My teaching philosophy
Contents
My teaching philosophy¶
This is a video about my teaching philosophy, how I view my role in higher education, my principles and goals for students.
Note
The music I used in the video is licensed CC-BY and was downloaded from Freesound, which is a great resource.
Script¶
One of the most important things I gained from my Bachelor’s degree was learning how to teach myself.
Through it, I gained self-reliance and specialization beyond what my program could offer.
But learning independently is a difficult skill to master, even more so without proper guidance.
It is made even harder by a lack of confidence in one’s own ability and a passive view of education, which are often deeply ingrained in students minds.
My teaching philosophy is centered around providing the resources that students require to build up their confidence, master key skills, and grow in independence.
A significant part of my efforts go into maintaining a positive and stimulating learning environment, which has a significant impact on students’ motivation to learn.
My goal is to empower students by giving them agency over their learning.
For example, I offer a variety of recorded, written, and practical material so that students are able to go over it at their own pace, either independently or with guided instruction during a live session.
I provide extra challenges and necessary scaffolding to account for variations in students prior knowledge [Paas et al., 2003] [Kalyuga, 2007].
As much as possible, I try to allow students to choose the topic of their assessments.
I develop my lessons around coding and analysis of real data to provide students with authentic tasks and a chance to practice a wide range of skills.
I build in time for peer-instruction to encourage students to interact and learn from each other [Vickrey et al., 2015].
This is doubly important for online learning, where engagement and social isolation are often problematic.
A sense of agency, learning skills that are demonstrably useful, and learning along side their peers are some of the biggest motivators for adult learners [Wlodkowski and Ginsberg, 2017].
I’m also a proponent of open-access and collective development of learning resources.
Too often we find ourselves developing the same set of slides, practicals, and notes.
When open-access resources do exist, they tend to be highly specific to particular modules, lessening their potential for reuse.
There is often also no easy way for others to submit improvements to the material.
In this, higher education has much to learn from the open-source software community.
In open-source, we work collaboratively to develop software that fulfils the needs of the community.
We encourage others to contribute changes and join our development teams instead reinventing the wheel.
We develop tools like version control systems that enable collaboration on our projects.
Ultimately, I plan to update and rework my current teaching materials to make them more suitable for collaborative development.
I hope to implement several of the research-based techniques outlined in Devenyi et al. (2018) [Devenyi et al., 2018].
This will be a significant effort but I strongly believe that it is well worth doing.
We all benefit from improving the commons.