TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

          An effective and passionate educator has the ability to ignite within their students a desire for knowledge. From personal experience, I know that it only takes one great educator to change a student's view on a topic and inspire them to achieve and learn what they once considered to be the impossible. One educator’s passion for teaching and mentoring honestly changed the trajectory of my life and is the reason I too strive to become a more effective educator. My ultimate goal is to be a professor that inspires their students to believe in themselves the way that I was once inspired.
           I am an educator who is driven to share my love for science and get more youth interested in the STEM career fields. My students will be actively engaged in completing science labs. In doing so, they’ll be able to see how the concepts I teach in class connect to the bigger picture. In addition to the typical “cookbook” science experiments, I will challenge my students to design and conduct their own experiments. To do this, I will create different scientific questions and ask my students to develop and design experiments that will answer the question.

           Targeted practice makes perfect. In science, it’s very rare that things work the first time around. And even if they do, you’ll have to do it several times to verify your findings.  I want to teach my students to appreciate the process of failure and discovery by utilizing concepts taught in class and accessing prior knowledge to solve problems.  During the science labs in my class, I will perform an experiment incorrectly and have my students tell me where in the process I made a mistake. This will challenge students to use their knowledge base to guide me in successful completion of the experiment.

          I believe that constructive feedback and a supportive environment that encourages students to learn and grow from their mistakes is key to promoting a growth versus fixed mindset for students. Students need the opportunity to correct mistakes made on tests and other assignments so that they get direct feedback on the areas they are struggling with and be able to correlate hard work with success in their studies. To make sure they learn from their mistakes, I will allow students to correct missed problems on tests for some credit back, but students must include an explanation of why they got the question wrong the first time and how they came to a new answer. This is a great way to pinpoint problem areas for students and an effective way to promote targeted practice.

          To ensure that students are gaining an understanding of the concepts taught in my class, I will use peer focused learning techniques. These techniques include group-based assignments and projects, clicker questions and flipped classrooms. These active learning processes will ensure all students are getting feedback and a formative evaluation of their progress instead of just summative. The group assignments will contain scientific scenarios in which the students will have to draw on prior knowledge and outside sources such as lectures or textbooks to fully address the problem.

          Students need a supportive and encouraging environment to become confident in a learning new and difficult concepts. They also need an educator who understands that they are not only a student in a classroom, but also a person who may be experiencing difficulties in their personal life that can affect how they learn. To encourage an inclusive and supportive environment in my classroom, I will always keep in mind that students are people first and need encouragement and understanding. My office hours will help students that are struggling with classwork, but also be a time for mentoring to help students with issues beyond the classroom that may be affecting their work.

The active learning techniques described are my tools to ensure that my students are not just learning content, but also understanding the concepts and bigger picture of the material presented. Fostering an inclusive environment will help students feel welcomed and supported, and by using targeted and specific learning goals to guide my lectures, I strive to facilitate an atmosphere of structure to better help the students learn. I aim to convey my passion and love for science and education to my students so that they can leave my classroom excited to pursue their education in science.