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Thanks for visiting Mastering Education, the personal journey of Peter Rod as I pursue the Professional Masters of Education graduate degree from Queen’s University. This website will be a home for my digital artifacts, my thoughts, my ideas and the ideas of many other excellent and respected educators and colleagues. I hope you come along with me for a small part of this exciting adventure!

My teaching philosophy:

All of the teachers from elementary school through university who have impacted my teaching methods today were passionate about their material and went to great lengths to respect each student as an individual learner with unique needs and skills. These teachers were often also my favourites as I felt both supported and challenged in their classes and I realize now they were using innovative teaching techniques to push my learning to another level. They made learning fun and whenever possible connected the learning to other aspects of my life making it more real, relevant, and important to me. They showed me that success was possible if I did the work. Because of their commitment and skill, today I value the critical role that student validation, group work, hands-on learning, reflection, discussion, and creativity have on students’ ability to respect and enjoy the process of learning.

Today, as a professor of wine programs at a small community college in southern Ontario, I have the privilege of working with hundreds of students of many ages from several countries with diverse cultural and professional backgrounds, abilities, and motivations. Over the five years I’ve taught full-time and the many years of part-time teaching before that, the one core value that has remained constant is demonstrating a passion for the material and the process. More than any other, the comment I hear from past and present students is how passionate I am about wine and teaching about wine. This is a vitally important part of the learning environment I try to create because this passion is contagious and it can directly connect the material to their future professional and personal lives. Without student engagement in the material and the process, it can be very difficult for them to take the kind of initiative in the level of individual inquiry and reflection needed for deep learning to take place. With all the pressures students face, it’s very easy for them to “zone out” in or skip class outright, so creating a lively, active, personalized and, whenever possible, fun learning environment is vital. A little humour goes a long way too!
I want to create classrooms where students are excited to participate, are engaged and curious, and where they feel safe and supported knowing they can trust their instructor to guide them down the sometimes rocky path of learning. Every student is living a different story and it’s important that each one’s story be respected and shared when appropriate. By encouraging students to share their story with their classmates in a constructive and relevant manner, we create a classroom where each student feels they are an important part of the process and where diversity is celebrated. During my wine and food pairing classes, I encourage each student to provide a recipe from their home country to incorporate into the group wine pairing exercises. Each student is given an opportunity to speak briefly to the entire class about the recipe’s origins and ingredients after which time they rejoin group members to explore appropriate wine pairings. These students are given an opportunity to teach, which goes a long way towards deeper learning.

Finally for real engagement to take place, students must feel they can trust their professors. We can’t, however, provide everything on a silver platter so they must also take ownership of their own learning. Helping students to manage their time, find efficient and effective ways to study, and showing compassion and flexibility when needed while respecting valuable learning outcomes and standards, goes a long way to earning this trust. A flipped classroom approach, when designed successfully, allows students to learn the material virtually at their own pace and opens up the face-to-face time in class to debate, discuss, and reflect on the material. It’s also important to provide opportunities for personal one-on-one time for students with office hours and ensure they receive timely and genuinely formative feedback on their work. This combined with giving value to their input during class time goes a long way to enriching the student-teacher relationship. Students must know that they can be successful if they invest in the process of learning. It’s very important that their teachers remind them of this and support them in whatever ways possible.