I have desired to become a teacher since I was a kid. I love teaching and I have gained teaching experiences both in K-12 and higher education. People always praise me that I have a talent for teaching. I feel intuitive about how to teach well even before I started teaching as I like to observe how my teachers teach, what I can learn from them, and how I can do better. The philosophy rooted in my teaching is that students should always be put in the center and teachers need to constantly reflect on how they can empower students with knowledge and skills that can impact their lives.
I care about each of my students and I strive to build good rapport with them. I take a great effort to get familiar with them by remembering their names, majors, and interests. In my classes, I usually remember most of the students’ names after one or two classes. I still remember the surprise in the student’s eyes when I was able to call her name in the hallway outside of the classroom before the second weekly class started. The other thing I do is to observe and keep track of how each of my students is doing. I make myself available through both face-to-face and online meetings. I encourage students to communicate with me if they have any difficult situations. When I find students are not doing well, I approach them in nice ways to find out what is going on and assist them based on their individual needs. I believe that students learn better in an environment where the teacher and students have mutual understanding and trust. Furthermore, it is important to establish good relationships between students. I promote a learning environment of mutual respect and inclusiveness by exposing students to different cultures and help them understand the diversity in their cultures and backgrounds. I stimulate students to appreciate and cherish the diversity among them and facilitate collaboration between students.
Besides building good rapport with my students and promoting an environment of mutual respect and inclusiveness, I promote student-centered learning in my classes, and I differentiate my instructions to meet students’ individual needs. The gist of student-centered learning is that teacher should not be a “sage on the stage” but a “guide on the side” (King, 1993). However, student-centered learning is not equal to just letting students take over the learning and the teacher assists on the side. Teacher-centered learning and student-centered learning are not two absolute categories of pedagogy but are instead on a continuum depending on how much scaffolding students need. I always learn about who my students are, what they know, what they need to learn, and how I can help them learn. I design instructions based on students’ learning needs, i.e., the gap between what students know and what they need to know. To meet the learning needs of individual students, I provide personalized teaching and support. For instance, I give more challenges for students who may achieve higher, however, for students who really struggle, I help them step-by-step and provide more scaffolding to them. Discovery learning, problem-based learning, and inquiry-based learning are some of the highly advocated student-centered instructional strategies, but they may not always work (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006) because students may need different levels of guidance and scaffolding. I believe there is no single instructional strategy that works for all students and I always adapt instructions to meet the learning needs of individual students.
I engage students in learning activities such as apply, analyze, evaluate, and create (Krathwohl, 2002) to enhance students’ higher-order skills. One of the learning activities students did in my introduction to educational technology course was to give a presentation on how a technology can be used for teaching or learning and the strengths and weaknesses. In this learning activity, students need to apply what they learned about educational technology, analyze how the technology they chose can be used for teaching or learning, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the technology for teaching or learning, and then create and deliver a presentation. In order to engage all students when their classmates were giving presentations, I used a Google Form to design a template with guided questions for students to provide feedback on their classmates’ presentations. This peer feedback activity highly engaged students and students reported that they benefited from both receiving and providing feedback, which helped them think critically when evaluating their classmates’ presentations.
I promote students’ critical thinking and collaborative skills throughout their learning processes. I always encourage students to think critically and I also design lessons to cultivate students’ critical thinking skills. For instance, I taught a lesson on media literacy and students learned that they need to think critically when using information on the media because information on some websites looks credible but could actually be fake. In the online course of instructional design that I co-taught, I responded to students’ discussion posts on instructional design case analysis with questions for them to think further and critically. I facilitated the discussions to make the discussion forum vibrant and stimulated students to raise constructive questions and think critically from different perspectives. I also engaged students in collaborative learning activities through in-class group activities and projects that students completed outside of class. During the last phase of teaching, I evaluated students’ learning to examine whether the learning goal and objectives were achieved, using a variety of authentic assessment methods to evaluate students’ learning, including peer teaching, videos and animations creation, reflection, discussions, group projects, and e-portfolio.
I believe teaching is also a learning process for teachers. I constantly reflect on my teaching and make improvements. I always keep in mind that students are the center of my teaching and it is my responsibility to help students learn and to empower them with knowledge and skills that will impact their lives.
References:
King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College Teaching, 41(1), 30-35. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.1993.9926781
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational psychologist, 41(2), 75-86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into practice, 41(4), 212-218. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2