“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” — Prov. 4:23

Philosophy

My vision in teaching is to promote and exemplify Passion for learning, Compassion for the students and peers and Authenticity in all educational activities (PCA). By Passion I mean the inner drive that makes one curious and appreciative of the beauty of Mathematics or the scientific patterns/laws in the Computer Science subject we learn, be mindful of the functions of many real-world applications that make the subject so useful. When a student has that passion, they would have found a source of strength for lifelong learning. By Compassion I mean the kind of grace we show to students or peers in the learning community as if traveler would care for each other on a long exploration. A bottle of water or a piece of snack received in need will make our journey so much more enjoyable. Isn’t that the kind of happiness all students hope to have when they leave their home and step into the world in front of them? By Authenticity, I mean the necessity to achieve learning with integrity and true understanding. Authenticity goes beyond learning without cheating, it means we are honest to ourselves knowing our limits and be willing to discover learning through learning. It further goes beyond good grade although that is certainly desirable. In order to achieve authenticity, we need to be open minded to new methods and tools to give access and help all student to succeed through suitable learning pathway. Over the years since I joined UIUC, my vision has been developed further especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. I see the urgent need to promote the core values in learning that go beyond technical ingredients of our education services, for example the needs of promoting community building and the framework of inclusive learning using Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Approach/practice

Here are some examples of how I approach to achieve the above vision. My methods are either existing best practices I learned from CITL, AE3, literature in education research, teaching academy or developed based on observations, data analysis and findings in my own research on UDL and accessibility. 

To promote passion for learning, I have immersed my lectures with visualizations of examples, Mathematical plots, or real-world applications. For example, the visualization of “Four-season” violin concerto, Simulation of games of chances, the visualization of immune cells using PCA. I also use device or object such as Galton board, dice and poker in the classroom for students to play simple games and understand the probability theory associated with it. In order to engage students actively, I have made poll questions embedded in each lecture for students to solve individually or in group, and thus break the lectures to rhythmic components. Typically, in my lecture, I use inquiry-based method to teach concepts with examples and comparisons. I tried to tell story using each lecture through intuition and insights. I have also trained my TAs regarding my visions and specific approaches in class instruction by regular meetings and in class observations. For my teaching, I have been selected as part of the faculty spotlight in the SIIP project ENGINE that demonstrates good active learning practices. In addition, I have taught students how to develop growth mindset and research-based studying methods for growth mindset has been found directly correlated with good academic performance and long-term outlook of learning outcome. For example, I regularly asked students to review their exams with detailed exam wrappers. 

To promote compassion in our learning community, I used welcome videos in the past 3 semesters to build welcoming environment where I talked about my visions and introduced my family, my hobbies and invited students to share their story as well in a “get to know each other” forum on LMS. I have given students extra credits for serving other students by leading group studies, caring for their needs (ie, covid illness, mental stress), crowd sourcing the lecture video transcripts, or giving feedback to the instructor in person, etc. In addition, I compiled a CS361 music playlist to play before the lecture. Students have commented they like these short pieces of music. I tried to learn every student’s name and have used an on-boarding survey for students to register their special needs and I invited every student with DRES accommodation to meet personally. In addition, in order to help students to connect with each other, I designed both synchronous discussion problems through recitation and asynchronous discussion problems on Canvas for them to learn in a community. Furthermore, in my lectures and assignments, I tried to build emotional connection for students by using social science data or data in biomedical field to show the higher calling of a computer scientist in serving people using their skills.

To promote authentic learning, firstly I set up the policy on academic integrity issues in the syllabus that follows both the departmental policy and the student codes, furthermore I designed questions about academic integrity in the Orientation quiz to make sure students are aware of the policy. I also shared with students my perspectives on grades so that they have a balanced view about performance. To facilitate students’ questions, I organized TA/CA to help answer questions in lecture, on Zoom and enabled anonymous questions on discussion forum. To encourage students to ask for help, I have assigned dedicated CAs for illness accommodations or other flexible deadlines. Furthermore, I shared resources with students on how to learn using published results, thus encouraging them to learn about their own learning. I also communicate with students by prompt feedback through grading, personal feedback, data analysis from past semesters so that students are well informed about their status. I think I also exemplified authenticity by admitting my own errors or mistakes should it happen.

One overarching approach I use in teaching is analyzing students’ data and apply findings from my research projects on universal design for learning to my teaching. For example, I have applied the UDL approaches of providing multiple modalities of content delivery via offering lecture slides (pre-lecture and post-lecture) and lecture videos with transcriptions through ClassTranscribe and multiple ways of assessments for students to demonstrate their understanding. For the two GIANT projects (Fa22 and Fa25), I generated iNotes and Lecture notes with Latex code of equations as extra material. Please refer to my research statement about details on the UDL approaches and material.

Examples of my teaching

The website linked here is an example Canvas course website of CS361 I taught. Please check out the syllabus, all the lecture notes (pre-post), and other learning materials in the course modules.

For information regarding the UDL approaches we apply, check out the nuggets we developed in the UDL research group page.