Students Use Teaching in Learning Center to Propel Careers in Education

The student support network at Rockhurst is strong and is made stronger by student leaders who serve as tutors or supplemental instruction (SI) leaders in the Aylward-Dunn Learning Center.

The service isn’t just for the student receiving the extra instruction, however. Many tutors and SI leaders go on to pursue careers in education – several deciding on this path, or a new direction, after working in the Learning Center.

Numerous students use the practical learning that teaching in the Learning Center offers to propel and strengthen their careers.

Ani Haroian graduated from Rockhurst in 2016. She’s currently a Spanish and Secondary Education teacher at St. Teresa’s Academy in Kansas City. That St. Louis native is also enrolled in the M.A. program at Saint Louis University for Spanish.

Haroian worked in the Learning Center as a Spanish and Communication tutor when she was a junior and senior.

“As a freshman in the Spanish language program at Rockhurst, students were required to have one 15-minute conversation in Spanish per week with a Learning Center tutor,” she said. “I grew to look forward to these conversations as a critical part of the improvement in my conversational skills. After studying abroad in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, I received the opportunity to conduct these conversations in the Learning Center and help students grow in their own conversation skills, which was very rewarding.”

The experience helped equip her with additional practical skills to be an educator.

“My role in the Learning Center prepared me for being a Spanish teacher as it taught me patience and reminded me of the joy of being a lifelong learner,” she said. “I looked forward to seeing improvements in students' speaking levels each week, and that is a joy I experience in my own Spanish classes today.” 

Jack Alsbach (pictured, left) is a 2019 Rockhurst graduate from Marshall, Missouri, who studied Secondary Education and Mathematics. He served as an SI leader for Calculus and as a tutor from August 2017 to December 2018, tutoring Pre-Calc, Calc 1-3, Differential Equations, Probability and Statistics, and Philosophy.

Alsbach worked as director of technology and dean of St. John Paul II Community at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic High School in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, until September 2021. He is now a team lead at Complete Technology Services.

“My education classes, I found, focused a lot on educational philosophy and principles, as well as specifics about working in a school, addressing complicated situations, best practices, curriculum, etc.,” he said. “I learned the most about actually taking knowledge from my brain and placing it into someone else’s from tutoring and student teaching (FYI: The answer is to use interesting examples, explain several different ways, and then the student needs to practice-practice-practice - at least for Math!).”

For Alsbach, he used the opportunity to work with his fellow students to help them in their career journey, too.

“Camryn Keaton (pictured, right) was in my SI and she was really gifted at Calculus,” he said. “She was pretty much just coming to SI for fun (had a near-perfect grade in the class). She was going to be an elementary school teacher and I encouraged her to explore a double major or a minor in Math, and to consider Secondary Ed since she had so much raw talent for Mathematics. She ended up changing majors to Secondary Ed and Math, and I’m really proud of her for having the courage to take that uncertain step.”

Keaton graduated in 2021 and is pursuing a master’s while teaching in the Saint Louis University Billiken Teacher Corps program.

Seán Thomas Kane was part of the Rockhurst Class of 2015, graduating with a B.A. in History and Theology with minors in French and Philosophy. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University in Upstate New York.

Originally from Wheaton, Illinois, Kane arrived at Rockhurst via Kansas City, Kansas. He worked as a tutor from January 2013 to May 2015 in French, History, Philosophy, Communication, Political Science, and Writing.

“I really enjoyed working as a tutor in the Learning Center,” Kane said. “It was my first taste of teaching and also one of the first times that I actually felt like I was making a difference in other people’s lives. I’m interested in too many things to look into on a given day and the tutoring job really helped focus my attention on education as a career. Nearly all of the jobs I’ve held since have been in education, whether as an English Literacy teacher with an educational nonprofit in London while I was working on my first M.A., or as a T.A. during my second M.A. and now my doctoral studies.”

Tutoring in so many subjects helped Kane gain flexibility in his teaching, learning how to customize lessons for individual students or classes.

“Rockhurst’s curriculum really helped prepare me to be a critical thinker and to provide a perspective to my students and my colleagues that is different from their own,” he said. “Equally at Rockhurst, I learned to listen to others and take the best ideas they propose to change my own way of doing things, not just as an educator but more broadly as a person.”