Month: February 2016

Will technology guide your teaching?

Teaching philosophies are vital to the success of the students. As engaged as the instructors are, the more positive outcomes come out of these classes. This week has been a week I’ve been thinking very deeply about teaching.. In relations to the readings and striking a balance with my own, already present teaching philosophy.

I’ve been a true believer that people can always improve and build on an already present teaching philosophy, to include a lot to engage students in the most cutting edge manner. Sometimes I’m really sold on the cool things technology can do for teaching. I love technology, I’m attracted to it, and I think it’s awesome. I’ve had classes that had awesome teachers who relied less on technology, while some relied on PowerPoint. There were others that had a lot of technology, but couldn’t engage their student’s interest in the class. At the end of the day, my peers and I got interested in what we could get in touch with… In other words, if learning this course could help us be better in our field… If we knew the benefits, if we knew what to do and how to accomplish our dreams… we did. It really helped to have good teachers, who could really teach. Who cared for their students. Who were interested in their students success.

On that note, part of my teaching philosophy isn’t to impress my students and give them technology. Technology can support their education, but it doesn’t have to be the full thing. In both Sarah Deel’s essay “Finding my Teaching Voice” and Shelli Folwer’s “The Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills” the struggle is quite clear for how to both establish control and interest in classrooms without micromanaging students and being strict.  Apparently, this struggle is more well-known among females than males, but it exists. A lot of what both of these pieces included made me wonder, well how would I handle my students, how much technology, how friendly should I be… etc etc…. I don’t have the right answers to all these questions even after doing the readings and thinking about the responses to these questions.

However, what I do know, is I vow to be passionate about what I teach or quit. I vow to transfer these passions to my students. I will not have any student feel like research is more important than teaching them. The students, and the print left within students will be there. I will also be there for my students, and I will encourage them and support them. I will teach my students the tools they will forever use in their lives for their success. That’s what I know. I can’t tell you if I’ll buy into a lot of technology or a mild amount, but I’ll stick to making my students the best most passionate students in the world. That’s how I see it. If you have any tools or tips to make this possible, please leave me a comment! Thanks!

On the Way of Finding My Teaching Voice

In “Finding My Teaching Voice“, Sarah Deel narrates her journey of developing her teaching style from mimicking other good professor to being herself as a teacher. She faced many questions that I also have when I am finding my own teaching style.

I have being a teaching assistant for more than 6 years and a guest lecturer for several times. My advisor and the professors I worked with think I am ready to teach a class by myself. Thus, I was offered an opportunity to be an instructor for a summer course. I used similar teaching methods like my advisor who teaches this course in spring semester for a long time. Deel gives a slightly negative attitude to using some of your previous professor’s techniques in the classroom, as if it is opposed to finding your own teaching voice. But I think it will help you develop your own teaching voice when you take advantage of  some truly exceptional techniques. I tried to attract students’ attentions with videos, discussions, and various related examples during my lecture sessions (50 min) but I didn’t do well. Many students would do other things after 20-30 min of some lectures. Students thought the lectures were not interesting. That’s my fault. I am very bad at using humor in the classroom. I always use a lot of examples to make concepts/methods interesting to me, but it doesn’t work for students. I can understand many jokes from professors but it is really hard to me to incorporate proper humor in the classroom. I don’t know how to change the situation. How to incorporate humor in the classroom? Is it necessary to be a good teacher?

Defying Gravity

How would I describe my authentic teaching self? Rough. Over compensating. Ok. I’m not real sure at this point. While I have had the honor of teaching people one-on-one, or giving presentations to my classmates, and a few experiences training/teaching new hires at former jobs, I have not had the full experience of teaching a class on my own.

I would love to say, my ideal would be transparent, inspirational, fully present, and encouraging. Transparent enough that my students would understand that there is no way I can be the end-all, know-everything, expert but experienced enough that they can take what I have to offer from that knowledge and understanding. Inspirational that would create thoughts beyond just the requirements of the class and stir a desire to find out more on their own. Fully present, that I can be enough in the room to know what is going on without being said. To be sensitive to the needs of the class and meet them where they are in that moment…be it to discuss what is on the syllabus or what may be happening in the world which could be overriding anything we could cover in class. Finally, encouraging. I would hope that as a teacher I would be supportive and a champion in helping them gain strides in their learning. To be able to have a marked difference from class day one to ending class day.

However, I started out with the words: rough, over-compensating, and ok. I use these adjectives because it is true to how I am currently. Rough because I do not have the experiences in formal teaching to have polished these skills. Over-compensating because I have a tendency to prepare, research, prepare, and repeat that cycle a bit more until I feel prepared to know the material. Usually that is to my detriment, as I learn too much and have difficulties in getting material down to the level where the students are because it all seems important and necessary to me. Lastly, I say ok. Ok, as I have done some things before and have been told I was quite good. That I have a way of explaining things to others without making them feel that my way is the only way and breaking things down into easier to understand ways.

After reviewing some of the materials on finding my teaching voice, I find that being authentic, fully present, and transparent, seem to be a common thread. Honestly, I believe that moving forward, if I give myself enough compassion with my beginner level, I have the potential to be a good teacher. Then I can continue to hone that until I become a great teacher. I know it will not happen overnight, or after one teaching experience, or one class semester. Some liken teaching to acting, with similarities being with preparation, and performance. I think I can relate to that in many ways.

So, in keeping with that theme, and following the lead from one of my favorite Broadway musicals Defying Gravity from Wicked:

Too late for second guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It’s time to trust my instincts.
Close my eyes and leap!
 It’s time to try defying gravity.

Let’s see if I can indeed defy gravity and become a great teacher!


Teaching to the choir

Although much of the reason that I am in graduate school is for an eventual career teaching college students, I have not had many opportunities to teach courses yet. Therefore, for a teaching reflection, I will be reflecting on other opportunities I have had to speak and the one or two opportunities I have had to give a guest lecture.

For the purposes of this blog, I will consider two different experience I’ve had related to teaching: (1) in the fall, when I gave a guest lecture for my advisor in a sophomore-level dynamics course, and (2) yesterday, when I got the opportunity to preach the sermon at my church, Fieldstone UMC. There are actually a surprising amount of similarities between the two experiences. Note: my faith is very important to me, but this is a blog about teaching.

In reflecting on these two experiences, I’ve noticed some things about my teaching style.

Examples are very important to me

Examples help illustrate concepts and help us connect ideas to things we can already wrap our heads around. Maybe its the engineer in me, but I think that examples make incredibly powerful teaching tools.

In the dynamics course, I was teaching about the impulse-momentum equation

J \equiv \int_{t_1}^{t_2} Fdt = mv_2-mv_1

Which says that there’s this thing called the impulse, J, that is equal to the change in momentum. It is a useful formula for studying things like the dynamics of billiards and car accidents. To introduce the topic to my class, though, I didn’t just give them that equation, because equations are scary. I showed a video of a golf ball deforming and talked about how the impulse represents the total effect of that deformation and restoration. Therefore, we don’t have to know the details of that deformation. All we need to know is the change in velocity of the club head in order to determine the velocity that the ball.

In the sermon, I was discussing how small actions can have a profound impact, and I shared a TED talk by Drew Dudley entitled Everyday Leadership. He shares the amazing story about a time that he gave a lollipop to a girl and it utterly changed her life. Thinking about how this moment where he had so profoundly impacted somebody without even remembering it, we can see how we may all be able to impact those around us through small actions.

Examples people something tangible to hold onto when discussions become abstract.

I like to make people move

As we’ve discussed in class, lectures can get boring and people don’t have the attention span. I like to make people move around the room if possible to get the blood flowing and to help them engage.

In the dynamics course, I used a sort of think-pair-share to get the students to try to apply the knowledge in small groups and then discuss with the class in order to make sure that students were engaging with the material rather than just listening to me drone on. In a boring class talking about a derivation, I had the students try it first. Then, they would have something to go from when we talked about the material in class.

During the sermon, I was trying to encourage people to be more conscious of creating a welcoming environment. In the middle of the sermon, I asked everyone to stand up and learn the name of one other person in the room. The room was immediately filled with energy and the rest of the sermon flowed from that energy.

Getting people physically moving during a lecture helps them be involved.

It’s important to keep people engaged

Engagement is hard to describe when giving a presentation of any kind, but it is the most important thing. I think that engagement is just something you can feel. It’s in eye contact and facial expressions, but it’s really just something that you can feel.

I felt it while performing in musicals in high school. I felt it I spent my first couple years of graduate school giving presentations to prospective students and their parents. I felt it yesterday while preaching, and I felt it from some of the students when I taught the dynamics class.

I don’t yet know how to improve that engagement in the classroom. I think that is something that I’ll be working at throughout my career as a teacher.

What do you think? Do you have any fun examples to share? Do you have fun ideas to get people moving in the classroom? Do you know what it feels like when the audience is engaged? Why is it so much harder to be an engaging speaker in a classroom environment?


Is it just a “performance”?

When I was a TA for fluid mechanics, I was given the opportunity to give students weekly recitation. This 45-min class was usually divided into two parts: I will work through some example problems for that week’s topic first, and then followed by some experimental demonstrations that facilitate the students’ understanding of some concepts. This recitation was optional. And the professor stressed that I won’t get too many of them, you know, just to make me less nervous. However, when I walked into the classroom in the first week, I got more than 30 students! That was two thirds of the class! I was totally taken aback by this for a minute, and then, without choice, I proceeded with caution and finished my first class. It is amazing how teaching can get you addicted. Well, at least for me. I started to enjoy standing in front of the students and getting their attention. And inevitably, this feeling got me disappointed several weeks later, in fact, exactly the week after spring break, when some students were still in their holiday moods. I got only five students that week. I felt so depressed that I ran to the professor and asked if it was because the way I teach. Was it because I was a bad teacher? He said: “No. I don’t think so. Sometimes students got busy or they don’t feel like the need to attend a recitation this week. So you don’t need to be sad. As long as you think you are doing your best. This is like a performance. Your performance. You got prepared, go up stage and perform the teaching. No matter how many audiences you’ve got, it does not affect the way you teach. ” I was convinced. This made me feel much better and I totally bought the idea of seeing teaching as a performance. But is it really? As I learnt recently, no. It’s better if we see ourselves as facilitators for students’ learning than as teachers. Teaching should not be a one-way knowledge indoctrination, but should be an interactive process. I still appreciate the professor’s saying that helped me to rebuild my confidence, but teaching is totally not a performance. We should, from some aspects, be cautious about our gestures, voices, and postures that can affect our communication, but we should never see the teaching podiums as our stages. Teaching is not about us. Teaching is about the students.

Bridge Over Koolaid-filled Waters or We Don’t Need No Replication

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.” ~ Nikos Kazantzakis   We don’t need no education We don’t need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teacher leave them kids …

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I’m amorphous, mostly.

Writing about my “authentic teaching self”is proving difficult, as I’m not sure how much of my previous teaching style was due to implicit nature and how much has been due to external circumstance. When participating in discussions concerning teaching praxis, instructors are clear in defining their styles and objectives, not necessarily with the intent of converting their listener, but most assuredly with utmost conviction. We, as instructors, are often very aware of how we present ourselves and our material in the classroom. Of course, this is likely biased, as those they talk about teaching methodology are often those that enjoy teaching. I’ve not had many conversations with instructors that despise their role.

That said, I have not participated in many conversations revolving around the dynamic nature of teaching and the need for uber-plasticity. I suppose this is one of my premier concerns with teaching: each semester is vastly different than the one prior. Knowing my audience is the first task I undertake–even before the semester begins.

This revelation came during the years before my PhD studies in my international agriculture development work. We often lead classes, workshops and conferences (as well as intern trainings and seminars). I taught many sessions, and the turnover is far greater than the university setting. My fellow instructors and I often talked about how finicky the classes are–one session, the students want all hands-on learning and no classroom time, the next session the opposite. We took feedback to heart, but it really could not inform how we handled the next session because it was comprised of very different students with very different goals and very different experiences. Did I ever truly develop a solution? Maybe. Maybe not. I can only change so much, and often met many students’ needs, while others felt neglected. I’ve come to accept that this is going to be a common theme.

This brings me to my next point: contextualization of material is difficult. Once I feel I know generalizations about my audience, I can then contextualize the material. It is my point to understand whatever I am teaching to such a degree that my examples (often parables) are contexualized as well. This was extremely important, and infinitely difficult, with my previous job, as the students were from all over the tropical and subtropical world. Thus there were huge cultural considerations to boot.

Lastly, I, as many do, rely on passion and transparency to bridge all gaps. The one set of truly bad reviews I received was from a new class that I acquired and was not at all interested in (and the first time I taught it, I was feverishly sick). I tried my darndest to fake some passion and interest in the subject and the students saw right through me. As an introvert, I always have to draw energy and present myself in many ways that are unnatural to me when I teach, but it oddly comes with ease because of my passion for teaching, itself.

As for transparency, I mean it in terms of the material taught and the management of the classroom. In my previous posts, I’ve not shied away from my dislike of hyper-connected (technologically) classrooms. I try to strip away everything unimportant to the material and help my students really connect with the ideas being shared. I don’t want the material muddled or convoluted. I don’t want the students distracted. I don’t want teaching tactics to stand in the way either. Pedagogy has its place, but many of my previous instructors and teachers seemed to hide behind teaching methods in lieu of grassroots learning.

This is me, but I rarely can say anything in the aforementioned conversations with fellow instructors because my innate teaching self is malleable, constantly processing my environment and adapting as much as possible. And so far, it has served me well. Currently, I am focused on how to best get to know my students on individual bases, so if you have any feedback that has worked for you, please let me know. One thing I hope to implement in my career is to require at least one office meeting during the semester to have face-to-face time, but this is heavily dependent on class size. We’ll see how it goes!


My Authentic Teaching Selves

I have little teaching experience to date. The extent of it is ~2 years tutoring math at a private company where I was working with kindergarteners to high schoolers (four at a time) and one day doing labs with high school students (~20 students at a time), teaching them about the tools of my research. The little I know about my teaching voice thus far is this:

  1. In small groups or one-on-one, I am easy-going, attentive, patient and not afraid to show my inner nerd,
  2. In front of larger groups, I am hyper, nervous, and over-the-top geeky no matter how prepared I am (I definitely could relate to Professor Sarah Deel with this).

Judging from these perhaps preliminary teaching personas, I would much rather my future students be exposed to the former, no matter the size of the classroom.  However, according to the document by Dr. Shelli Fowler, you should “not be someone you are not in your classroom.”

My question is, if both of these teachers are “my authentic teaching self,” just in different settings, would it be “posing” is I try to be teacher #1? Does anyone have a similar dual-authentic-teaching-self situation, as I seem to have? Does anyone know if these two teaching voices will perhaps reconcile themselves with more experience?

Beyond the teaching voice, one thing I know for sure is that I would like to style my classroom in such a fashion that I do not receive the questions brilliantly compiled by PhD Comics below:

phd101008s

Here’s to hoping!


We’ll see how things go

My approach to teaching has so far been very reminiscent of Sarah Deel’s. I knew last semester that I would be teaching my current class and I started to think about how I would approach it. My initial thought was that it would be fairly lecture-heavy, because that was really all I had known, with a few exceptions here and there. But it was those exceptions that were some of the most engaging and exciting classes I took in undergrad. They were generally discussion-based classes, with readings assigned that were discussed during our face-to-face sessions. This seemed like a pretty reasonable approach, but my selection of literature (for casting design) was quite limited and certainly didn’t make for good reading. Knowing that there was baseline material I wanted the students to know, I started out with lectures, figuring I’d make things up as I went along. I knew that I didn’t want to be locked in to the exact styles I had experienced, so on the first day I asked my students to describe their learning styles and what they’re looking to get from my class. This helped tremendously in guiding my initial approach.

I am extremely thankful to be taking this class (Contemporary Pedagogy) in the same semester as my first teaching position, because it’s caused me to rethink many assumptions I had made about the practice of teaching and it has allowed me to incorporate, as best I can, a variety of techniques in the classroom to help students to be more engaged with the class at large. I’ve been able to develop my style in parallel with learning other ones, enabling me to start out with a reasonably effective approach rather than to build bad habits that must later be broken.

The first section of my class is lecture-heavy, to establish that fundamental knowledge base, much like the building a house metaphor used in our meetings. After finishing the lectures, I’ve moved on to a more discussion-heavy approach that is (maybe?) similar to the Socratic method (though not deliberately), where I’ll give a design challenge to the students and we’ll talk through their approach. Very soon we’ll be able to transition to the software phase of the class, which will in turn spawn more discussions, about design both of the castings themselves and of how to create and interpret the simulations and their results.

As far as personal connections/barriers, I think I’m fairly friendly with my students, since I was their TA at the foundry either last semester or last year. If there’s a building and environment at Tech that fosters camaraderie, it’s the foundry. It’s an inherently cooperative environment, because every has to rely on people besides themselves to get major things accomplished. I’m very lucky to have that foundation of camaraderie and friendship with my students. They will often see me in the MSE lounge and ask questions about my class, another class they’re taking, or just hang out. Now because of this, I do need to be careful to maintain a level of professionalism and avoid playing favorites and grade people fairly (note: fairly, not necessarily equally, especially since the students have widely varying levels of intuition for this type of design).

We’ll see how things go.

Planting the seeds is not enough…anymore.

“They are not growing! I’m going to fail science class!” said the girl staring at the dish looking disappointed.

“They are” said her mother, “you just can’t see it yet.”

Not doubting her parent for one second the girl asked “Well, what do I do then?”

“Make sure you put your dish in the sunlight every morning and make sure it has enough water…not too much not too little…just enough and then,” said her mother “you wait.”

Now that does not sound like something a ten year old can do easily – Wait?! Be patient?! What?! But I remember waking up every morning and putting my little dish on the window sill in the sunlight, making sure it had just enough water and then sprinting to catch my school bus in time. It did take a while and eventually one morning I saw little white stems emerging from within the thin cotton layers that held my precious black grams, the seeds to my science experiment. Once the white stems had found their way out into the open air I started seeing little green leaves forming. As the saplings turned upwards towards the Sun reaching out for light and carbon dioxide, I felt this exhilaration inside me. I had done it! I had successfully planted the seeds and they were turning into little saplings quickly. I didn’t even care about passing science class anymore…this was SO cool!

Over the years I have heard many uses of the phrase “planting the seeds” and I have always appreciated its significance. My entire family loves plants and we have a few green thumbs among us. While reading Professor Fowler’s work the story I mention above came to mind. The questions that she poses in her writing The Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills made me realize that “planting the seeds” was not good enough anymore. When we take learning into account, as a teacher I can plant the seeds of basic concepts related to Counseling or Psychology or any other class I end up teaching through lectures, assignments, articles, YouTube videos and Ted Talks but whether those seeds are going to turn into saplings or dry up with too much sunlight or drown in too much water is also my responsibility. I cannot just plant a seed and leave it to fight for light and water! On the other hand, I cannot smother them with too much either – too much sunlight, too much water, too many nutrients…yikes! I have to be able to provide ideal conditions in which the seeds have the opportunity to thrive.

Therefore, I intend my approach to teaching being similar to how I approached growing black grams in a dish. It would involve fascination, exhilaration and patience. Buddhist teachings talk about the “middle path”, a path that runs through between any two polarities. I find myself trying to maintain this balance in my authentic teaching self. Balance between being structured and being fluid, balance between lecturing and discussing, balance between theoretical and experiential learning. Additionally, similar to how Buddhism predicts I anticipate it being a constant struggle, a consistent effort just like trying to be mindful. In my journey to define my authentic teaching self I hope to be able to continue balancing polarities – just the right amount of water and sunlight.


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