Teaching Philosophy

Effective teaching must be student-centric, bearing in mind that students are independent learners investing time, resources, and effort. Therefore, I encourage students to maximize their learning by expressing their creativity within the scope of course objectives (experiential learning). This is possible when I cultivate an environment that allows students to thrive, rather than to simply pass my course. To establish this ideal environment, I employ evidence-based teaching practices that promote engagement, timely feedback, and active communication.

I increase engagement by trading the full-class lecture for mini instructional units followed by short assignments, summary activities, or live coding. This keeps students' attention and assuages boredom. In particular, I have found that rapid application of recently-learned concepts helps to cement a learning objective in each student's mind. This also creates enough cognitive load to keep the students on their toes without overwhelming them. Finally, I typically assign collaborative group projects to accommodate diverse learning styles and allow students to engage with one another outside of the classroom.

Next, I emphasize timely and direct feedback on students' work. This is progressively difficult with increased enrollment and online educational environments, so I research and implement crowd-sourced natural language processing techniques—sentiment analysis in peer review—to provide the detailed subjective feedback students need to improve the quality of their work. The courses I teach are interdisciplinary in nature and lend themselves to new pedagogical methodologies like peer instruction and visual peer review. This allows students to develop critical analysis skills (formative) and augment instructor feedback (summative).

No team can thrive without a solid foundation of active communication. Since many students initially hesitate to speak up, I utilize break-out group questions: each low-stakes, practical assignment scaffolds students’ understanding of the material and promotes dialog. In this adaptation of peer instruction, advanced students help those struggling with concepts and solidify their own understanding. It also quickly moves students to the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy by allowing them to create and develop within the classroom. Finally, I employ an extensive number of surveys throughout the semester so that I can more effectively gauge the pace of the course, content difficulty, and lingering (but unspoken) questions. It also allows me to discover and engage inactive students.

Students appreciate my focus on engagement, feedback, and active communication—my evaluations to date average 4.18 out of 5.00, surpassing both departmental (3.95) and college (3.95) averages during the same period. I have received the ASEE State of Engineering Education in 25 Years Award and the USF Spirit of Innovation Award for the theoretical basis of this teaching philosophy and am a USF STEER STEM Scholar. Ultimately, my responsibility as an instructor goes beyond providing an education to providing an educational experience for well-rounded and world-changing students. My desire is that each of my students is equipped and confident through the student-centric mentoring I provided. By utilizing evidence-based practices and modeling engagement, feedback, and active communication, I can lay a firm foundation for my students' rewarding and successful careers.