My Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is encapsulated in three themes:

1. The instructor must provide a purpose and a path for the student.

Learning takes effort, and students need to be convinced that the effort is worth their time. Therefore, when designing a lesson, I first ask myself “why will my students want to listen to me?” I strive to make the material engaging and relevant for my students. For example, for an introductory programming course last Summer, I demonstrated how students could write programs to monitor online apartment listings and send notification emails when new listings appeared. This got their attention because many of them were in the midst of house-hunting for Fall quarter. In a lesson about linear algebra, I showed students how they could use nutrition data provided by Jamba Juice to reverse-engineer smoothie recipes. To introduce Graph Theory, we discussed the “6 Degrees to Kevin Bacon” project, which links actors based on which movies they’ve acted in together. My students engaged with the material when they could relate to their own lives and interests, and I enjoyed getting them excited about learning.

Once my students are eager to learn about a topic, learning can begin. I arrange the topics like building blocks, ensuring that each new concept builds upon its predecessor without requiring outside knowledge. For example: “Last time we talked about vectors and strings,” I’d say in my programming class. “We found they were useful for storing numeric data or character data. But soon we’ll encounter problems where it’s natural to store both types of data in a single object. Consider a bank account; it has a balance — stored as a number — and the owner’s name — stored as a string. It would be nice to link the number and the string together in a single datatype. Today we will learn about a new datatype called a ‘struct’ that does just that.” In this way, the students progress through the concepts along a logical path, each step building on and reinforcing previous ones.

2. Struggle is a vital component of learning, but must be carefully modulated.

Students learn best when they can practice new material; grappling with new skills is how we build proficiency in them. However, not all struggling results in the same quality of learning, as any attendee of a late-night cramming session will attest. Therefore I strive to present my students with many opportunities for low-stakes practice, well before any homework due-date or exam. For example, I pepper my lectures with in-class exercises and questions for the students. Sometimes the questions have short, unambiguous answers: “Okay, I’ve drawn a triangle for the brick’s velocity, and we’re interested in this side, this other side, and this angle. Sine, cosine, or tangent?” For more involved problems, a think-pair-share or group discussion activity may be appropriate: “Based on our discussion of function syntax, write a function to solve the quadratic equation”. While the students work, I circulate around the room to check in on the students. After bringing the class back together, the students volunteer their approaches and we discuss it. I sometimes cold-call the students using a deck of cards, so that the students know they’re on the hook. This also serves to get a uniform sampling of the students’ status, instead of polling just the talkative ones. But if a student can’t answer, I don’t push it: I put their card aside for a later question. My main goal is to give my students ample opportunities to struggle with the material in a low-risk way. I believe that one of the chief roles of an educator is to foster a balance of healthy, productive struggling in students.

3. The instructor must be able to empathize with the student’s struggle.

As educators, we must modulate our students’ struggle carefully: left unchecked, struggle leads to frustration and resentment. To strike this balance, an educator needs empathy. I use a variety of methods to keep my fingers on the pulse of my students’ welfare. With index cards, I solicit weekly feedback from my students — “What’s going well? What is challenging for you?” — and adapt my class accordingly. For example, contrary to my expectations, my students reported that they wanted even more in-class exercises than we already had. I was happy to oblige, and the students felt validated and empowered. Also through feedback cards, I learned that students felt I lectured a little too slowly, so I picked up the pace. Feedback cards have been invaluable for learning what my students need.

Empathy takes many forms beyond simply asking what students need. When writing my lessons, I pretend I’m seeing the material for the first time and I ask myself, “what questions do I have at this point in the lecture?” When lecturing, I keep the tone informal and conversational, because I remember being afraid to ask dumb questions of my brilliant, formal professors. When helping a frustrated student, I take care to be sympathetic and supportive because I remember how it feels to be stumped on a problem the night before it’s due.

A pessimistic professor once told us on the first day of class: “Students are the only group of people who are happiest when they aren’t getting their money’s worth.” Who can blame them? Without a good teacher to provide motivation, guidance, and empathy, school is just one big pointless, frustrating effort — and we are all creatures trying to minimize effort. By adhering to these educational values, I hope to help students embrace the struggle of learning instead of shying away from it.