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Teaching Statement | |
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Teaching itself is a procedure of learning: developing a broad array of skills to meet the needs of students, fostering student mastery of course material while at same time sparking student interest. As my curriculum vita details, I gained valuable experience teaching and working with diverse student populations. I learned much from my experiences as a lecturer, teaching assistant and student. Each experience provided different and challenging opportunities for me to improve as a teacher, as well as demonstrate my dedication, creativity and enthusiasm for teaching. From September 1999 through July 2001, I served as an adjunct lecturer at Union University of Hefei (China) while completing my M.S. degree. In this capacity, I taught several computer science courses. I found strong value in demonstrating interesting and challenging examples that provided a clear representation of the material being conveyed. I firmly believe in a student-centered classroom that engages, motivates and challenges students. This ultimately leads to student success in a course. I have accomplished this through stimulating discussions, classroom activities and group work. Undoubtedly, teaching is reciprocal learning. When I prepared my lectures, I focused them around my students to ensure that they would be able to retain and apply the material in any given situation. While a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo, I continued to hone my teaching skills by serving as a teaching assistant in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering for several courses. These include CSE 113 (Introduction to Computer Science I for Non-Majors), CSE 116 (Introduction to Computer Science for Majors II), CSE516 (Secure E-commerce Technology) and CSE 573 (Computer Vision and Image Processing). These courses provided me with invaluable experience creating, developing and assessing labs, homework as well as projects. I worked with diverse populations and backgrounds, so it was crucial to be aware of the various ability levels. I value individuality, and strive to accommodate different learning styles and student attributes through a variety of teaching strategies and the promotion of an educational environment that emphasizes responsibility, respect, ethics, tolerance, communication, cooperation, understanding and mutual encouragement. I was readily available and accessible to students for recitations and office hours. In addition to office hours, I have used a variety of communication means such as e-mail, newsgroups and telephone. I enjoy teaching as well as research tremendously. Research is to help oneself learn and create something new; teaching is to help students learn and create something new. I enjoy and welcome the opportunity to teach both undergraduate and graduate students. I feel that I can successfully work with both populations as demonstrated in my diverse experience. For undergraduates, I want to help them develop abstract thinking because the thinking of computation is essentially abstract. Starting with programming languages such as Java and C++, as well as data structures, they should gradually develop their abstract thinking capabilities. For graduate students, I will provide them state-of-art technologies and lead them into the frontier of research fields, especially in pattern In conclusion, I want my students to learn through meaningful and interesting lectures, which provide a strong foundation for fundamental, essential concepts while maintaining relevance and applicability to their future careers. Simultaneously, it is very important to help my students improve their critical thinking, and problem solving skills, both individually and as group members. I believe that these skills will help lead them to a successful career. |