Teaching

Teaching for me is not an isolated activity but central to all that I do. My pedagogical approach primarily follows two main paradigms: education-through-practical-research and learning-through-research-experiments. I never feel more energized than finishing a lecture/discussion where I know my team/students reached the desired outcomes.

I believe in engaging students thoroughly on a topic and hence, I follow active learning methods, which takes many forms. Most commonly, through these methods students fully participate in their learning by thinking, discussing, investigating, in small or large activities centered around writing, talking, problem solving, or reflecting.

To engage my students, I often use outside material such as YouTube videos in my classes. I start the discussion with focused questions which energizes students in class activities. I help students create diagrams and tables of a given concept, facilitate the conversation, and hastily write their ideas on the board. I demonstrate various applications in which a mathematical concept can contribute to the understanding of the driving mechanisms of a problem and how the combination of resources can be used in our understanding. By the end of class, each student is fully absorbed.

I help my team/students engage in their growth mindset path so that they can seek out new challenges for themselves, be persistent in their efforts and draw inspirations from theirs and other’s success. I regularly identify new strategies and approaches for them so that their efforts can be productive.

I am committed to guiding students in learning and applying their knowledge to solve meaningful and relevant problems in life and to achieve their goals. As a mathematics teacher and mentor, I often meet students and peers who are less interested in mathematics and I strongly believe that it is our responsibility as an expert, to make mathematics interesting for them.

I incorporate what I call an, “inverse teaching methodology” in my classes, research groups and teams. This method of training includes starting with a real cutting edge application topic, that is directly relevant to the students/peers. After providing them with some instructions, I guide them through a stimulation of equations using popular software for the topic. I provide related data needed to perform data analysis and statistical methods before finally introducing mathematical analysis. I believe this method works well at engaging the student throughout the lesson.