Teaching Philosophy Statement

“Teaching is an art for which there is no one best approach.” A skillful educator builds good relationships with her students based on mutual respect and trust and sets the tone for a classroom community. Teaching has been the most enjoyable and rewarding part of my responsibilities. I believe that teaching is an opportunity to share the excitement of knowledge with curious minds of students. It can be challenging as finding the right pitch to capture and attract the minds of a diverse audience is a non-trivial task. Therefore, a teacher should never stop refining and fine tuning his/her teaching methods to best fit the new audience.

The keys to effective teaching are providing students with simple real-world examples, motivating them to discuss what they have learned, and providing them with opportunities to practice their knowledge. In addition to providing the students with informative and insightful lectures, the instructor should foster an environment in the classroom that promotes question and discussion opportunities. I believe that a course developed and taught is successful only if most of the materials are absorbed by the majority of students during the class sessions and reinforced by homework, study groups, and review sessions. A related aspect of my teaching style is that I recognize that on many occasions there is no right answer to a particular problem. There are numerous times in my classroom when my response to a student question is “It depends”! We then discuss, of course, what criteria should be used to select the best solution from our alternatives. I believe that it’s important to convey to students that the logical evaluation process is critical to developing good problem-solving skills. This is particularly true in my software engineering classes, where I regularly challenge my students with incompletely-specified, open-ended problems. Although many students are uncomfortable with these problems, practicing software engineers have to make decisions based on incomplete – and even incorrect information all the time. By taking this approach, I can help students hone their skills facing this kind of problem in an academic setting before they have to face them on the job.

I believe in making a classroom interactive by asking questions, encouraging discussion, using visual aids and real-world analogies is important not only in enhancing learning but also in maintaining enthusiasm. I often ask students to work together or to explain concepts to each other: in addition to the gains in conceptual understanding cited by education literature, I have personally seen how excited students can be when they are making progress on a problem. I had an opportunity to work in industry for a few years. During those years, I have been involved in numerous small scale and large scale software projects; starting as an inexperienced developer to a confident programmer. As a result, my experience in industry has provided me with a wealth of real-world examples and case studies that I have been using during my lectures to facilitate the understanding of the abstract concept using concrete examples. In addition, I believe in the use of technology as a teaching aid both during and after the class. Screencasts, which are audio-visual recordings disseminated via the course management website, were used as an added resource for students. The screencasts included lecture recordings, homework solutions, quiz and exam solutions, and mini-lectures on challenging concepts that remained unclear to students after the lecture.

Keeping the teaching requirements and materials transparent to the students is very essential. I found that the lab manuals and materials prepared for difficult topics were very useful for the students. A very effective method that I often use in my class to measure success is the One Minute Paper. I stop my class just five minutes early and ask some quick questions about my lesson such as: “Who can tell me the most crucial thing you learned today in my class?” In this way I am able to collect speedy responses from my students, either verbally or written on a piece of paper. When I assess my students, I take the opportunity to assess my own performance as well. I ask my students to give me feedback in writing (without giving their names) about my lecture content and the way it is presented so that I can evaluate myself and make the necessary changes.

To summarize, my teaching philosophy boils down to three key goals: to always challenge my students to excel and expand their capabilities; to always challenge myself to do the same in my teaching, using my computer science education research to support my improvement efforts; and to constantly explore and implement exciting new curriculum innovations.