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Throughout my education, I have had the pleasure of working with excellent teachers. Their most valuable contribution to me was the feeling that I could learn by myself. Learning is a lifelong experience that evolves in time while the process of learning is ultimately individualistic. Likewise, the art of teaching is very personal.
In that respect, I find myself in constructivist epistemology that relies on knowledge construction by learners and iterative use and transformation of previous experiences. Teaching happens based on learners’ previous experiences in a shared environment and is, therefore, consensus-based. Teacher is the mediator within a learning community. The process of teaching involves both the teacher and the students at the same time and continues through an interactive fashion. In addition, factors affecting teaching include personal beliefs, gender, cultural diversity, and individual interests. Sometimes it is easier to state the opposite. So, I would like to emphasize what is not teaching:
- Teaching is not to tell students what to do or what to think,
- Teaching is not to urge students to memorize what we want to hear, and
- Teaching is not lecturing only, though lecturing is necessary to some extent.
Although I taught several courses on theories of teaching and learning, I still find the art of teaching quite challenging. By experience, you may find an optimal set of teaching strategies; however those may need to be adjusted for every classroom in a unique way. Eventually, your job as an instructor is to help students achieve their goals in their lives so that they become effective users of existing, emerging knowledge in the field and contribute to the community by sharing their experiences.
In brief, I try to incorporate the following components into my teaching so that I could tackle the complexity of learning: interactivity, hands-on and minds-on experience, continual development, teaching at different levels, teaching and research, and technology integration.
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