Educational Philosophy

Below is an Example of Problem Based Learning Through the Engineering for People Design Challenge

"Tell me and I'll forget; Show me and I may remember; Involve me and I'll understand"  -Chinese Proverb

The core tenet in my teaching philosophy is that involving the students in their learning with authentic forward-looking assessments and learning activities is the best way to foster true understanding. To accomplish this goal, I employ Problem Based Learning (PBL) in many of my classes. To make time for PBL and deeper learning during class time I flip my lectures and scaffold the material to achieve the higher levels of learning through PBL.

To provide motivation and lay the groundwork for PBL I try to start every course, class, or module with a question that facilitates this style of learning. For example, in my ENGR1101 Introduction to Engineering and Engineering Technology class, I begin the course by introducing students to the problem we will be working on all semester. Since 2021, I have partnered with Engineers without Borders to enter my students in the Engineering for People Design Challenge. This design challenge forces students to think about engineering and computing solutions in context with details from real world locations. Throughout the course, students learn content to help them with this design challenge and it provides a motivation to interact more deeply with the course material. With this design challenge as the goal, students are eager to learn the skills. In fact, one student email provides evidence to this fact. She writes, “I also wanted to thank you for this semester's project. The reason I chose my major was to be able to help solve environmental and medical issues worldwide and one day work with Engineers Without Borders. When I read that this was our project this semester I truly felt like I was on the right track.”

An important part of PBL is to provide students support and teaching them important skills along the way. While teaching new skills, I try to make sure the courses are pleasantly frustrating (term from Jose Bowen) for students (Bowen, 2012). In other words, I try to push students to a sweet spot - a place where they stretch their limits but are not so overwhelmed that they feel hopeless. I employ scaffolding with a flipped classroom approach in all my courses, which I hope results in a course that is pleasantly frustrating. I teach programming in many of my courses, and I have found this flipped approach to work quite well. During the programming unit, I structure each class session in the following way. The students first watch a video lecture (usually less than 15 min) or read an interactive textbook outside of class time. Before attending class, the students complete an automatically graded homework online that they can take as many times as they want until they master the content. This homework could be simply multiple choice or fill in the blank questions or it could be more complex like automatically graded code such as Hacker Rank, MATLAB grader, or code in an interactive textbook. The homework is meant to be relatively easy for the students if they understand the basic concepts from the video/text. Once in class, the students then apply that concept with a harder challenge working collaboratively with their classmates and me. I tend to scaffold the in-class time by making checkpoints where they have to show that they have completed more challenging tasks in class. This allows real time feedback from me to make sure they understand the concepts and cannot get checked off until they complete it sufficiently. Then students can move on to a summative project where they apply the skills. This approach allows students to get the basic concepts out of the way independently, freeing up time for classmate and instructor support in the classroom when grappling with and applying the harder concepts apparent in PBL.

In addition to PBL enhanced by a flipped classroom, I also try to use the Socratic method as much as possible. My first formal pedagogical training was through a tutoring certification course I took when I was a group tutor as an undergraduate student. The course solidified what my experience as a tutor had taught me, that leading someone to an answer themselves by asking the right questions is a much more effective way of teaching than simply telling a student the answer. I find that using the Socratic method also helps me to connect to student’s prior knowledge and either activate what they need in the current situation or clear up any misconceptions. I strive to incorporate this strategy in my instruction. Overall, I find that my teaching philosophy keeps students engaged and motivated to be agents in their own learning which gives me a great sense of pride. Going forward, I hope to write and teach to more comprehensive course goals which include not only foundational knowledge, application, and integration, but also caring, human dimension, and learning how to learn which are essential to more significant learning as described by Fink (Fink, 2003, p. 9).

References

Bowen, J. A. (2012). Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your college classroom will improve student learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Fink, L. D. (2003). A self-directed guide to designing courses for significant learning. University of Oklahoma, 27(11), 1-33.

To see examples of my instructional accomplishments and how I deliver this philosophy please go to my Instruction ePortfolio