Teaching Reflections

Teaching Reflections Part 1: what do we mean by ''quality in teaching'' and ''What make us sit down, listen and learn?''

My academic field is applied and engineering mathematics and simulation techniques, and with this short essay I am aiming to put on paper my thoughts about learning and teaching with the hope to ameliorate my teaching practices and my understanding of the ways to communicate the knowledge that I have acquired over the years. Owning to the complexity of the teaching and learning theories and my current understanding of their theoretical base, here I decided to focus on two basic questions that rose during the past few weeks that, I feel, are substantial in helping me to achieve a higher intellectual maturity in my teaching strategies. Also, I will provide my personal views as answers to them, limiting possible terminologies that could derail my aim to stay in the practical and personal side of the matter.

Then, I will give an epigrammatic description of the inherent parameters that affect my teaching, my vision/wish for a future lecturing pattern in the field of natural sciences and my concerns related to teaching as an academic.

Beginning my reflections with the questions, what do we mean by ''quality in teaching'' and ''What make us sit down, listen and learn?''. I believe that answering these questions is important in order to determine the content and the way that a lecture (or a course) has to be designed, and how to communicate the knowledge and interact with the students.

Based on my experience and after reading Chapter 2 by Tennant, often the standard answer, in the first question, is just a quantified assessment based on performance rate, evaluation procedures and standardized surveys. But the question how quality can be achieved is often neglected. My point of view is that teaching indeed has to provide high technical knowledge (know-how and deep understanding) to the students, but also to elicit the social awareness that will help them to find their place in the world, protect their rights and thus to be politically active citizens (with the broad meaning). For me a teacher in mathematics or engineering has fulfilled part of his/her job if he/she has students that can interpret for example the TV news: {\it a COVID detection test has 99\% success and at the moment 1\% of the population is infected}. (Briefly this means that if a random person undertakes the test then there is 50\% chance for a true positive result i.e. there is 0.5 probability that somebody is infected if his/her test result is positive. This conclusion comes easily for Bayes' formula). Owning the lecturing material can help us as citizens to act accordingly. On the other hand, we need to perceive that this material is not panacea and therefore, we should not to take it always as dogmatically correct. Later in my text, I will try briefly to describe how I envision that critical thinking, deep understanding and social awareness can be achieved during lecturing.

Following now the second question that I was very interested to elaborate on, I believe that adults learn by persevering effort (in order to keep alive their attention) stemming from personal motivation (e.g. I have to get my degree or I want to learn something in my life) or by curiosity and excitement (which possibly turns on the nucleus basalis of our brain) that allows us to focus our attention effortlessly (based on Dr. Merzenich). Therefore, I am concluding that both creativity, inspiration and vision are important aspects that we need to instil to our students during the lecturing.

Going now a little bit back to my current teaching practices, I could briefly say that my teaching choices (e.g. chalk and talk or PowerPoint) depended on the following parameters:

a) the number of the students that I have to teach

b) the design of the unit and its content/type

c) the available resources/infrastructures and services and the university policy (i.e. how much freedom we have as lecturers to experiment) and d) the time that I can devote to the students and the lecture. All the previous parameters influence to a large extend my abilities to perform and act in order to deliver, expand and enjoy my lecture.

In an ideal world, I would like to provide a holistic type of lecture series in the spirit of my answers. What I mean with a holistic is to provide my students with the tools to cope with the labour market and help them be emancipated. To do that, I would like to run a course where I could invite other lecturers, people from the industry or independant organisations to give their insight onto the theoretical material of the unit e.g. how an engine has to be modified in order to work in reality and what are its environmental impacts. I strongly believe that ''Not Only Does the Brain Shape Culture, Culture Shapes the Brain '', so we need to make sure that our students have contact with the real world and not only with our sterilized offices.

Also, organising debates between the lecturers (who have different point of views) with student's Q/A or elevator pitches that students could debate their points of view, would be something that I would really like to include. In general, I feel that the social and humanistic aspects are very substantial and utterly absent in natural sciences at least in the undergraduate level.

Returning to the present reality, my main concern nowadays is that we often make the mistake to instruct the students to search and read the answers instead of ''reinventing'' them (here I use the word invent based on Piaget's aspect of Chapter 1 by Stewart). Everyone find much easier to use a search engine to solve ones problem but from my own experience this can lead to dangerous outcomes. As an example, I remember a friend who went to a job interview and one of the main questions was to solve a quadratic equation. My friend blacked out... he could not remember the formula (which of course is absolutely normal). I am prone to believe that if my friend had understood how the formula was derived, everything would have turned out differently. Unfortunately, the interview was a disaster.

Due to the lack of time, expertise or just to ease our effort, we often rely on presentations full of equations and concepts that the students have to receive within 45 minutes of lecturing. Additionally, our students are reinforced to believe that by memorizing they can save time and personal effort, pass the course which often is their only aim. But this type of lecturing has only short-term benefits. Fragmented knowledge and information is one of our pathogenicities today.

I think the previous phenomenon has two-fold reasoning.

First, the students want to learn how to build ''a skyscaper'' when they do not know how to build a ''small summer cottage''. It is extremely difficult to change this attitude and persuade them that we need to start from the foundation. Second, our curriculum (at least in Engineering) is overloaded with many technical aspects and methods that we cover very superficially. For instance, we have to give the Fourier series formulae in 2 slides but nobody understand why it is useful, where we can apply it and how Fourier came up with it. We, the teachers, often struggle to find these answers (even for our personal interest) because nobody ever devoted time to discuss them with us when we were students. Thus, we live in a vicious circle. If one perceives these answers then all the other similar methods (e.g. wavelets etc) follow naturally. Then, our students could understand also them without much effort.

Closing my short reflection essay, based on my current experience both as a teacher and a student unfortunately I can identify that most of the time I have come across with behaviouristic and a little bit of constructivist approaches to teach.

The students are more or less passive receivers of cumulative information (which actually I am pretty sure many times they cannot fully absorb). After that, essays and assignments are given resulting in extra stress especially if the students have not developed confidence in the topic. This needs to change progressively. An open and continuous discussion in the academic community of the natural sciences is essential in order to understand and prioritise what we need to teach and how we can make sure that our students build a good foundation that will allow them later to learn more complicated concepts painlessly by themselves having us as supporters and not as instructors.