Teaching Pilosophy

Teaching experience

My first teaching experience was as a TA during my senior year of college, for a Calculus class. My responsibilities were preparing and teaching review lectures on Fridays, and preparing and grading weekly homework. During my graduate degree, I focused on taking classes and doing research, thus my next teaching experience was as a postdoc when I participated in the University of Arizona’s CIRTL Postdoc Pathway Program, which includes co-teaching practice. My background in Physics, Optical Sciences, and Electronics allows me to be able to teach a variety of courses in the STEM field, so I chose to co-teach Optics of Photography and Videography, an undergraduate-level course at the College of Optical Sciences. This course presents an interesting challenge, which is that most students’ motivation to take the class is to acquire technical knowledge to become better photographers. However, being an Optical Sciences class, it is important that the students first learn basic math, physics, and optics concepts that will give them a strong foundation to later understand better the camera and photography techniques. My lectures included the wave, particle, and ray descriptions of light, including electromagnetism concepts and wave equations. To keep the students engaged, I exemplified abstract mathematical concepts with visually appealing photographs, since I knew it was a common interest among the students. I exemplified every concept with images, plots, or animations in slides, and complemented the lecture with derivations on the withe board.

Teaching techniques

I believe in approaching teaching the same way we do research, which is by identifying needs and looking in the literature for state-of-the art research-based solutions, since the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is an active research area. To help with this, some important resources to be part of are local Faculty Learning Communities, university teaching centers, and talking with more experienced faculty members about their own experience. I like to approach teaching with a beginner and growth mindset to be able to keep up with and apply current evidence-based techniques.

I consider students’ prior knowledge and level of expertise when designing lectures, which involves asking them at the beginning of the semester about their background and their motivation and expectations for the class. Another consideration when designing lectures is backwards design, where the learning objectives are defined first, then the assessments, and finally the lectures. For assessments, it is important to know the skill level I want to evaluate, as explained in the Bloom’s Taxonomy pyramid, and not only test for skills such as remembering and understanding, but also for reflecting, analyzing, and creating. An activity that helps students in their reflection skills is Peer Assisted Reflection, where they evaluate the work of their classmates to make an objective analysis.

Some active-learning techniques I like to implement on every lecture are reviewing, retrieving, and predicting, which consists of a short summary of the previous lecture, asking students a question to bring up their knowledge on the current lecture, and asking them to predict concepts on the current lecture even though it is likely that they haven’t had exposure to the topic. This helps them to be aware of what they know and what they don’t know about the lecture. Other important techniques that can be implemented less often are cooperative learning and peer instruction (teamwork) in the form of in-class activities for small groups where discussion and analysis is encouraged.

Inclusive teaching

I believe that if inclusive teaching techniques are not purposely implemented, we may unconsciously create microinequities that benefit some students and hurt other students, which results in a performance gap that is small at the beginning of the semester but increases significantly by the end of the semester. It is important that I examine any assumptions and biases I might have with respect to student’s identities and backgrounds so that I can work on eliminating them. It is easy to identify the students that are more likely to participate in class, and the students that never participate, and I believe that the instructor is responsible for allowing the students to close the participation gap. Some techniques to solve these problems are asking students to introduce themselves the first class so that everyone feels that it is safe to participate, to randomize participation, to create anonymous ways of participating such as digital interactive whiteboards, to normalize student struggle in case some students are not as familiar with STEM fields, and to promote a growth mindset. I also believe in the importance of modeling inclusive language and using culturally diverse examples.