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Statement of Philosophy on Teaching and Learning

Real learning is, almost by definition, active learning; it requires the learner to identify and confront areas of missing or incorrect knowledge, and conciously construct a new conceptual framework that incorporates additional, more accurate knowledge. I use active learning techniques to help my students confront the most difficult aspects of a topic, and seek to inspire a passion for learning that will sustain them through the hard work it requires.

As a teacher, my primary goal is to help my students understand fundamental physical laws and appreciate their impact on our daily lives, not just as dry facts in a book or phenomena that occur halfway across the universe. In astronomy, there is a natural inclination to classify objects into a taxonomy of ever narrowing categories. I strive instead to emphasize the fundamental physical processes that shape our universe. For example, while differing by four orders of magnitude in size, the co-planarity of planets in our solar system and stars in the disk of the Andromeda Galaxy both demonstrate the importance of angular momentum conservation in astrophysical systems.

In addition to helping students gain an understanding of a course's core subject matter, I strive to provide them with the tools they need to navigate a world in which scientific issues are increasingly important. Specifically, I hope to help my students understand the nature of scientific inquiry, and develop skills to communicate complex technical ideas clearly. These goals lead me to emphasize the interaction between scientific theories and the empirical data that support them, as well as to provide my students with opportunities to practice interpreting and explaining scientific results with one another.

In practice, I use interactive lectures and guided exercises to provide students with a framework to actively engage the material. I typically use a short (20-30 minute) lecture to introduce a concept, motivating it and providing a first description or example of the core idea. I then use activities to focus students on the most difficult or counter-intuitive aspects of the day's topic, bringing out complications that students are less likely to consider in a passive lecture. I then bring the class back together to recap the exercise, summarize the most important points and clear up any remaining confusions before moving on to the next major concept to be covered.

A typical class from the 50 student introductory astronomy course I taught at the University of Washington provides a concrete example of my approach. I began with a brief (~20 min.) lecture on the structure of the Milky Way, describing how the density of stars on the sky provides a first order understanding of the structure of our Galaxy and providing examples of the spatial distribution of stars we would see from inside galaxies with different shapes. I then led students through an exercise I designed where they worked in small groups to measure stellar densities from Palomar Sky Survey images. Plotting their data on a map of the sky, they compared the observed distribution to those we predicted earlier for different models of the Galaxy, and (usually!) concluded that the Milky Way is a disk-like system, with the Sun located some distance to one side of the disk's center. We then discussed the results as a class, and explored how various factors (namely, the range of stellar luminosities and the presence of dust) impact the accuracy of simple star-count analyses of the structure of the Milky Way.

Depending on the topic and the size of the class, I will actively involve students by leading them through a mini-lab, an analytic problem, a thought experiment, a brief think-pair-share problem or a free-write exercise. Smaller classes lend themselves more naturally to in-depth activities; students can handle more challenging problems and I can circulate among the groups to intervene when students become stuck or confused. In larger classes, sheer numbers prevent me from providing all groups personal oversight, so shorter exercises avoid leaving students hopelessly lost for long periods of class. Instead, a short 5 minute free-write or peer learning exercise helps students engage the material and renew the focus of students whose attention is fading.

While our time in the classroom provides the central structure for every course, students often make the most progress outside of class time, as they read the text, work homework problems, or review for tests and exams. I post my slides and notes from each lecture on the course website so that students can review the main thrust of my lecture, placing their personal notes in the appropriate context. This frees students from the pressure to record the entire lecture, and instead concentrates their notetaking on recording the key ideas that help them grasp the big picture. I repeatedly encourage students to form study groups to review these notes and benefit from one another's knowledge; I also emphasize that even the time they spend explaining material they believe they already understand is valuable, as it cements those concepts in their mind and provides experience discussing technical material that will be beneficial for capstone oral presentations.

While I do encourage my students to engage early and often in peer learning, I also feel a strong commitment to serve as the primary resource and mentor for each of my students. My job is to help my students in their studies and professional development, and that commitment does not end when the class period comes to a close. In addition to clearly defined office hours, I operate with an open door policy, encouraging students to drop in if they are feeling stuck or confused by any aspect of the class. The interactivity of my courses helps my students feel more comfortable taking me up on this offer -- circulating the classroom while students are working on exercises makes it easier to connect to students as individuals, and makes me more approachable than I would be if they always saw me behind a podium.

One area of my teaching that I have worked hard to improve is assessment and evaluation. I assess and evaluate student learning with a focus on consistent, demonstrated mastery of a subject. While I use tests to provide indespensible motivation for students to synthesize material, I find they often encourage short-term memorization rather than true integration of knowlege. I evaluate students based on a wide array of work, weighting weekly problem sets, written papers, and oral presentations as strongly as mid-term and final exams. I then base my grades on a comparision between each student's work and a previously distributed rubric. In addition to helping make my grading more transparent to the students, placing their grades on an absolute scale, instead of a curve, explicitly encourages coopearation instead of competition.

Finally, it is important to remember that in many ways, I am no less a learner than my students. I constantly seek feedback on my teaching from students, colleagues, and other educational resources. Through these evaluations, I was able to identify assessment and evaluation as a weakness, and devoted my time and energy to improving that aspect of my teaching. I view improving my teaching as an ongoing excercise, and look forward to learning new and innovative strategies for enhancing student learning in my courses.