Philosophy of Teaching

When teaching my students, I always follow a personal list of axioms that reflect my core values, and help me guide my interaction with my students. These personal convictions for teaching are adopted from my time as a graduate student, educator at University and Elementary school levels, and my time volunteering as a scientific communicator.

  • Career choices change over time, and that's OK
  • Children are curious, and their questions should be listened to
  • Mistakes and challenges are part of progress
  • Age is secondary as a condition for learning
  • Verbal communication is not always the most effective teaching strategy

Using these guidelines, my personal teaching philosophies are:

1. Promoting empathy

Students come from all different backgrounds, and in many cases they already know their interests. This point refers to the ability of clearly expressing my expectations for a lesson while acknowledging the right of a student to feel emotions, both positive or negative, towards the lesson and without fear of retaliation. This allows the student to feel validated, allowing for the opportunity to learn by feeling comfortable asking deeper questions like "Why are we doing this?".

2. Keeping it short and interactive

Using tools - like computer programs and coding - to change the form in which complex information is delivered is a learning curve on its own right. However, the nature of some concepts is so well adapted to alternative forms of information, that it becomes a necessity to invest on creating new resources to ensure effective teaching.

3. Active listening helps build confidence

One of the most important attributes of a student is the ability to take on challenges on their own, motivated by curiosity. While conventional scoring systems teach the importance of discipline, they may also limit the capacity of the student to explore new solutions due to fear of academic failure. Actively listening to a student's unique way to address a problem helps them build the confidence of facing important scientific questions by looking at failures as part of a continuum process of finding the truth.

4. Teaching for creativity - Active Learning

Especially true in areas that require high modular thinking, like computer science. The idea of learning a new language is based on the notion of building compound forms of information by sampling other, simpler forms of information. While this process of modularity is fundamental, it is secondary to the main goal of using it to create complex systems. A good analogy to this is learning to read in english by using a book instead of a dictionary.