Jiasong Fang Teaching Philosophy
A teacher is a person who creates an environment that is conducive to
learning รท a place where students can immerse themselves in a subject
or discipline as they assimilate a body of requisite information, concepts,
and/or skills. Learning is not a passive process, it requires motivation,
effort, and persistence. Good students enter the learning environment
with a commitment to scholarship, a willingness to work, and a sense
of personal responsibility toward achieving their educational goals.
Good teachers provide an environment that is challenging yet supportive.
They set goals and deadlines. They furnish resources, critique performance,
and provide enough stimulation to minimize distractions and sustain
motivation.
In my role as a teacher, I believe I have three primary functions: tour
guide, facilitator, and gate keeper. These are not mutually exclusive
activities, although students often regard them as such. Each lecture,
laboratory, or homework assignment contains elements of all three functions.
As a tour guide, I lead my students on an intellectual journey through
their course of study. I view a course as a complete journey (for example,
for Contaminant Hydrogeology, the topics start from ground water contamination,
to contaminant aqueous transport, multiphase transport, transformation
and biodegradation, sampling and analysis, remediation and assessment).
My role is to point out the scenic attractions, highlighting particular
features of the subject matter, and focusing attention on major points,
important terms or concepts, relevant issues, and significant relationships.
It is my responsibility to decide where the path leads, what topics
are important, which concepts are central, and how much emphasis is
placed on each subject area.
As a facilitator, my job is to provide an organizational framework and
a set of tools that students can use to assimilate the knowledge they
seek. These tools must be sufficiently diverse to accommodate the varying
needs of different personalities and learning styles. In my courses,
I provide handouts, study guides, and homework assignments that supplement
lectures and labs. On the Internet, my students can find syllabus, lecture
notes, customized semester calendar, study guides, and assignments.
The variety of these resources is designed to facilitate students to
assimilate the knowledge.
As a gate keeper, I am responsible for setting standards of achievement
and for evaluating the progress of my students against those standards.
I do not reward laziness or sloppy thinking. I insist upon excellence.
In the course of their education, I expect students to develop an ability
to think critically and analytically, to know what questions to ask
before making a decision, and to know where to look for answers to their
questions.
