My teaching philosophy revolves around student-centered active learning, emphasizing student engagement, critical thinking, and active participation. I strongly believe that passively listening to course content being presented by the instructor promotes surface-level learning and poor knowledge retention. On the other hand, active learning can create a positive and effective learning environment, increase comprehension of fundamental concepts, and promote communication skills and deep learning. I regularly implement active learning techniques in my classroom like 'muddiest point', online polls using 'Mentimeter', game-based learning using 'Kahoot', and small-group cooperative learning. In previous semesters, I have incorporated in-class activities involving questions at various Bloom's Taxonomy levels (like 'Understand', 'Analyze', and 'Evaluate') that are often not typically a part of undergraduate course assessments. These activities were designed to be implemented in small groups of 2-4 students seated at each table in a technologically-enriched classroom. The graduate teaching assistant and I would walk around the classroom during these activities to answer any clarifying questions. The goal of these assessments was to encourage students to discuss various approaches of thinking about a problem and better understand the underlying concepts through back and forth of ideas.
In the future, in an attempt to further increase student engagement and overall class experience, I am interested in implementing more active learning strategies (rooted in constructivist learning theory), such as purposeful pause for reflection and peer discussion, collaborative concept maps, small-group think-aloud problem solving, etc. I am also interested in exploring new collaborative digital tools (like Miro or Padlet discussion boards) that would enhance the classroom experience and embedding them in the course assignments by following learning design principles highlighted in the technology acceptance model. While I believe that traditional lecturing has its benefits and should not be completely overhauled, my long-term goal is to make my classroom a welcoming, interactive environment where the instructor is a 'guide on the side' and the students are creating new knowledge through active involvement and peer-to-peer interactions.