Teaching Philosophy v1

My Philosophy of Teaching

I have built up a philosophy of education around the idea that teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects requires emphasis, up-front, on explaining the core principles of a subject, in a myriad of different ways, that appeal to people's intuition and visual thought processes. This is a powerful way of providing students with the abstractions they need to start tackling more complicated subjects, unravel the complexity, and intuit their way around new ideas.

My Teaching Style

My teaching style is based on this philosophy of teaching. To tackle complicated subjects requires up-front work in distilling a very large body of material into the essentials - identifying what students need to know, and what students don't need to know.

I teach these essentials in a clear, intuitive way by giving the student simple, visual abstractions that they can hold in their mind. These mental tools, which I call "intuition pumps," allow the student to build and develop their own mental model. This is a much more powerful way of empowering students to develop their own interpretations of a subject.

The State of STEM Education

My experience with STEM education comes from earning an Associates Degree in Physics at a community college, a Bachelors Degree in chemical engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Utah. I was also a tutor and teaching assistant at all three. During the course of my education, I learned several things about STEM education.

First, I learned that STEM education is a very work-intensive process. The concepts are complicated, and require a lot of work and explaining to understand. The process becomes exponentially more expensive the more ill-equipped the students are. This actually creates a negative feedback loop - as teaching becomes worse, fewer students are equipped to tackle concepts on their own, leading to the teaching work being more intensive, leading to increased frustration and less time spent on teaching, leading to teaching becoming worse...

I also learned early that STEM teaching, as it is currently practiced in most colleges and universities, almost exclusively uses a facts-based, information-centric approach. Systems are taught by writing their governing equations on the blackboard, classes involve regurgitating material from textbooks, and the process generally resembles the way a mother bird feeds her young: the results are not pretty. If you're not good at tackling complicated subjects on your own, if you aren't good at interpreting dense textbooks and lectures, good luck getting through four years of engineering education!

STEM is primarily focused on complex systems. To teach complex systems, you must help the student connect the inputs - system rules and definitions - with the outputs - the system behaviors. This then allows the student to construct a model of the process - a mental model, that is, a model simple enough to hold in one's mind.

But STEM teaching, by being facts-based and information-centric, leaves all of the work of understanding - that is, connecting system structure (inputs) to system behavior (output) and constructing a mental model - to the student. This is why STEM education fails so many students - and makes the students like they're the ones who failed.

More Problems

The inability of STEM education to cater to a wider variety of perspectives and thinkers has led it to the point where it is now: aloof and inaccessible, and suffering from a lack of diversity. The problems mentioned above feed on themselves. Less effort spent on teaching leads to more frustrated students, and that leads to more students leaving STEM fields. As that happens, the only students who are left in STEM fields are the ones whose style of learning and thinking matches those of their teachers. They go on to become teachers who, like the teachers before them, have trouble articulating their abstractions and mental models to students.

How Do We Fix It

The solution, of course, lies in the teaching philosophy that I opened with: by focusing on distilling subject matter to what's most important, and communicating these abstractions in intuitive and visual ways that appeal to many different types of learners, it opens STEM fields up to more people with a wider variety of perspectives and thinking styles.

So what's the problem? The problem is, this requires STEM educators to put more effort into their teaching, and transition from a teaching style where lecture material (i.e., textbook content) is already prepared, to a teaching style where the educator has to do more legwork and act as an intermediary between the students and the textbook.

But this is precisely the role that educators are supposed to play in the first place! That's why a professor is at a university! Not that professors actually realize this. It's unfortunate that the noble calling of teaching others has been diluted by the insane rush to grab research dollars, caused in turn by universities greedily taking more of those research dollars in trying to fill budget gaps, which in turn is caused by stupendously stupid decisions made by lawmakers to starve fine educational institutions and deprive the citizenry of the right to an education.

And somewhere in this swirl of human greed, students are adrift, without guidance.

To make STEM fields more accessible to people who have been turned away by unfriendly professors and torrents of confusing verbiage, to increase diversity in STEM fields, and to move STEM out of the inaccessible silo that it sits in today, requires STEM educators to focus on creating better, simpler abstractions that appeal to our visual brains and our intuition. This is particularly important when the material is a student's first introduction to a STEM field.

About Me

I am a chemical engineer by training, a writer and a communicator by nature, a hacker and programmer by choice, and I am driven to teach. My experiences as an engineering student, as a teacher, and as an autodidact have given me insight into people's learning processes – what's different, what's universal. Combined with a voracious appetite for reading and a visual learning style, I am able to teach to different styles of learning and break down complicated ideas in simple, clear ways. And more than anything, I want to contribute something meaningful back to the open source software community.

Useful Links

This paper is a classic paper on learning styles in engineering education: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/LS-1988.pdf

It focuses primarily on intuitive and deductive styles of learning and teaching, and how that applies to engineering.