TEACHING STATEMENT
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"I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think."

--Socrates

Teaching is a process full of joy and rewards. I enjoy teaching and gain great satisfaction from seeing my students learning new concepts. To me, the goal of teaching is not only transferring knowledge, but also helping students to gain wisdom, and to think independently and creatively.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

My enthusiasm about teaching has driven me to actively participate in all kinds of teaching practices during my graduate studies. I have been a Teaching Assistant (TA) for 4 courses in 7 semesters, given guest talks for 2 lectures, taught 1 programming course independently for 2 semesters, trained 2 departmental webmasters, and mentored many undergraduate and graduate students. The courses I have assisted or taught vary in both class sizes (from 10 to 80 students) and levels (from introductory courses like Computer Literacy & Applications, to upper-level undergraduate courses like Computer Architecture, to graduate courses like Software System Safety). From my assistance with courses of different levels and my interaction with various student groups, I gained a lot of firsthand experience about different learning styles.

Starting summer 2007, I have become the instructor for a programming course, Applied Computer Programming (Visual Basic), in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. Unlike being a TA, I am fully engaged with teaching activities, including designing course material, constructing the syllabus, composing assessments, etc.

Having learned from these experiences, I developed my own teaching philosophies and the following is a sketch of them.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

A well prepared course is halfway to success

The preparation of course material plays a major role in teaching. I usually spent a lot of time preparing abundant material for my course. For every knowledge unit in the syllabus, I designed a set of examples to help students learn and another set of problems to challenge students to think. Each example or problem had several versions with different difficulty levels. This redundancy became very useful when I needed to tune the course content in the middle of semesters.

Encouraging active learning

I believe the learning process should be active. Therefore, in my class, I strongly encouraged group discussion among students. From my experience, the group discussion and in-class interaction stimulated students' interests and made their understanding more concrete. Students learned faster by exchanging thoughts. The interactive discussion helped to create an environment for active learning.

Balancing the basic knowledge and the latest technology

Throughout my teaching practice, I have constantly faced the same problem - balance: balance between basic problem-solving techniques and vocational skills, balance between fundamental knowledge and state-of-the-art developments, balance between breadth and depth, etc. Among them, the balance between the fundamental knowledge and the latest technology developments is of my particular concern. I believe we should modernize our curriculum to help students adapt to the changing field. At the same time, the basic knowledge should be kept as the backbone of the syllabus to build up a solid foundation for students. It is better to seamlessly integrate the two kinds of knowledge together to stimulate deep thinking and interests among students.

Importance of early and frequent feedback

I believe in the importance of early and frequent feedback. It has been proved in my teaching experience. I gave out biweekly short surveys. They were very effective to collect feedback from students. The surveys directly told me how students felt about the course organization and how well they understood the course content. Sometimes students made good suggestions in the surveys too. Based on the feedback, I adjusted my presentation style or tuned the syllabus when necessary. The strategy of early and frequent feedback benefited students with a more suitable course setting. It made my teaching more effective and efficient as well.

Mentoring graduate students to identify problems and to think independently
It is critical for graduate students to develop the ability of identifying problems. They should be given enough freedom to think and to discover. Some students may need more guidance at the beginning stage. However, passing this early stage, every graduate student should be trained to be an independent researcher. I learned this from my advisor, Professor Carl Chang. He usually steps aside, allowing us to explore the field, and then comments on our findings. Such comments help us understand the context of the research fields and finally target our research directions. I have benefited from Professor Chang's style and developed my ability of independent thinking. I want to follow this style when mentoring my future students.

TEACHING INTERESTS

My research and teaching experience enables me to teach a wide variety of undergraduate courses in Computer Science and graduate courses in software engineering. Considering my research interests, I would be more interested in teaching software engineering, including design, analysis and implementation of software and algorithms. I am comfortable to teach in other areas of Computer Science too. Besides, I am interest in modernizing software engineering courses to include new paradigms of software development, such as agile and service-oriented development. It would be exciting to see the integration of such research fronts with traditional software engineering topics.

In addition to encompassing research into fundamental courses, we can also bridge research and teaching by developing a course that closely ties discovery (research) to learning (teaching). As a matter of fact, the process of creating the course itself could stimulate new thoughts on research topics. Speaking from my own background, I would like to initiate a course on modeling and analysis of software systems. Such a course will focus on improving students' analytical abilities and enhancing their problem-solving skills.