Teaching Statement

My teaching philosophy aims to transform students from young adults to contributors to the surrounding community, the industry, and the progression of science and technology. It focused on driving students to achieve their potential; in my class, this would be the ability to grasp how things worked and code. They gain hands-on skills that are used in the real world beyond textbooks, the power and curiosity to research and discover, more importantly, learning how to learn. When they move past the class, they should have the ability to look for the resources they need to achieve their goals. 

All of these are achieved through a combination of strategies contributing to their mastering of concepts. Learning is a metacognitive process; students need to be capable of creating their own product to reflect that they genuinely understand knowledge. That is how I designed my classes around. I employed strategies to encourage students to code with fun activities and generate fun outcomes. For example, in an entry-level computer science class involving python programming, I spent 50% of the time mentoring students in labs beyond lectures, guiding them to build ASCII games designed by themselves with their own creative storytelling. Students demonstrated their project on the Wilmington Information Technology eXchange.

My other teaching strategy has been proof tested by working with interns from the Global Education, Academics, and Research Skills (GEARS) program at NC State University for two years over six sessions. It is proven through my teaching and mentoring that teaching or explaining a concept to students works best when putting them into solving a real-life problem that is hard to resolve without such a concept. Far better than memorizing textbooks, students engaged more in learning and research activities, generating papers that went into publication. This accomplishment typically takes one semester for graduate students to complete. In contrast, in 2020, my undergraduate students completed it in 3 months on a real-world topic of detecting problem statements in peer assessment. By employing a practice-fail - self-initiated research - then teaching strategy, students learned scientific ways of thinking beyond tools and concepts in machine learning, then published papers in an educational data mining conference.

Besides that, I’ve also found that adding peer review and some level of the flipped classroom helps students understand concepts faster. In my lab, I’ve organized regular sessions to share the knowledge members obtained through projects. Often, people need to spend considerably more time to gain a deeper understanding of that knowledge before making it water-tight to teach others. Over a semester, they have created four manuscripts to submit to conferences. 

In sum, I’ve always measured learning outcomes through what students can do rather than their scores, and I’m glad to see them revisiting my office with their original ideas and products years after finishing my class. My pedagogical strategies are dedicated to bringing programming and engineering to the students in ways beyond textbooks and lectures. As a result, those strategies have boosted their interests and helped them carry knowledge, wisdom, and the ability to seek them independently long after they leave my classroom.