Teaching

Teaching statement

In my view, most undergraduate philosophy classes have three primary goals. The first goal is to introduce students to a sample of important philosophical ideas and problems. The second goal is to help students develop their ability to think about philosophical ideas and problems in a creative and analytical way. And the third goal is to help students develop their speaking and writing skills.

In my teaching, I prefer to use a mix of contemporary readings and readings from the history of philosophy, and I will also use readings from outside of philosophy when that is appropriate. My overarching goal is to introduce my students to a broad range of perspectives, and I particularly like to highlight commonalities between different views.

One type of exercise that I often give students in order to help them develop their ability to do philosophical analysis is argument reconstruction. Typically, I will give the students a paragraph from one of the week’s readings that contains a key argument, and I will ask the students to reconstruct the argument in premise-conclusion form in such a way that the premises logically entail the conclusion. I explain to the students that a premise-conclusion reconstruction is successful if it manages to (1) succinctly isolate the major contentions in the argument, (2) make explicit whatever hidden assumptions the author has left implicit in the prose, and (3) give a formulation of the argument that is maximally fair to the author and ideally even stronger than the author’s original formulation. Argument reconstruction is an art – a difficult art – so this is an exercise that I give the students several times throughout the semester.

In order to help the students become more conscious of their writing, I use grading rubrics that place an emphasis on writing quality. I also always dedicate time during the semester to going over how philosophy papers ought to be written, and I particularly emphasize the importance of argumentative depth—it is much better to discuss one argument in depth than to discuss four arguments superficially. One exercise I have found to be especially helpful in this context is to give students a sample paper and then ask them to map out (in the form of a simplified Toulmin diagram) the paper’s argumentative structure while answering the following questions: what is the author’s main thesis? What is the main argument that the author uses to support the thesis? What are the premises in the argument and how are they defended? What are the main objections and what are the author’s responses?

To enable students to consciously practice their writing skills, I generally give students the option of rewriting one of their papers. In order for this exercise to be productive, I have to spend a lot of time giving the students feedback on their papers, but in my opinion the effort is worth it. Since I think it’s important that students get a lot of opportunities to practice their writing skills, I also typically require weekly reading responses. Requiring weekly reading responses has the added benefit of forcing the students to engage with the class material every week, and I also use the reading responses to guide my lesson planning.

In class, I use a mix of lecturing, individual exercises, and group work. Many Singaporean students are hesitant to speak up in class, but they tend to be willing to discuss in smaller groups, so I often divide the class into smaller groups when I want them to debate an issue. Often, I will ask each group to share the main points of agreement and disagreement reached during discussion, and since I want all students to have the chance to practice public speaking, I will sometimes require that each person from every group say something.

In general, the academic skills that really matter, both in philosophy and in life in general – such as writing well, communicating well, and reasoning well – all take a long time to develop, and the best any one instructor can do is to assess each student’s ability and then help the student improve, if only incrementally. I design all my classes with this in mind.