"All happy families are alike," announces Tolstoy in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, and while the same certainly could not be said of all good teachers, I believe that certain essential qualities (which I shall discuss further below) are discernible in all good teaching:

1. The students are active, engaged, and empowered, never passive or bored.
2. The teacher plays to his or her own strengths, rather than adopting a pose (e.g. of infallibility, or excessive familiarity) that rings false with students.
3. The students feel that their work, their ideas, and their voices matter.
4. The students feel safe with their teacher in two ways:
   • they believe that their input will be respected, and that their mistakes will not be held against them but treated as learning opportunities.
   • they believe that their teacher is qualified, both as a leader and as an authority on the learning process and the material to be covered.
5. As a result of the above, the students in the class enjoy a sense of intellectual community and collective inquiry that stimulates them to produce their best work and makes the class feel like an enterprise, rather than an exercise.

The students are active, engaged, and empowered, never passive or bored. Based on my experiences both as a teacher and as a learner, I believe that students learn best when they play an active role in their own education; that is to say, they absorb knowledge more efficiently and, what is more important, gain their intellectual independence through active engagement rather than passive reception. I have therefore made it a priority, both in my language and in my literature classrooms, to create an environment that welcomes students' input, encourages them to take risks and accept constructive feedback, and offers a dynamic, collaborative dialogue rather than a one-way transmission of knowledge from me to them. This pedagogical style has long been the accepted norm in language teaching, where vigorous student participation is recognized as the most effective means of acquiring oral proficiency, and the fear of embarrassment as the most formidable barrier to such participation. It is my firm belief that the same basic principles hold true in a literature course, where the students are learning the language of literary analysis and critical inquiry, and the stakes are even higher, since the culture they are learning to describe--and participate in--is their own.

To ensure that my students are actively engaged from the very beginning of every class, I start by turning over the conversation to them. In language classes, I begin--starting on the very first day of Russian I--with what I privately call "shock drills," exercises in which students are required to perform a specific function (such as introducing themselves, playing "Simon Says," or answering questions based on the previous day's exercises) completely in Russian, in response to my Russian and (if necessary) pantomimic cues. In literature classes, I begin by asking the most provocative question I can think of--one on which even the most diffident student cannot help but have an opinion--and develop the class discussion from there, following a combination of student inclination and my own gentle guidance toward important passages and promising lines of inquiry. Students have commented that although the discussions are non-linear, and everyone is given a chance to express his or her opinion, they generally feel at the end of the class that the material covered was comparable to what they could have gleaned from a lecture.

The teacher plays to his or her own strengths, rather than adopting a pose that rings false with students. I strongly believe that students respect a teacher who strikes them as genuine, and can see through common forms of pretence (such as the old chestnut, "That wasn't really a mistake--I was just testing you"). A teacher who demonstrates respect for her students by representing herself honestly stands a good chance of earning the same respect in return, and of eliciting a similarly honest effort from students in their coursework. At such an early stage in my academic career, I can hardly hope to project the gravitas of a scholar with several decades of experience in my field. Instead, I have capitalized upon my other assets: energy, passion, a knack for collegiality, and the willingness (and agility) to undermine my own dignity in the pursuit of pedagogical goals (most good language teachers recognize the pedagogical value of occasional clowning). I fully expect that my teaching style will change and ripen as I gain in age and experience, and I look forward to the constant adaptation--to my own to my own abilities and energies as well as to the needs of my students--that underlies all good teaching.

The students feel safe with their teacher. An important advantage of my collegial teaching style is that it lowers what Stephen Krashen has called students' "affective filter," and increases their willingness to risk embarrassment for the potential rewards of pushing their own intellectual limits. I am aware that I demand a great deal of my students in this regard--I stress in-class and online participation heavily in their final grades, and subject their papers to detailed critiques--and I actively strive to make my classroom a sympathetic environment in which they feel emboldened to take such intellectual risks. In language classes, where there are clear right and wrong answers, mistakes must be corrected, but I take care to do so in a constructive manner, prompting rather than censuring, treating mistakes as puzzles the whole class can help to solve, and never interrupting an ambitious sentence in mid-flight. In literature classes, I encourage students not only to challenge one another's arguments and to marshal textual evidence in support of their own, but also to grapple messily with new ideas, helping each other develop inchoate theories and rudimentary insights into full-fledged analysis.

In addition to making the classroom as inviting and non-threatening as possible, I do my best to make myself accessible and approachable, and to bridge the gap between my students and a scholarly establishment they often perceive as rarified and remote. I encourage my students to see me as a resource whose expertise and guidance can be both sought and put to use beyond the classroom walls, and to see other faculty in the same way; I actively combat the diffidence that prevents students from developing relationships with faculty who could otherwise help them both intellectually and professionally (e.g., by writing recommendations for a graduate school application).

Students in the class enjoy a sense of intellectual community and collective inquiry. In all my teaching, I have striven to create among my students a sense of intellectual community that not only increases their comfort level in the class, but also dignifies their efforts as contributions to a shared intellectual enterprise, rather than sterile exercises in self-justification. Most notably, I have designed and implemented a course website and online discussion boards that allowed my students to express ideas they omitted in the class discussion, to interact on an informal but still academic plane, and to become familiar with each others' names, perspectives, and intellectual styles much more rapidly than would otherwise have been possible (if it even occurred at all). Many have reported that the resulting sense of collaboration with their classmates was unique in their college experience. My efforts have further been rewarded by the increased ease and authority with which my students participate in class discussions, allowing me to mediate rather than dictate their analysis of the works discussed, and to demand more from them both in class and on paper. I will certainly continue to develop teaching strategies that take advantage of students' attraction to technology and virtual communities, and to share my more successful ideas with colleagues.

Above all, I believe that language and literature classes share the potential to open students' minds to foreign cultures and ideas, while simultaneously giving them a vantage point from which to reflect on their own. In the process, they may discover familiar concepts in what at first appeared foreign, and vice versa. These paired skills--of discerning universality on the one hand, and particularity on the other--are, I believe, among the most important habits of mind we can impart to our students. They also hold the key to the future of our field. I am deeply committed to attracting students to Russian language and literature, not only by demystifying them through comparative course offerings and an accessible, collegial teaching approach, but also by bringing to life the thrill of the unfamiliar, and the oddly reflexive intellectual rewards to be gained from immersing oneself in a foreign culture.

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