GTA Teaching Statement

Teaching Statement
My teaching experience goes back to the Fall 2014 when I was offered a GTA position for the Engineering Statics and the Mechanics of Materials. From then on, my department has designated me as the GTA for the same courses because I get positive feedback from students each semester. As the only GTA in both courses with more than one hundred students, my work load is more than average in my department. However, I have been absolutely enjoying the teaching experience as well as the interaction with my students. I have experimented various teaching methods each semester to keep all my students on the top of the materials. In below, I have listed the three most effective teaching methods from my last four years’ teaching experience.
Integrate various medias into teaching
It was a challenge for me to answer questions for over a hundred students at the beginning of my teaching.
To teach more effectively, I started to categorize the questions and create videos to answer their questions. To test students’ understanding of the courses, I have integrated interactive quizzes in each video through Camtasia which an affordable video editing software. With the help of the software, I can track who watched the video and how are their performance on the quizzes. Since they can watch the online videos whenever they want to, I can deliver the knowledge equally to anyone through my videos. Currently, I have been working on a study video project of the Mechanics of Materials that aims to be the substitution for the costly textbook for students at The University of Kansas. Since the online learning experience becomes more and more popular among universities around the world, I would love to develop more online study materials for the engineering students at the University of Hawai’i . Here is a link to my teaching video
example: https://www.screencast.com/t/4Xw6V98il Teach student how to learn
The teaching philosophy I believe is that we should stimulate students’ self-teaching skills. During the years of teaching, I have inspired my students to think by themselves instead of giving them the solution. Whenever students come to my office hours with questions about assignments, I usually tell them how they can retrace the problem back to the basic concept with related examples in the textbook. In this way, students can find the solution by learning and deriving from the textbook examples. It is important that they can obtain the skills of problem-solving, which is something I strive to teach students in my classroom. This method works great for students who have a good understanding level and these students can be great helpers for their peers in my classroom.
Students learn better through teamwork
I believe that students learn better through teamwork.
Since the fall semester 2017, I have experimented the team-based class experiment. Students are divided into twenty groups with five members in each group. Once the groups are assigned, all the homework and exams are based on the group performance. I encourage the students to teach their peers with the topics they are good at. In such way, students not only learn from me but also learn from their peers. The feedback at the end of each semester was a much higher satisfaction of the learning experience than the previous semesters. More important, my students learn to be a team player which is very an important quality when they work as engineers after graduation. Furthermore, my class becomes a time that students can build friendship, learn to help, and support each
other.
My long-term teaching goals
Besides the courses like the Engineering Statics and the Mechanics of Materials that I can teach right away. As a long-term, I plan to develop a series of undergraduate and graduate level courses based on my research which include batteries, electric vehicles and the optimal control. The courses will consist of lectures, experiments, and class projects. Ultimately, a small-scale electric vehicle will be designed and built by students with the battery cells they fabricate from my lab. Moreover, students will get a chance to learn programing and modeling skills through MATLAB and COMSOL Multiphysics in my courses. The battery and electric vehicle models they will build from my courses can provide them a tool to start their own research. Since these courses will be closely related to my latest research, it would inspire students to be part of my research team. It will be a great opportunity for me to bring this exciting teaching activity to the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Hawai’i.

John Liu