1. Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my life as a student, I had always been thankful to the teachers who had taught me along the way regardless of their varying pedagogies, of which I find there are two general types. For one of the said types, I am aware of certain times when I was sitting in a class and learning nothing. Conversely for the other type, I became aware that I had learned a lot without noticing how time was creeping off. As a student, I found that I could cope with both kinds of teachers; one that would end up teach “everything” and the other that teaches “nothing”, that is, as perceived by the students themselves.

Today I am a teacher myself, and being an educator, while learning from the many teachers I came across, I now have my very own ideals; I believe that a student can be considered to “learn” something when they are able to express and layout all that they have learned from a class. No matter how organised my notes were to them, if they are unable express and decode the knowledge from my class, they have learned nothing! Hence, encoding our knowledge into a digestible format for our students is our job, but at the same time teaching them to decode it is equally important in pushing them up their learning curve. Decoding of knowledge can be done by challenging the students with problems, tasks, questions or even something as simple as a quiz. It gets their synapses fired when they are asked to decode their knowledge, and it is this “firing” that keeps this knowledge staying and staining the memory canvas within their brain cells for a deep and memorable learning.

While educating communication takes place. In this process, we, the educators/ lecturers are the encoder, a person who develops and sends the message. The encoder should also take into account any ‘noise’ that might interfere with their message, such as other messages, distractions, or influences. Student in this case is audience and ‘decodes’, or interprets, the message for themselves. In the student, it is the process of turning communication into thoughts. The perceived thought then shall be used and if the communication is successful, student should be able to use their own word in expressing what they have learnt.

Oftentimes, one way teaching did not involve effective message delivery a.k.a learning did not take place. Hence, in completing the cycle of effective knowledge transfer, activities that require student to think are essential.

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