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Teaching Statement
It is my belief, that in order to be an effective teacher, one must be willing to learn. As I teach, I try to absorb as much of the activity surrounding a course offering, learn from it and feed this information into my course organization, lectures and assignments to both motivate and guide the delivery of the course material. I look to the students to understand what inspires them to learn, be it research, industry, or entrepreneurial endeavours while I depend on the cohesive support of the teaching team for feedback to continually refine the delivery. This philosophy requires a direct connection with students which in the past I have established through well attended office hours and interaction in the classroom. As class sizes continue to grow at UVic, I have begun to encourage students to participate by asking and answering questions on a class discussion forum to develop a sense of community that extends beyond scheduled lecture and lab times. Additionally, during in-person course offerings I hold my office hours in a common space near the student labs and study area which substantially improves office hour attendance.
Learning requires a desire to learn. Motivation and the level of desire will vary dramatically in any group of students. While I believe students must want to learn, it is my job as a teacher to fuel this desire by keeping the material relevant. I draw from both research and industry to do this. By highlighting material from publications in related research areas, students become exposed to research as well as innovation and state-of-the-art, providing context to the material they are learning in class. Additionally, learning and drawing from practices in both industry and entrepreneurial endeavours further motivates and gives context to the material covered in lecture and assignments. Applying this at first and second year, can be done by simple couching assignments within real-world problems and using real-world, large data sets whereas, in upper-level courses, application can be much more explicit such as reviewing publications, applying industry techniques within assignments or hosting guest lecturers from industry.
As my teaching evaluations reflect, I enjoy interacting with students in class and in office hours. This is much easier to do with small class sizes but I have been able to scale problem-solving, active-learning style exercises to classes 200+ in size. I am always looking for ways to scale my approaches to larger class sizes and to reach those students who are not as interactive with the teaching team. I feel to grow as an educator I need to be able to have an impact on the diverse set of student needs and backgrounds and provide a quality education for all. I experimented early in my teaching career with augmenting lectures with short, online tutorial videos leveraging screen capture software to provide extra explanation for difficult concepts. This philosophy and approach has aligned well with the active-learning, problem-based lecture style of the first-year classes that I taught at UBC. The shift to online-learning during the pandemic has allowed me to develop a set of online resources for the two CS1 courses at UVic which will allow our teaching team to leverage these materials in a flipped-style of classroom in the future.
Holding onto my desire to provide a quality education for all, I believe we must become cognizant of students for which a given teaching style is not working. Teaching in Vantage College has allowed me to work with small class sizes of English Language Learners (ELLs) in which I am able to identify patterns of challenges with skills such as study strategies, time management, verbal communication and oral comprehension. These skills are necessary for student success in an active-learning environment that is often very different from what students have experienced in the past. I have experimented at UBC with ways to support student development of these skills including basic awareness of styles of study, encouraging Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), monitoring student self-efficacy across the term and providing students with interactive pre-lecture preparation in the form of a programming practice tool.
While I believe teaching strategies and student motivation are a significant part of teaching responsibilities, a strong cohesive teaching team can serve to significantly improve a students’ course experience and ultimately their success. While an instructor’s name is assigned to a particular course, the teaching team including lab instructors, markers and support staff are also on the front lines, working with and encouraging students along the way. I believe it is critical to work closely with a teaching team of both teaching assistants and department consultants to monitor successes and failures in all aspects of student participation. Tracking progress from lectures and labs to assignments and exams to feed into the refinement of a course offering creates an environment in which students can get the most out of the learning supports available to them.
Very often, the teaching team involves multiple professors, sometimes in different sections offered in the same term, but also over time—across terms and years. Collaborating with other professors can help to expand a set of course materials and allow an instructor to experiment with and share innovative teaching techniques. In courses where the curriculum and core materials are set there, I have still found potential to develop and share supplementary lecture materials. For example, I have shared with other instructors visualizations created to help CPSC 110 students develop a mental model of new concepts by linking to their existing knowledge. I have also had the opportunity to develop and share core materials for a course in the form of worksheets, videos and quizzes with other instructors allowing them to tailor these materials to their needs. I am fortunate to have worked with a diverse set of instructors, students and staff that have mentored me and influenced my teaching philosophy; I look forward to continued collaboration with my extended teaching team to continue to evolve both my practices and teaching curricula.