TEACHING

Teaching is one of the most enjoyable work for me. Teaching is a good way to evaluate, enhance, and apply my learning. More important is, I like to pass the information I know, to help in solving others’ puzzling, and to guide the students to learn how to learn. I am always passionate to achieve these goals.

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Learning is the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. How to teach is the most important thing to guarantee the learning of students in classes. I believe that students learn best when the teacher mains the eight research-based principles about learning: Attention, Novelty, Prior Knowledge, Context, Spacing, Retrieval, Emotions, and Expectations. Most teachers can do well in providing novel and great contexts, connecting with prior knowledge, retrieve what has been taught and talking expectations to encourage students. While I also care about the other principles and this will make my teaching contribute more to students.

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My classes will not be teacher-centered. I am more like a helper rather than a leader in the students’ learning process. I will illustrate the knowledge, train their skills, and then guide them to learn and form more by themselves. Encouraging this kind of active learning is difficult unless we understand what triggers it. From my observation and conclusion, interest and grade are the most important factors we should take good use of.

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This leads to the several defining features of my class, which facilitate the learning of my students. First, students’ attention and engagement are the basics of effective teaching and learning. Especially for engineering courses, to avoid abstract and obscure lectures, I will use more visual materials, e.g., images and animations, to explain the contents. The second technique is the formative assessment in class. Assignments after class are more like evaluation and make-up lectures after the assignments will mess up the following schedules. Frequent in-class practices make sure that students learn each part of the lesson gradually and provide the opportunity to compensate the teaching in time, as well as increase the learning effectiveness by class chunk. Another specific goal of my teaching is to prepare students for being qualified engineers. The teamwork and group discussion will be also assigned to train their communication and collaboration skills. In addition, both the in-class assessment and group work improve the interaction between students and me so that I can adjust the teaching accordingly with the feedback and communication.

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These strategies in my teaching philosophy not only aid in the specific course, but also equip my students to extend their skills and learning ability beyond the bounds of my courses to their other studies, everyday lives, and future careers.