Professor Richard Puffer — Teaching Philosophy

I enjoy teaching in a atmosphere where everyone in the room is eager to help everyone else in the room expand their horizons. My goal is to facilitate engagement in the subject matter being discussed and getting everyone involved in the inquiry.

The key to making this type of classroom environment a reality is preparation. Students have to read and question and work up the nerve to ask their questions. The instructor has to find material that will both engage the students and enlighten them on the principles under discussion. In a sound bite, what I enjoy most is facilitating a collaborative learning experience where we each bring in our own 4x5 frames of reference and where we each leave with a new 5x7 and maybe even an 8x10 frame.

When it comes to the communication area it is my hope that students are participating in communication. By that I mean that I hope they are reading newspapers, local and national. I hope they are paying attention to current events through reputable news channels. As we teach communications at Coker, with a strong liberal arts base, the major is great because it allows students to keep a lot of options open. Communications is a versatile major that allows someone who is engaged to pursue opportunities from the news room to the board room with all kinds of pathways in between.

I particularly like the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell because it shows the importance of communication in a wide variety of fields and it shows how critical communication skills are to success without really mentioning much about communication. In my field, which is organizational communications, public relations and journalism, I think keeping up with busines, politics and popular culture all help build a perspective of wanting to become an excellent communicator.