Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

As an educator, my responsibilities are to the student/learner, the discipline and the institution.  To maximize student learning, I must create a learning environment that enables students of diverse backgrounds to “risk” learning and to push themselves to their limits.  This learning environment can be a formal classroom, a laboratory or any configuration for educator-student interaction in which the student is both liberally educated as a critical thinker and specifically trained in some practical ways as a novice scientist.  As an educator, I must articulate my responsibilities to the student and to the discipline; I must evaluate cultural challenges facing education, as well as assess student learning and my own teaching effectiveness.

Responsibilities to the Student

My responsibility to the student/learner requires me to do the following:

• to communicate my enthusiasm for the subject matter (usually science);
• to clearly communicate expectations in a course;
• to recognize students as individuals with varied strengths and weaknesses: I find it very useful to be aware of the student background and other issues that might impair or enhance the learning process;
• to adjust my teaching style to maximize learning while maintaining a high level of performance expectation from the student, and high standards in the discipline.

Responsibilities to the Discipline

My responsibility to the discipline requires me to do the following:

• to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter in dealing with the broader issues as well as depth in the field of study. I find that students/learners will gain respect and appreciation for both the subject matter and the teacher when the teacher demonstrates depth of knowledge in the discipline;
• to uphold the ethical values and high standards of excellence.

Responsibilities to the Institution

In the traditional model of instruction, most of my teacher-student interaction takes place within the framework of an academic institution.  The institution provides the resources for the teaching and learning experiences as well as the rules and regulations to ensure equitable utilization of these resources.  I expect my students to appreciate the institutional mission (or goals) and to familiarize themselves with some of the institutional regulations as they affect my teaching and their learning experiences.

These are the basic elements that have driven my teaching performance.  Evaluation of any teaching performance, however, is a very complex issue.  One indicator of my teaching performance is when students can demonstrate an understanding of the scientific enterprise; (a) when they are familiar with the language discourse in the discipline, (b) when they can begin to ask important questions in science, (c) when they can design scientific ways of addressing their questions.  This typically involves challenging the students by way of activities such as examinations (oral, written, objective and essay type) and inquiry-based laboratory exercises.  Over the years, I have found problem-based learning approach to ‘teaching’ to be more effective – as judged by many student learning measures that I have implemented in my classrooms.  Another measure of my teaching performance was from peer evaluations by faculty colleagues (those who attended most of my lectures) and from the students themselves.  I used these assessment strategies to evaluate my teaching effectiveness for continual self-evaluation and improvement.

Courses Taught: