Teaching Methods (Informal Ideas)

A few ideas that I use to shape my classroom time:

I believe in an interactive classroom. To this end, I employ many different methods to engage students in the learning process. In particular, I strive to incorporate practice problems which the students perform in class into the majority of my class sessions. I also regularly do in-class projects, group work, and think-pair-shares.

I really like having more interaction with student questions/issues and such, and like to see students collaborating on homework etc. While many electronic management systems provide a way of doing this, I was introduced to a FAR better site: www.piazza.com !! I started using it Spring 2012 for my Statistics class and it is fantastic. It has made a significant impact just during that single course in my office hours and answered student questions.

I believe that (generally) assessments do not require a pause in learning, that is, projects, worksheets, and take-home quizzes where students can practice their work, and achieve deeper understanding are far more important than regular quizzes (though there is certainly value in them) and also provide excellent means of assessing student's understanding.

I'm interested in the concept of a "flipped classroom" and have experimented at different times with this technique. It's something I hope to at least partially employ in future classes.

While I understand that learning some concepts by rote or in the abstract is necessary I do not like it. Instead I strive as frequently as possible to avoid purely abstract teaching instead grounding all theorems, methods, and concepts in practical, applied problems and samples. Ideally each unit of material learned will have at least a short application project or assignment. Some samples of this can be found under my "Samples" tabs.

Feel free to leave any tips or interesting things you use in your classroom in the comment section below, I'm always interested in new ideas! -- I think I fixed this now... I hope... It isn't as obvious as it seems!