My teaching philosophy evolved from many years of teaching experience. In the very early years of my teaching, I tried to deliver as many materials as possible in my classes and provided extensive explanations on a number of important topics in each lecture. Later, I realized that quantity is not the most important part in teaching. Although students in my class had highly diverse backgrounds and had different career goals in their mind, they all would face all sorts of challenges in their life and career, therefore they all need to learn a lot of new skills and knowledge over time, and they will be required to come up with creative solutions to challenges they face. Therefore, my duty as a college professor is not simply helping them to understand course materials, but creating opportunities and environment so that students can actively learn new information inside and outside the classroom, and also apply the knowledge and skills to solving problems creatively or generating new knowledge for upcoming generations.
I am a proponent of active learning and use a variety of methods to encourage discussion on the materials I present in my courses. One method that I frequently use in my classes is to assign students small scale research projects since I believe students are best served when they are actively and rigorously engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. I encourage students to work together in these research projects to determine the solution to the problem, but finish the project independently. For instance, in my Data Science in Health Informatics class, I require each student to finish one data science project with the data set that they identify and I approve. In this case, each student has one unique research project in terms of the content, but these projects have similar steps to find the answer, for instance, cleaning up the data, handling missing data, data transformation, exploratory data analysis, and statistical modeling. Therefore, these students can work together as a team to figure out the methods and strategies to finish the project. Each of them can then apply the methods and strategies into their own project to obtain a unique research result. Every time I received positive feedback from this type of projects. Some students even stated that they learned the most from this project.
I believe oral and written skills are critically important to students' future career. Therefore, I always require these student "researchers" to present their methods and results in class and answer questions from me and their fellow students. I also require each of them to write a short scholarly paper to describe their methods and findings. I understand that not all students enjoy writing the project report (or mini research paper), but that is exactly the reason why I assign this task to them. In their future career, only technical skills are not sufficient. They need to be able to present the results to their audience in oral and written format professionally so that decision makers will take their results seriously.
Students should know where to find information, how to evaluate the collected information, and how to make an informed decision based on their understanding of the information. I assigned a small literature review project to each student. For instance, in my Security and Privacy class, I asked each student to search in the PubMed and identify five published journal articles on mobile apps. They were asked to make selections from hundreds of search results according to certain inclusion/exclusion criteria, and carefully review the five selected articles, summarize the results, and come up with their own conclusion. This exercise gives students the opportunity to investigate a topic in which they are interested, teaches them how to locate and read primary journal articles, and challenges them to synthesize and evaluate the information they find in the articles.
I believe it is my duty as an instructor to show students the relevance between the course materials and their everyday life and future career. In any class I teach, I hope that students are able to apply the course material to their own lives. For instance, every student has a smart phone and they use a number of apps on their phones. Security and privacy issues of their data, including the photo they share with their friends, can be quite serious. Therefore, I organized a discussion on security features available in widely used mobile apps. From the discussion, students realized that the security concepts introduced in my class, such as encryption, authentication, and access control are closely related to their everyday life, instead of concepts only useful for information security and privacy professionals.
I also take efforts to train next generation educators. For instance, I provide teaching and training opportunities to graduate students so that they can improve their teaching skills. I always encourage my graduate advisees and PhD students to attend my classes so that I can show them how to teach a class. After they are well prepared "theoretically", I invite them to teach some of my lab sessions. In this process, I am always with them and provide my guidance and feedback to them. Although this process actually slows down the things I typically do by myself, my students receive the necessary training in teaching. It is particularly encouraging when I see the following comments in the course evaluation: "I love the TA. He is extremely helpful in this class." I am grateful to see that my PhD students can do a great job in teaching since that is exactly what I intent to achieve when I provide teaching training to them.
In summary, I am very committed to providing a learning environment that is both exciting and rigorous to my students.