Teaching Statement

I received my PhD from Physics department at Duke University. In my graduate school, I had many opportunities for outreach, teaching, and pedagogical training. I participated in science community outreach through stargazing open houses at the Duke Teaching Observatory; learnt about pedagogical practices through the Duke Graduate School’s Certificate in College Teaching and by working as a Teaching Assistant (TA) for several Duke physics courses. Any course in physics comes associated with it new mathematics, new physical insights and translation of the new mathematics into physical insights. Juggling these abstract physical and mathematical ideas simultaneously is what makes physics learning so challenging.

Since the whole point of learning physics is to understand everyday experience, I make sure to give examples from everyday life as illustrations of the physics concepts that I am teaching. In addition, I attempt to show my students the problems that are at the forefront of current research. This is to emphasize the fact that there are still unresolved open problems in physics. For instance, it is easy to introduce the dark matter problem when discussing gravitation in an introductory physics class. Providing historical context is also useful as providing the original motivation for a development of a topic is the best way to introduce it and also highlights that physics has been developed by inter-generational collaboration between human beings. My goal is to always make sure that in my classroom students feel they’re in a nurturing, safe environment while learning.

Research on education has suggested that students learn better by actively engaging with course material rather than by listening to passive lectures. In all of my teaching roles so far, I have implemented practices designed to cultivate an environment of student participation, peer instruction, and question-asking.

In my discussion sessions of the Introductory Physics course at Duke, I structured them so that group problem solving could be done once or twice between mini-lectures. This semester, I have been using in-lecture concept questions (with ABCD cards) as well as tutorials with practice questions and challenging group problems. Utilizing class time for these activities has numerous benefits – students share ideas and explain their answers to one another, they have time to process and apply material from a lecture, and I have the opportunity to observe what they are learning and what concepts need to be revisited. Particularly with ABCD cards, students approach numerous eye-opening questions in a low-stakes, interactive format, and they are given opportunities to defend their positions (an exercise that, much like teaching itself, can cause one to realize the limits of one’s own knowledge) with one another.

While my ideal course structure involves intensive active learning components, I am still searching for the appropriate balances among lectures, outside-of-class readings and assignments, and in-class engagement. I recognize that there are many areas in which I can and should grow as a teacher, and I am prepared to try different research-backed methods in future courses, such as minute papers and interactive lecture demonstrations, to help my students learn more effectively.

A very important aspect of my teaching philosophy is that teachers need to be flexible, both with students experiencing difficulties in a course and themselves as they continue to adopt more effective teaching practices based on their student population and their own strengths. One of the most challenging aspects of teaching for me so far as a graduate student, has been adjusting my expectations in a class that is influenced strongly by the difficulties of the coronavirus pandemic. I have needed to adjust the course pace and workload accordingly, and students and I are now better calibrated given the need to review essential background that was not necessarily discussed in as much depth during the pandemic semesters as it normally would have been.

Flexibility also applies to my growth as an instructor. As I have mentioned earlier, I am passionate about helping students learn, and I recognize that there is much learning that I have ahead as I pursue a career focused on teaching undergraduates. I am excited to develop as a teacher alongside my future colleagues, from whom I would gladly consider advice, ideas, and observations, in College or University programs designed to aid faculty teaching development, and through active engagement with teaching-focused organizations such as the AAPT.