Welcome to my class!

It was on one fine morning of my summer vacation, I was taking a stroll with my grandmother. We had just walked a short distance and were taken aback by a stranger, a young gentleman who walked up to us with uncertainty on his face and then suddenly exclaimed with folded hands, “Teacher Namaste!” He then went on to touch her feet and say how she, who was his primary teacher, had played a great role in inspiring him, had even furtively paid his tuition fees, because of which he had now established himself, had a decent job and a family. This incident heartened me and I suddenly had this new found reverence for the noble profession of teaching. I grew up watching my grandmother, my maternal aunts touching the hearts and minds of children, and this always fascinated me from a very young age.

When I completed my postgraduate studies and joined to work with my alma mater to render my services as an academician and a teacher, my perspective about the responsibilities of a teacher were limited to the notion of teaching being primarily about curriculum and usage of traditional pedagogies to deliver it. With a handful years of teaching experience, I have now come to realize that teaching is much more than delivering a course in a classroom, it comes with a great sense of responsibility towards and a privilege of inspiring young minds and touching the souls of individuals who can steer the nation to greater heights. It didn’t take me long to realize that being a teacher was equivalent to possessing a superpower!

Engineering education is still predominantly grade-oriented, focusing majorly on theoretical fundamentals. Education is delivered in a cookbook approach, where all learners are mandated to think along the same lines and creative thinking is not rewarded. As an educator, I feel engineering education in India should strive to promote design and innovative thinking, decision making, and critical analysis. An engineer should also strive to abide by ethics, and have the ability to empathize with and design solutions for local, national and global needs.

Teaching has been equally challenging because there has always been a mandate to incubate the habit of lifelong learning and to cultivate the proficiency of handling a group of students with diverse learning abilities. A few of them like the traditional chalk and talk, a few others have been visual learners and others were impacted greatly by peer learning groups. A few of my students were quick in grasping a new concept, while others required hand holding. Managing this learner diversity within a class with limited time, providing enough challenge to the proactive and independent learners and building confidence in the slow learners has always been challenging to me as a teacher.

To fulfill this vision as an educator, I accommodate brainstorming sessions that allow learners to identify pain points, arrive at different solutions and evaluate feasibility. My classroom discussions are based on the golden rule - “no answer can be wrong answer”. This encourages my learners to make mistakes in the process, share ideas/ mistakes with peers, which in turn boosts their confidence. I take time to discuss assignment design and assessment/evaluation with my colleagues. I encourage students to give constructive feedback focusing on areas of course content, delivery and evaluation that need improvement.

The learner feedback and course outcomes achieved provide positive indication for the effort invested. However, my goal is to use assessment as an improvement tool rather than just to comply with basic requirement. I plan to incorporate active learning techniques effectively and assess my learners fairly. I aim to design assignments that require the learner to provide a personal outlook to a problem. Encouraging collaborative projects which build confidence in learners and cooperative activities in which they have individual and well as group accountability are some of the measures I intend to initiate for better learner engagement.

My two main focus areas to grow as an educator are to improvise course delivery by engaging students in the learning process and research engagement to be a quality professional. In order to improve content delivery and student engagement, I intend to promote learning on to go, encourage learners to interact with their peers, and promote self-learning wherever possible, better utilization of classroom time by promoting flip classrooms and accommodating as many learning styles as possible in my content delivery.

One of the most interesting aspects of teaching is that you constantly learn not just technology but people. The students make the soul of my classroom and their enthusiasm and liveliness keeps me on my toes and motivates me to strive to achieve much more than I ever thought I could. They taught me the importance of inculcating people skills and maintaining a healthy rapport with a fraternity belonging to the next generation. They helped me understand that, developing a positive relationship with them, my students, required me to step down from my pedestal as a teacher, see from their perspective, provide them with constructive and sensitized feedback and also be agile. I can confidently say that this profession has made me a patient listener, and a better human .

My immediate goals for this year are:

1. Participating in training programs that strongly support my aspirations as an educator.
2. Interactions with local organizations/ industry to generate need statements with an objective of encouraging design thinking among the learners.
3. Research engagement and continuous learning (MOOCs and online courses/specializations) in focus areas that fit well in the institution’s /department’s/personal action plan.
4. Membership in professional bodies like IEEE, CSI etc. to establish valuable connections with fellow professionals and professional growth.

My long term goals are:

1. Connecting with industrialists to design curriculum for value added courses.
2. Upgrading my educational qualification by registering for a PhD programme.
3. Aspire to lead and shoulder important responsibilities as I progress in my profession as an educator.