Colleges and universities are intended to be places of learning and growth. Fulfilling this expectation in the increasingly complex, rapidly changing, and informationally overloaded world is becoming an increasingly demanding challenge for educators. Today’s college instruction, to be effective, must involve much more than knowledgeable delivery of a subject matter. It is becoming increasingly crucial for a teacher to inspire interest, facilitate active learning through problem-solving, stimulate critical thinking, and help students find a direction to harness their potential. Therefore, when designing and teaching my courses, I focus my effort on creating an engaging, adaptive, and supportive classroom that makes learning meaningful and achievement affordable. The following principles guide my work:
Teaching must focus on real-world problems and exciting professional opportunities. I see my primary role as an educator in helping each student achieve their career dreams through developing skills and qualities that are essential to success in today’s knowledge-driven, highly competitive economic and social environment. Therefore, when preparing a course, I invest substantially in providing relevant, useful, and well-structured course content so that with reasonable effort, every student could take away some of the best tools they need to advance in their professional lives. As an example, in the Data Analysis course that I teach at Georgia State University, students learn cutting-edge data analysis, visualization, and presentation techniques in R, an open-source statistical application in high demand by public and nonprofit employers. The acquired skills provide them with a range of exciting professional opportunities and competitive advantages. I also make sure that students can relate course objectives and activities to real-life situations and apply the knowledge to solving relevant management or policy problems by using real-world examples, datasets, exercises, and hands-on projects. A student in one of my courses noted, “Love the challenging course. I know that this class definitely gave me the skills I need for the real world.”
Motivation and persistence are vital to learning. Research evidence and my own academic experience show that motivation and perseverance are key factors in active learning and achievement. However, the volume and complexity of the content in college courses can make the process of learning frustrating and motivation hard to sustain, especially at the undergraduate level. Besides carefully choosing the course content, I also address this challenge through methodological aspects of my teaching. Specifically, I always start by taking the time to show students the value of the courses they are taking. To facilitate comprehension when teaching concepts that are abstract and difficult to understand, I rely on instructional strategies and resources that include my own teaching tools. For instance, I develop interactive visual applets to illustrate statistical ideas in a way that makes them more intuitively understandable and engaging. By doing this, I also show students my own enthusiasm towards the subject matter, which helps keep them inspired and engaged.
Diversity-responsive teaching improves classroom outcomes. In my different roles at Georgia State University, I have had a valuable opportunity to serve and learn from one of the most diverse student communities in the nation. Being an international student gave me a firsthand understanding of the challenges associated with active engagement in a linguistically and culturally different environment, as well as an appreciation of varying perspectives that may arise from many differences in student backgrounds. Now, as an educator, I am confident that diversity in the classroom has value beyond the social justice and tolerance argument. In the right setting, it can also be an educational asset helping students understand the world around them better and become better citizens and decision-makers. Therefore, recognizing, accommodating, and celebrating diversity has become one of the cornerstone principles of my worldview and philosophy of education.
Diversity management is conventionally viewed from the perspective of identifying mistreatments of and creating an equitable environment for individuals with disadvantaged identities based on race, ethnicity, gender, cultural traits, or sexual orientation. My experience as an instructor shows this is only one essential dimension of diversity that matters in the classroom. In my view, an inclusive classroom that is free of bias, negative attitudes, and discrimination for all students regardless of their social group membership is a bare minimum that every educator must aim for. Diversity-responsive teaching, however, would also effectively suit the learning needs associated with less readily observed differences in students’ socioeconomic status, disability, aptitude, experience, goals, and achievement, which I find to be another important goal to pursue.
To maximize the potential of a diverse classroom, I work to make my classes diversity responsive at the methodological, organizational, and emotional levels. My first strategy is to invest energy in building empathic, respectful, and trustful relationships with students. From day one, I work to demonstrate a friendly, respectful, and caring attitude and foster an emotionally positive relationship where everyone can feel comfortable to be involved. I further reinforce my commitment to creating an unbiased and fair classroom through the design of my assessment techniques. For instance, I use a mix of blind and objective grading methods. In practice, this means that I either grade assignments without identifying student names or develop unambiguous grading rubrics.
When designing a course, I am increasingly adopting learner-centered instructional strategies to facilitate a safe, adaptive, and supportive learning climate to all students, irrespective of where they fall on the achievement continuum. With those goals in mind, I design my grading policies with a focus on learning objectives rather than process, incorporate multiple means of demonstrating outcomes in assignment design, and encourage redoing work until a learning objective is achieved. I choose a teaching style that cultivates a sense of community in the classroom and loosens barriers to communication and expression. For that reason, I always learn student names and interests, engage in face-to-face dialog during class sessions, and participate in student work as a team member.
While my choice of course content is driven by leading students towards promising and exciting professional opportunities, my selection of teaching tools and resources is also rooted in concerns about how to make achievement affordable to those who are financially disadvantaged. In my courses, I increasingly rely on books, articles, and software that students can use inexpensively or for free in class and after graduation. For instance, I have already redesigned my statistical data analysis class so that valuable skills could be learned by relying on high-quality open-source textbooks, such as OpenIntro Statistics, and software, such as R. This approach alleviates the financial pressure on students and helps them focus on learning and achievement.
An effective teacher must stay on the cutting edge. For me, being an effective teacher also means constant self-improvement through the learning of both substantive material and instructional techniques. To remain on the cutting edge in my field, I take advantage of a variety of resources for such advancement. Having particular enthusiasm for quantitative research methods and data science, I systematically take online courses to develop my professional skills further, learn new data tools, and earn certifications.
I also find there is much to learn from my students through our class interactions and their formal feedback. Therefore, I approach measuring student feedback as a vital part of my learner-centered philosophy as it helps me improve my instruction through adjusting the course workload and flow, improving the course structure and content, and adapting the teaching style and techniques.
In sum, I find teaching to be a stimulating profession and a great responsibility. Effectively fulfilling this responsibility requires cutting-edge content and compelling delivery. In my teaching practice, I continuously work on perfecting both my knowledge of the substantive content and my pedagogical skills.
