Teaching statement

As an educational researcher I am in the fortunate position that one aspect of my job (research) informs the other (teaching) which motivates the former. My interest in education research is driven by my practical experiences as a teacher and curriculum designer.

Experience

I have a variety of teaching experiences that have prepared me for academic teaching:

  • 2 years full-time teaching experience. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I spent two years as a full-time English teacher, (and part-time computer teacher) for elementary-, middle-, high-school, and adult students in Mongolia.
  • Curriculum design. As a graduate student, I taught, as well as designed (or redesigned) the curricula for several courses:
    • Educational Game Design,
    • Technology Consulting in the Community, and
    • Programming Usable Interfaces.
  • Instructional methods. As an Institute of Educational Sciences funded fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research, I am well versed in instructional theory and design methods, which include, as part of my field-based experience, Lesson Study - an iterative process used by Japanese teachers to improve curricula.
  • Instructional technology. Educational technology can significantly improve learning efficiency. As the subject of my research, I have developed several technologies for classroom use such as:
    • The Causality Lab for teaching science learning,
    • iLogos, for teaching argumentation,
    • Policy World, for teaching service learning, and
    • several short on-line programming modules.
  • Organizing. Any new curriculum effort involves mobilizing groups of people. During my time as a Peaces Corps volunteer, I planned a health education project to teach a variety of life skills including communication, decision-making, critical thinking, etc. With support from the United Nations Development Project, the project resulted in a national network of after-school clubs, a multi-volume set of lesson plans, teacher-training seminars, and was later adopted by the Mongolian Ministry of Health and Education as part of its national curriculum. On a smaller scale, while a graduate student, I initiated a now popular course in educational game design, and organized a public speaking club for graduate students and faculty that became the 2nd ranked Toastmasters club by its second year (out of 68).

Philosophy

Although we often form a teaching philosophy based on particular methods or beliefs about learners, teachers and learning scientists have built up enough experience and knowledge that we can now treat instructional design as an engineering discipline, much as Human-Computer Interaction approaches the design of human-centered technology. When designing a new curriculum, I explicitly define the learning goals and assessments for the course, then use principles from educational psychology to make informed predictions about the best instructional techniques to use given the particular set of learners, learning content and context. Then, in conjunction with other instructors, I use Lesson Study as a continuous development process, I collect observations about the success of the lessons in order to redesign and test the lessons again. This process also drives the research questions I ask, and the research results in turn improve instruction. In this manner I seek to integrate, theory, practice and design.

Interests

While I am interested in teaching any course, I can prepare the following on relatively short notice:

  • Programming User Interfaces. Prototyping, animation and interactive programming, (for non-programmers).
  • Software architecture for user interfaces. Designing complex interfaces (for programmers).
  • Educational game design. Methods for designing digital and non-digital games for learning.
  • Cognitive tutoring & educational technology. Methods for designing technology for learning.
  • Educational goals, assessment and instruction. Methods for designing instruction.
  • Human-Computer Interaction. Usability methods, interaction designs and rapid prototyping.
  • Technology consulting in the community. Engineers work with non-profits to develop a real-world technology project.
  • Quantitative and qualitative research methods. Experiments, protocol analysis, surveys, etc.
  • Public speaking. Introduction to speaking for researchers, teachers and students.