Teaching Belief/Philosophy
My fundamental teaching belief is that good teaching (the instructor side) comes with good learning (the student side). They are two sides of the same coin. In an ideal education environment, I try to achieve the following three basic related goals:
- Generate and sustain student interest.
- Maintain teaching/learning balance.
- Provide complete educational experience beyond courses.
1. Generate and sustain student interest.
I believe that "interest" is one of the most important and common driver for learning (and other activities). Generally, people will devote more time to the things they are interested in, and will be more active and proactive. In turn they experience more and learn more. However, this is also the most difficult task. Interest may be vague, dynamic, and inconsistent; and pure interest driven may not be good. It is an art to maintain a reasonable level of interest and effectively utilize it.
Some of my practices:
- Relate to the real world and current events: talking about relevant news and events, using popular short video clips from SNS, using cases or examples in daily life where students are most familiar with (they are usually more active when they are more familiar with those things), etc.
- Prepare in-class interactive guided exercises to keep students' attention.
- Put up chanllenging questions and tasks throughout the learning duration for them to earn bonus points.
2. Maintain teaching/learning balance.
Teaching and learning are interactive. A preferred teaching (and learning) environment is built on a balanced information exchange between the instructor and students. Neither instructor nor student should dominate each other. I try best to engage students in the learning process, following a Heuristic Teaching method: of or constituting an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student (more about heuristic teaching).
This means that students learn best from their own experience and effort, rather than directly from instructors. The process consists of cycles of learn-act-think. The more they think and act, the more they learn.
Rather seeing myself as a lecturer, I see myself as a/an:
- Organizer: I organize and manage learning plan by focusing on fundamental and important knowledge in a limited learning period.
- Guide: I guide and assist students in a reasonable way of thinking and doing within the teaching domain.
- Information source: I provide sources that potentially extend and expand students' understanding of the subjects.
Some of my practices:
- Problem solving oriented teaching: for example, analyze and work on typical problems to illustrate concepts and theories, and incorprate student exercises and research whenever possible.
- I especially like student research and presentation project for higher level courses, where students can explore their own interests and learn more.
- Set up SNS-like discussion boards and encourage online participation; encourage students-help-students and reward their effort.
- I try not to simply give answers; instead, I offer hints or guidance that could lead students to answers if I think they are able to get it. The process seems to take more time, with possible wrong direction and vain effort. But I often see students more satisfied once they get through and become more confident. However, be careful if students are trying to guess the answer instead of discovering it though active thinking.
- I encourage students to do some research about their questions before asking. I will often ask them: "how much do you know about this?"; "what have you done to know it?"; "why don't you do some research and report it back?". Eventually they should develop their own ways of investigating and solving problems. A better student often extends the learning into a bigger context, defining and answering his/her own questions.
3. Provide complete educational experience beyond courses.
College education (teaching) goes beyond simple aggregation of classroom or online lectures. Courses are only a part of a complete education environment that the college provides (Barr 1995). Out-of-class student engagement is one important aspect. Student organizations, specially arranged projects, blogging, student advising, managed internships, student research and external competitions: all of these are effective ways to learn and gain experience. It also helps to build up the trust between students and instructors.
Reference
Barr, Robert B., and John Tagg, From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education, Change, Vol. 27, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1995), pp. 12-25