Teaching Statement

While earning my bachelor and graduate degrees in engineering, I have been able to develop and sharpen my own teaching techniques. Teaching skills are crucial to be successful while giving a presentation, writing fellowship and grant applications, mentoring students, or leading a class, all of which are key components to achieving a PhD and becoming a faculty member. Starting as a swim instructor in high school and leading discussion sections and labs for over 160 students as an undergraduate teaching assistant, I discovered a passion for teaching well before applying to doctoral programs. It wasn’t until I gave a guest lecture to over 120 students as an undergraduate that I realized I was interested in becoming a professor. While my pre-graduate school experiences allowed me to hone my teaching skills for formal classrooms, mentoring nine students in a research lab, leading outreach events for K-12 students, and writing and presenting research to the general scientific community has allowed me to zero-in on effective teaching strategies applicable for every scenario. The three overarching teaching techniques that have risen from these experiences are: 1) Concept-based learning; 2) Hands-on teaching; and 3) Individualization of content. I look forward to integrating these three teaching methods into my role as a professor.

Hands-on teaching

            To further solidify a student’s understanding of a topic, the student can apply their knowledge through hands-on activities. In engineering, the simplest yet effective method to apply what students learned in the classroom is by working through mathematical problems and completing lab-based exercises. This allows students to engage with the material, figure out gaps in their understanding, and develop intuition. When I taught a weekly discussion section, the students were first walked through the concepts taught that week [such as 19 - 26 minutes in this video], then guided through an example problem [such as 26 - 32 minutes in the same video], and finally given the opportunity to work through a similar math-based problem on their own. The same methodology, when applied to lab classes, helps students to develop creative solutions to open-ended projects such as building their own speaker system or motion-sensor doorbells with simple electrical components. Even during COVID, when lab classes were online, students were building their own circuits at home, such as distance detector shown on the right, and I walked them through how to effectively troubleshoot their problems. This teaching style also applies to young students in K-12, who are excited about doing hands-on projects but need some more guidance to complete them, such as kids creating their own lithography masks or building mag-lev trains. As I transition to becoming a class instructor, enabling students to have ample opportunities to engage with the material in a hands-on fashion will be a major focal point in my course development.

Undergraduate mentee showing his poster at the Triangle Student Research Competition

Concept-based learning

            As an engineer, it is easy to focus on following structured procedures to solve problems, many times forgetting the concepts behind why that method works. By generally understanding a concept, students are able to solve specific problems with ease and carry over this knowledge to future courses and jobs that build-upon these concepts. Since introduction to electrical circuits was one of the foundational courses for all electrical engineering students, it was crucial that the students were clear on the concepts behind electrical components and were not bogged down by the math that this course entailed for each specific problem. In the eight discussion sections I led over the span of two years, the students were reminded of the basics, highlighting conceptually what was presented that week during lecture. Depending on the topic, this might look like showing the flow of electrons in a circuit, intuitively adding arrows indicating which direction the electrons are moving and what happens to the electrons when going through individual components of a circuit, such as in this video from 1 - 5 minutes. Many times, guiding students to think about concepts allows them to not only gain intuition on how they may go about solving problems but also serves as a method to check that their mathematical answers make sense. Since students responded well to discussion time dedicated to digging into the concepts that govern the equations presented in lecture, I worked to integrate this technique into all of my teaching endeavors.

Many of the topics covered in research are inherently complex and often times beyond what a student has learned in the classroom, therefore, explaining general concepts to students I mentor in the lab becomes essential to ensure students, ranging from high school to graduate students, understand their projects. This method has proven useful for ramping up students efficiently yet thoroughly, as each student has produced significant research results within a short amount of time, such as two undergraduates contributing as authors to this publication. After spending three months in the lab, a high school mentee produced significant results which led her to write a first-author journal paper. When leading K-12 outreach in the Durham area, I ensure all the topics covered are easily understandable by the students by working with parents and teachers to gauge the knowledge level. For example, to build a solar-fan with middle school students, students learned how to assemble the circuit part-by-part to learn the importance of each component for this circuit, building off knowledge their teacher has previously covered in class. By knowing my audience and teaching them the basics of complex topics, everyone leaves ready to apply their new knowledge to real-world applications. As I transition to a professor role, especially in the age of AI, allowing students to gain the intuition they need to complete their jobs will be one of the main focuses of my teaching.

Brittany demonstrating a distance detector when students had to complete lab experiments at-home due to COVID.

Individualization of content

            The best yet most challenging part of being a teacher is that every student that walks through the doorway comes from a different background, making it difficult to gauge the successfulness of hands-on and concept-oriented teaching. Recognizing where each student is coming from and tailoring my teaching to ensure that they are learning the material is the third key focus of my teaching. To determine prior knowledge of students, I poll and talk with students before and during the teaching period to ensure that my teaching style and the content being presented is maximizing their learning. Before the review sessions I led for an introduction to microelectronic devices and circuits course, the students had the opportunity to tell me what concepts they needed reviewing and how they would like to work through the problems, so that every student could benefit from the session. In a teaching lab, when a student is unsure how to troubleshoot hardware, I work with them to identify ways to resolve their problems, often times guiding them through new techniques. As a research mentor, I first learn the background knowledge of each of my students and bridge the gap between their understanding and the topics we are researching. Then, we create reasonable goals with specific metrics of success for them to achieve throughout the semester while also establishing a mentoring style that works for them. Throughout the semester, the student gives me feedback during weekly meetings that allows us to refine the project goals and mentoring style. Individualizing content becomes especially important when working with K-12 students, who require complex engineering concepts to be explained in a way that caters to their current background. As I go about building my research lab, developing my own courses, and starting new outreach initiatives, individualizing the content of what is being taught will be at the forefront of my efforts.