With retrospection of my own student life, I realized how a teacher, a mentor could inspire and shape students’ future in certain ways. Therefore, whenever considering the possibility of being a teacher myself, I can feel the enthusiasm rooted in the heart as well as the responsibility fallen upon the shoulder.
My teaching philosophy can be summarized to three main points:
Every student has the ability to succeed. Although there are always individual differences in terms of academic performance, I believe every student can achieve their own success once they make efforts. Therefore, I think, an instructor should treat every student equally but differently. An instructor should try to recognize students’ potentials and always encourage them and guide them to finally accomplish their own goals.
Teaching is not only to impart domain-specific knowledge, but also to foster general thinking ability. To my understanding, for a teacher, a very important task is to help students develop critical thinking skills-the ability to assess, create and articulate ideas, and to analyze and synthesize different kinds of information. Although it is not a simple task which could be accomplished by a single teacher during a single course, it could be built up gradually if every teacher makes a little effort. In order to help students develop general thinking ability, I think an instructor should always interact with students, get them involved in discussions and encourage them to express their ideas freely.
Teaching is also a challenging learning process. The more you know, the more you don’t know. Even an instructor may have taught a course several times, s/he still learn new things from each teaching experience—learn new achievements related to the course topic, learn how to improve the quality of the class, learn from interacting with a new group of students …