Teaching philosophy and interactive environment for efficient learning
We have taken many classes at college with completely different teaching settings. Most of us have taken classes where the instructor is the only speaker, giving hours of discussions session after session (could be boring, right?). In opposite, we might have probably taken other classes where students get confused and overwhelmed as they are responsible to engage in many class activities without getting enough background by the instructor to do the tasks!
In my opinion, in the first scenario, many students become reluctant to learn the material and might be engaged in doing irrelevant activities in class (checking social media!), especially if the instructors are not highly skilled in providing a good narration in their lecture. On the other hand, in the second scenario, although students could be more engaged (as they have to!), they might feel lost in the discussion and get unconfident about their performance.
As someone who’s thinking of teaching in the future (therefore, needing a teaching philosophy/direction), I think there should be a trade-off between these two. Specifically, it would be useful if the instructor provides a good overview of the topic in the classroom at the beginning, go through some examples with student together and engage them in the discussion, and then ask them to engage in more challenging activities to encourage creative thinking by the students.
Although I have relatively low teaching experience, using the above approach worked well for me at the first sight. Last year, I was teaching a session which required a lot of hands-on experience and computer modeling with a software. I started with some introduction about the topic and doing some examples myself. Next, I tried to engage students by asking their opinions about some specific tasks in modeling. After that, I gave them time to do another activity by themselves and then stopped by their desks to see how they are performing and what ambiguities they’re facing. I see this one-to-one interaction useful as they became more willing to discuss problems and getting feedback. Interestingly, the mistakes were also common among the classmates which helped me as the instructor to understand which parts were more problematic to cover in the lecture, so I give more emphasis in the future.
Establishing a teaching philosophy requires a lot of careful thoughts and different characteristics to account for. Nonetheless, regardless of the context, I believe one of my teaching style features in the future would be focused on the mutual contribution of the instructor and the students. From this perspective, (1) the instructor guides the students through the material, (2) student engage in activities or hands-on experience to foster creative thinking and facing challenges, and (3) the instructor gives constructive feedback to students so they get a better understanding of their work.