Teaching Philosophy

What To Cover

To what end - what are your objectives as a teacher? foster critical thinking, facilitate acquisition of life-long learning skills, prepare students to function effectively in information economy, develop problem-solving skills, your role in orienting students toward discipline, where your responsibilities end and their responsibilities begin

By what means - methods, learning theory, cognitive development, mental models, resources, methods, kinds of classes

To what degree - how do you intend to measure effectiveness of objectives and methods outlined? student learning, student outcomes should reflect effort. student evaluations, assessment methods, feedback.

Why teaching?

Draft

To What End

After nearly a decade as a student, a teacher, and a professional in an engineering field, I have witnessed many of the struggles that people face when trying to understand topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). I've seen much of it come about because non-traditional learning styles clash with traditional education methods, or because different perspectives are mistaken for incompetence. Sometimes students never get the chance to apply their creativity and skills to a field because they experience these struggles right out of the gate. As a visual learner, I've experienced these struggles myself.

My aim is to teach STEM fields in a way that appeals to intuition and visual thinking, to help students to develop intuition and mental models about a subject, to be able to reason their way through subject matter. This intuitive approach can help make STEM fields more accessible to students previously marginalized in STEM fields: females, minorities, and persons with disabilities, not to mention the wide range of different thinking and learning styles that benefit from everyone having a common context and learning as much from each other as from an instructor.

By What Means

For students to absorb a subject, for them to internalize it, requires that it become more than simply a set of definitions, facts, information, and equations. The subject matter must come alive and capture the learner's attention. There are many, many ways for that to happen (it might be a graph that makes concepts "click," or tying an abstract concept into baking, or changing the parameters on a computer program), but students often lead into new fields with intuitive and visual thinking, so that they can build up their mental models and navigate unfamiliar topics. Appealing to these types of thinking when introducing new STEM topics appeals to a wide array of students with a range of learning styles.

Mental models are the fundamental building bricks of engineering. The aim of appealing to intuition and visual thinking is to develop students' abilities to build and improve their own mental models. Having an intuitive understanding of quadrature is a far more useful skill than memorizing the coefficients for Simpson's Rule. As mentioned above, there are many different ways for the subject matter to come alive. This means that instructors should use many different media for instruction - including, most importantly, facilitating discussion among students, to give them a chance to explain the concepts themselves.

No STEM education is complete without learning programming. But it isn't just because any job in STEM will require programming skills. It's because programming gives students a chance to run very complicated thought experiments: to implement assumptions, and explore the consequences. This provides a versatile and powerful tool to develop intuition for just about anything. I think of programming as the roll of duct tape you can use to fix any mental model.

To What Degree

Measuring the true effectiveness of a teaching approach can require a lot of data - enough to see the long-term effects of a teaching approach. But information about the short-term effects of a teaching approach can be just as useful. I ask for feedback frequently and incorporate it into a continual improvement of my teaching process. I ensure that issues are addressed early on. Every classroom and every group of students is different, and requires a tailored approach - and teaching students using the same canned lecture materials year after year won't do anything to lower barriers around STEM or draw in non-traditional students. Feedback is a critical part of how I teach.

Why

(Community College)

I have seen, more times than I can count, golden opportunities to spark an interest in groups underrepresented in STEM education, or in groups of kids who haven't yet decided what they want to be when they grow up, who don't yet know what is possible in their lives. The person standing in front of that group has the potential to launch each and every one of them on a trajectory toward science and engineering. And, heartbreakingly, I have seen nearly as many opportunities badly fumbled and completely blown, often by people who take for granted that a spark of interest and a connection to the topic has already happened. (Think of a scientist standing in front of a giant Tesla coil, lecturing a group of kindergartners on Ohm's Law instead of just turning the damn thing on!)

Solving the problem of lack of diversity in STEM fields isn't complicated - it just requires gentler introductions and an appeal to more universal methods of learning and thinking, like appealing to intuition and the visual part of the brain. I am passionate about sparking people's interest in STEM fields, and I want to do my part to solve this problem!

Notes Outline

Philosophy of teaching

• STEm require up front explanation of principles in myriad ways
• abstractions to tackle complicated subjects
• intuit their way around new ideas

Teaching style

• tackle complicated subjects
• distill very large body of materials into essentials
• intuitive way, visual abstractions, intuition pumps

The bigger picture

• This is about more than a "bag of tricks"
• This is about solving, one person at a time, the problem of diversity in technology
• Negative feedback loop, as get deeper into technical field, losing touch with context, fewer can follow, self-selective process
• Process of engineering education is the process of teaching students how to think critically, how to observe and analyze, how to build mental models.