 How do you reflect on your teaching and how do you use those reflections to inform your course design? I had a wonderful teacher at the University of Iowa when I was a graduate student there and her name was Houston Deal and she was a Renaissance teacher that was her field. But she also was really instrumental in helping a lot of graduate students who were beginning to teach think about teaching, think about what a teacher does when you teach. And I thought I'd give several of these presentations on teaching and really what they were on was the questions you ask yourself as a teacher or that you should be asking yourself as a teacher. And there were all the questions that had to do with yourself in terms of who you were, how you communicated to others or how you wanted to in the class, how you wanted to present yourself, what your goals were, what you were thinking. There were all these questions about students, about who did you think they were and did you think they were actually quite smart and you just had help them, did you think they were not smart at all and that you had to enlighten them? I mean that all those assumptions you made about students affected how you taught and what you taught. But a whole series of these questions and she would write them out too and give them up. And then if you're teaching for her like literary texts then there's all these questions about texts themselves and what do you, I mean she would ask very fundamental questions like why are we sitting in the class having a discussion on a book? And you might think well that's what we do, I mean that's a valuable thing to do but asking the question makes you think about what is the value or what are the values if there may be more than that. And sometimes what you realize is that you ask the question you don't know as a teacher I think, like why have I always done this and people have always done this thing and why is it important? I'm not sure. So it enabled the process of thinking about such things, thinking about very basic things that you do and asking and questioning them and always questioning them. And I think that I maybe already had a little of that nature myself that I'm a very reflective questioning person. I ask questions about things but the Houston Deal just encouraged that and that was when I first started teaching and so I think that influenced my teaching a lot. So I think that reflection is an essential part of what I do. I mean I think of teaching as reflection that every day I teach, like the class I teach you know there's a way in which you kind of think over that class what happened and what were the moments that you were glad happened, what didn't happen that you wanted to, you know when somehow the discussion just didn't seem to go anywhere. Why was that? Was that the students? Was it your own preparation? Was it just the day? It was a strange day and everyone felt weird when they came to the class. I mean sometimes you don't know the answer but you try to reflect and try to think about well how can I prepare it and make it better the next time. It's also something what's interesting about being a Fairhaven College is I think that one of the things that makes Fairhaven distinctive or gives us some of the qualities that Fairhaven has is that reflection is at the center of everything we do. That is because we don't give letter grades to students what we ask them to do is do self-reflection, self-evaluation, self-analysis of their own work. So we encourage that and I think the other thing about being a Fairhaven that encourages me to reflect is that because I'm not in a specific department or discipline anymore because my colleagues are trained in many different ways and I interact with them and I teach with them and they might be in the field of history or psychology or science and here I am interacting with them in certain ways and we've been trained very differently. It means that some of the assumptions that come out of my discipline don't always hold water with everyone. I mean they don't, everybody doesn't assume those things and so it actually challenges very basic things just being around people who think differently.