My teaching philosophy boils down to the observation that students face a signal-to-noise ratio in any learning environment, and an effective teacher is one who can increase the proportion of the signal relative to the noise.
My teaching philosophy is still a work-in-progress, but it started developing from an early age, when, as a middle school student, I started evaluating my teachers and their respective styles in my head. As a student, I have often struggled to extract the signal from the noise. My most effective teachers were the ones who could anticipate sources of confusion and guide the students in addressing them. Alas, I had many teachers who could not even relate to students who were failing to make the appropriate connections in learning the concepts. In those scenarios, I learned the material through repetition – when there was enough repetition, I was finally able to see the patterns that helped me extract the signal. In each of those instances, I’d make a mental note of how I would have taught the material.
In my teaching, I consider my main objective to be to increase the signal-to-noise ratio for my students. In order to do this, it is important to recognize that not everyone comes to the classroom with the same processing capacity. How much processing capacity a student possesses is determined by a variety of factors, including, but not limited to previous coursework, quality of the previous coursework, the amount of engagement with previous course, and sometimes even natural ability.
Having always had paid attention to the specific sources of confusion in my coursework, I believe I am well-equipped to anticipate sources of confusion and address them preemptively. However, I recognize that I cannot anticipate everything, so teaching will require a certain amount of thinking on the spot. In order to do this, it is essential to have a sense of how well students are following the material. This can be achieved by encouraging student participation. It can be very helpful for the teacher if the students feel comfortable enough to voice their confusions. But in order to make sure that students are sufficiently engaged such that they are examining whether they have fully grasped the concepts, the teacher must prompt them to think, discuss, and share with the class. Therefore I plan to design my course in such a way that I incorporate discussion and class activities that will continually force students to engage with the material. I plan to have students interact both with me as the teacher and with each other. In my experience as a student, some of the best learning can happen from peers when working on group projects or exercises.
As a student, I have also valued constructive and detailed feedback, which I have directly applied to improve my skills. As a teaching assistant, however, I have observed that not all students value feedback or pay as much attention to it. It is not worth my time to provide detailed feedback to someone who will not take time to absorb it, hence I hope to teach in such a way that I can incentivize students to incorporate the feedback that I provide them. This can be achieved by having projects due in parts, such that the students have the opportunity to take the feedback from the first portion and apply it to their submission for the second portion. It can also be achieved by designing assignments such that they build on each other.
Since I have benefited from repetition in my education, I will try to incorporate this into my teaching to the extent possible. With limited class time and a large syllabus, there is often not sufficient time available to spend on each topic. However, if in my course design, I pay attention to aspects of the course that connects one topic to another, I can try to use these opportunities to prompt students to attempt to make these connections and guide their thinking along the way. This can be achieved through opening up to structured discussion at relevant points in the lecture, and through carefully designed assignments.
Finally, the last observation that informs my teaching philosophy is that respect for the teacher often engenders engagement with the material. I hope, as a teacher, I am able to convey to my students that I understand their objectives and am fully on board with helping them achieve these. I would like for my students to have confidence in me that I will be fair in evaluating them. And I hope that offering students agency and ownership over their own learning, they will be motivated to work hard to earn a good evaluation.
All of this being said, my teaching philosophy is still a work-in-progress since much of it has been formed through my experience as a student. I look forward to the continued progress of my philosophy as I learn from my experiences as a course instructor.
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 