Teaching

During my academic career, I’ve had the opportunity to be both a teaching assistant and course instructor. You can find examples of my teaching below, along with my teaching philosophy.

Showcasing my teaching

I wrote a blog post on my experience teaching Fluid Mechanics 1. Here are some examples of my teaching materials:

Here is a YouTube playlist of my lectures:

Building my teaching skills

I continue to seek training on how to teach university-level classes. I have the following accreditations:

Teaching philosophy

“Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.” - Herbert Simon

This quote from Herbert Simon sits at the core of my teaching practice. From my own experiences as an undergraduate engineering student, I have come to realize the utmost truth in this idea. Our focus as teachers should be to shape those thoughts and provide targeted learning activities for the students. In doing so, we maximize student learning at the institution and provide the students the tools to be lifelong learners in their engineering careers. My teaching practice is based on three main principles:

  1. Constructive alignment in course design
  2. Student-centred learning activities within the zone of proximal development
  3. Continued development of my pedagogical approach as my career grows.

Further, it is my goal to be an inclusive and compassionate teacher.

Constructive alignment

I strive for constructive alignment in my teaching because it provides a predictable, fair, and supportive environment for the learners. Since learning results from what the student does, I believe that the true power of constructive alignment is to support deliberate practice by the learner. The following diagram illustrates what I believe the roles of the student and teacher are in the learning process.

I believe that engineering students seek an environment where they can complete the deliberate practice feedback loop. Usually, when students have issues with a course, there is a clear misalignment between one of the three pillars of constructive alignment shown above. Over time, this repeated deliberate practice loop encourages distributed practice, a powerful method of strengthening long-term neural pathways within the learner’s brain.

Learning outcomes: I aim to set learning outcomes that are measurable, contextualized, and aligned with an appropriate rank of Bloom’s taxonomy. Well-designed learning outcomes empower students to set clear goals for their learning. For this reason, I discuss learning outcomes at the start of each lecture and tutorial with the students, so they implicitly begin the deliberate practice loop. In my syllabus, I provide course-level learning objectives.

Assessments: While summative assessments are the traditional method of evaluating engineering students, I also make frequent use of formative assessments. I am acting on evidence that frequent feedback ranks as one of the most effective teaching strategies. Repeated formative assessments have been demonstrated to strengthen neural encodings within the learner’s brain. In this low-stakes environment, the students can get frequent feedback on their learning prior to high-stakes assessments like exams. When it comes to high-stakes summative assessments, I believe students value fairness above all. I have grown to define fairness as no surprises on the exam. After writing my midterm exam designed with this philosophy, a student recently emailed me to say my exam “was very fair and quite enjoyable” – clear feedback for me that my summative assessment approach is working.

Even within a constructively aligned course, how do we motivate students to put in effort on their end? Engineering courses often contain complex concepts – students understand this, and I have learned through my teaching that once students see the real-world implications of an abstract concept, along with having trust that their deliberate practice will be supported and rewarded, they are motivated to put in effort. These two motivational principles are demonstrated in the following student feedback:

“I am really enjoying the use of videos as well, it really helps to reinforce what we’re learning and connect the math to the real world. The excellent teaching makes me enthusiastic about coming to lecture and overall is a very well structured course.”

Learning activities

A carefully designed learning activity allows the teacher to directly influence what the student does. I believe that we should aim to place the students in the zone of proximal development. An activity falls within this zone if it is challenging, yet still possible with appropriate instructional scaffolding. For the learner, this feeling is summarized as:

“Level of difficulty in the most recent tutorial (tutorial 3) was good as it was challenging enough to make us actually think and apply but not to the point where everyone is stumped.”

During teaching, I believe that check-ins with the students are a valuable mini-learning activity that serve to break up monotonous lectures and encourage the student’s deliberate practice loop. Online tools such as Mentimeter are highly valuable in that they allow rapid polling of class understanding, anonymous question submission, and immediate feedback on what the students are having trouble understanding. Rather than working through long examples, I provide scaffolding which allows the students to complete short example on their own and submit answers through Mentimeter. This immediate feedback allows me to dynamically adjust class time to provide the greatest value for the students. Several students mentioned the merits of this approach for their learning in my course feedback.

Redesigning the tutorials in my Fluids 1 class has been a valuable way to provide weekly learning activities that also serve as formative assessments, crucially closing the deliberate practice loop on a weekly basis. As an example, to teach experimental design concepts such as similarity, I designed an open-ended tutorial where the students formed their own engineering companies. The students were then hired to design a wind tunnel experiment for a “design engineer client” (the teaching assistants), who wished to predict their design’s aerodynamic performance. The students had a limited number of questions they could ask the client, which encouraged careful thought about exactly what information would be needed or available from such a client in the real world. The difficulty level was perfectly placed within the zone of proximal development. The power of team-based learning within the groups was clear. To close the loop on this assignment and provide further experiential learning opportunities, I have also organized a field trip for my class of 97 students to a local experimental facility with both wind and water tunnels.

Continued development of my pedagogical approach

My pedagogical approach continues to evolve based on student feedback and professional development. Part of my continued development is to seek advice and strategies from other instructors, attend trainings, and learn what the current state-of-the-art in engineering teaching is. I also regularly seek student feedback. It is important for me to adapt my teaching approach to what is working for the students. A clear example of this desire for feedback is my organizing of an early student feedback poll, conducted after three weeks in my class. Personal reflection on metacognition (“thinking about how we think”) has also been helpful for me to more efficiently learn how to teach. Embedding metacognitive discussions into my lectures has also been effective for student understanding of concepts not just in my course, but more broadly.

Inclusivity and being a compassionate teacher

Engineering students have responsibilities and needs that we need to be compassionate and inclusive towards in our teaching practice. Students may be in a stressful round of co-op interviews, encounter a sudden illness, or need a mental health break. Other students may have accessibility needs. I believe that circumstances outside the student’s control must not affect the learning opportunity provided to the student. In my teaching, I strive to make activities and materials as broadly accessible as possible. Some clear examples of this in my own teaching practice include posting video recordings of all lectures, designing learning activities on highly accessible platforms such as Mentimeter, and building flexibility into the design of my course. My course grading scheme is highly flexible, and accommodates students who need to miss a tutorial due to any circumstance outside of their control. When students need to attend an interview, become ill, or just need a mental break, I can accommodate this via flexibility built into my assessment structure. Altogether, these compassionate efforts help me to create a supportive learning setting, evidenced by 91.1% of my student survey respondents indicating they strongly agree my class had an inclusive learning environment.