Teaching Philosophy

I view teaching as facilitated learning, an active partnership in which both instructor and student grow. Effective teaching both transmits essential knowledge and empowers students to think critically, solve problems, and generate new ideas.

To guide my teaching, I draw on Bloom’s revised taxonomy as a framework for promoting higher-order thinking. While foundational levels (remembering, understanding) are necessary, true learning occurs when students apply, analyze, evaluate, and ultimately create. These advanced skills enable students not just to absorb knowledge, but to identify its limits, formulate new questions, and pursue independent research, essential abilities for graduate school and beyond.

To achieve this, I follow two core principles:

1. Minimize passive lecturing: Teaching should reduce one-way delivery to the essentials (i.e., key concepts, generalizations, and examples) while freeing space for active engagement.

2. Maximize active student interaction with content: Students should actively grapple with the material on their own: connecting new ideas to prior knowledge, identifying patterns, asking critical questions, and filling knowledge gaps independently.

Putting it into practice, teaching should follow an inductive approach: beginning with concrete, familiar examples and guiding students to discover abstract principles. This not only promotes transfer to new problems but strengthens long-term retention. Teaching should also aim to foster an active learning environment, where students build connections themselves rather than receiving them fully formed.

Ultimately, great teaching equips students to become independent thinkers, capable of analyzing knowledge, creating ideas, and contributing meaningfully to their field.

Resources:

• Therese Huston: Teaching What You Don’t Know, Harvard University Press, 2012.

• Patricia Armstrong: Bloom’s Taxonomy, Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, 2010.