MEET OUR FACULTY
Susan R. Rakow, Ph.D.
Clinical Assistant Professor
Coordinator of Gifted and Talented Program
College of Education and Human Services
I love to teach. That’s what I do and that’s who I am. Online learning provides a relatively new way of approaching education and as a teacher I want to figure out how to be good at it. Most people who are teaching online care about their subject matter and are excited that there are new tools out there that can help them better educate their students. And they should embrace those new technologies and move forward with them. It’s not easy but there is so much support here at Cleveland State for online learning, both for faculty and for students that people can do it.
I am hoping to develop teachers who will change the world. That’s what I want. I worked out how to do that for thirty years prior and now I am working at cultivating the next generation of teachers who will help make our world better, make our schools better and make sure that every child is learning at his or her maximum potential. In the gifted program, this means helping to cultivate teachers who understand a previously neglected group of children.
One theory of teaching is called constructivism. It says students create knowledge and learn by constructing it based on their prior experiences and what they know. To me that happens in collaboration with an expert adult in the field. And to do that you have to have a relationship with a student. To hear how my students are building knowledge, questioning their beliefs and dispelling their misconceptions helps me get to know them. And so that relationship between the teacher and the student allows for the correction of the misconceptions and for the building of new knowledge.
Teaching online has forced me to be more organized and more forcefully examine critical outcomes. It’s important to know whether students have mastered the content and are ready to move on to the next thing. One of my main responsibilities as the Coordinator of the Gifted and Talented program is to think thoroughly about the connections among the courses in the online program. This in particular has allowed me to remove a lot of content redundancy because I had to think through whole courses completely and make sure that they flowed in a programmatic way. I also feel excited about having learned new tools.
The course I teach allows for a lot of student choice. And in fact, all the online courses in this graduate program allow for a lot of student choice. And so to that extent it allows the students to make the course meaningful for them and allows me to adjust it to meet the needs of the students. All of my courses are substantive and lead to real licenses and real degrees that apply in the real world.
