Teaching Philosophy

Dungey Teaching Philosophy

“Knowledge is only rumor until it is in the muscle” 

New Guinea proverb

A college education is more than a piece of paper. It should empower a person to develop holistically, increasing in knowledge and skills. In my andragogy, I meet my students where they are, as adults who can participate in their own education. And I invite them to join me in creative and collaborative activities which work their “mental muscle” in order to incorporate the abilities they will need for a successful, robot-proof career (Aoun 2017). My philosophy as a teacher is to facilitate students in progressing from passively accepting information, to finding the information they need, to being able to generate new knowledge.

         The scientific process is a powerful way of understanding, which has transformed our world through new knowledge over the past four hundred years. Our current students will be leaders in the 21st century, in which knowledge-driven technology will continue to develop rapidly.  Therefore, I encourage scientific thinking in all of my students through my teaching, scholarship and service activities.

Although most of my students will not become professional scientists, my primary teaching focus is to prepare all of my students for a world in which science and technology have a great impact on how people live and work. Similarly, critical thinking skills are crucial for discerning the valuable portion of the massive amount of information that our graduates will be exposed to in our culture. Finally, effective citizenship requires communication skills to tell others of the insights one has gained through understanding science and applying critical thinking.

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

Plutarch

Perhaps this is a typical pathway for an educator, but my initial focus in my teaching was on content delivery (filling the mind). Soon I realized that the most important element to improve student learning is the student’s motivation (the fire). So I began to adopt methods for engaging the students in the classroom (providing kindling). Engaged learning is when a student actively participates in his or her own learning through experiences guided/facilitated by the teacher. Cooperative learning is when students work together to master difficult material. Research has shown that when students cooperate, they retain the course content better through organizing their ideas, giving explanations, and hearing other perspectives (Stewart and Wilkerson 2000). These teaching techniques can be readily implemented in a laboratory setting, where I have designed problem-based group projects spanning multiple weeks. Inviting undergraduates to participate in my research is the ultimate expression of this process.

Although it has been challenging to incorporate engaged learning and cooperative learning in my content-heavy lectures, I have successfully used two different active-learning pedagogies: Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL, Moog and Farrell 1999) and the so-called Flipped Classroom (Bergman and Sams 2012). These methodologies are based on cognitive and constructivist learning theories, and have been proven to be effective learning tools. For each class session I post video lectures and then engage the students in concept develop through in-class worksheets. Then I utilize classroom assessment tools, such as Student Goals Evaluation and the Minute Paper (Angelo and Cross 1993) and socrative.com to collect in-class surveys for rapid analysis, so that I can present the results to the students and make changes in the course as needed.

References

Angelo, T. A. and Cross, K. P.  1993.  Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd edition.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Aoun, JE. 2017. Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Boston: MIT Press.

Bergmann, Jonathan, and Aaron Sams. 2012. Flip Your Classroom Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Moog, R. S. and Farrell, J. J. 1999.  Chemistry: A Guided Inquiry. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Stewart, J. L. and Wilkerson, V. L.  2000.  ChemConnections:  A Guide to Teaching with Modules.  New York: Wiley.