that peels away the skin on the surface and plumbs the full significance. I help students to reach this level of meta-cognitive thinking by asking them to continually reflect on their work, I seek to help them learn to reach. At first, Mount students resisted such efforts as too demanding, too much work, and too off the beaten path of the expectations to which they were accustomed. Now I see a transformation. In part, this transformation is in the greater clarity with which I lead students to a meta-cognitive level. In part, it is a revolution in what students who take my classes are prepared to tackle.

9. Encourage “practice in creative cooperative problem-solving, so necessary for intelligent community living in the world of tomorrow.”

Creative and cooperative problem solving is integral to all my courses, from the explicit discussion in Social Interaction to my general practice of experiential and collaborative learning throughout all of my offerings. By designing experiential components for nearly all of my learning objectives, I create an interactive context that emulates the classroom that my students will one day teach in and which renders our interaction as a “real” source of learning. In this sense, teaching entails confronting a series of problems that must be solved if the class is to succeed. These are often problems of class dynamic, not of curricular design. My students jointly analyze such situations as they arise, not just as they are listed in the syllabus. In this way, we can see problems as they actually arise, not as reduced to a textbook illustration. The problem is then subject to discourse, examination of alternative and novel approaches, and reflection.

The model of collaborative learning is also key to my approach. I seek not just discourse, but mutual learning. Just as the power of the teacher derives from his or her power as a learner, students are never more empowered than when they become teachers—sources of learning for their peers and instructor. This is an important pedagogical model for my students to emulate. As future teachers, my students must learn to resolve conflict, find creative common ground, and otherwise manage the social environment. They must learn to be leaders and participants, to understand the power of group norms, and to communicate clearly. They will be teachers, and teachers are group facilitators. I do not only teach about this topic, but it is inherent to my pedagogy, based not only upon content, but in process as well. This is vital because learning to teach requires at least as much process learning as it is content learning.

Finally, a particular emphasis of mine since childhood involves creativity. I pride myself in establishing educational settings where emergent ideas and learning occurs and where the role of the teacher is to stimulate creative thought. To me, learning is about creation, not about mere repetition of recognized facts. While it may be safe for the teacher to rely on content mastery as a learning objective, the challenge always is how to get a particular audience to that level of mastery. The good teacher is “open” to the opportunities of the situation and the needs and learning style of their audience. Thus, good teaching is a creative process. And future teachers need to learn to address the inherent uncertainty of the classroom as an opportunity for creative participation in order to know how to construct successful learning events.

10. To develop in students "the attitude that learning is a lifelong process involving ongoing acquisition of skills and knowledge, and continuing selection of and commitment to values and a value system...”

I represent a strong model of lifelong learning. My ability to adapt to new learning environments has allowed me to travel, develop collaborative programs, and even move to a new country and create a new life. It would have been professionally much safer for me to stay in Russia and to operate in a society and academic realm that I knew like my skin. But I love challenges and always rise to them.

Over my time at the Mount, my course assignments have routinely changed, often at the last minute, leaving me to prepare a whole new course under extreme pressure. In my shoes, many learners would have been discouraged at the need to work late into the night to gain mastery. For me, each new course was a novel learning challenge that allowed me to get a better handle on the whole of our whole curriculum. I can now contribute my insights about how that curriculum fits together, how it might be streamlined here and augmented there, how it is best sequenced, precisely because I have taught much of it in a very short time.

I believe that I can teach anything and teach it well. At Ramapo, I suddenly became a teacher of Russian when I am trained as a teacher of English. But this simply meant reading the manual backwards. Language instruction is universal. And I taught literature, ranging from Shakespeare to Chekov’s plays, and Russian Literature and Culture. None of these courses are “my field.” But I can promise that they were superb courses.

If lifetime learning is my nature, the issue of values development has been central to my work since my dissertation, on this topic. When I was Dean of the VSPU School of Foreign Languages, one of the key partnerships I developed was with Character Development International, which has now funded for more than a decade a VSPU Institute which runs student programs and professional conferences on this topic. Values development remains a particular interest of mine. It is also a generic concern in teaching because so much of what the teacher does demonstrates their underlying values. It is only by self awareness that the teacher has a necessary handle on this issue.