Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I am always a keen observer of my teachers and mentors, often consciously or in my unconscious mind I compare their ways of teaching, interaction with the students, and assess the methods which is most helpful for my own learning and also to the other students. My teaching methods is based on my own experiences as a student, a mentor and as a teacher. I mentored/taught students of different grades (high school, undergraduate and graduate), ages, races and ethnic backgrounds.

My teaching method include use of a mixture of modern and conventional teaching tools with a lot of practical examples, demonstrations or hands-on experiments. Use of modern teaching tools such as audio-visual aids, and power point presentations make the teaching and learning more interesting and enjoyable, but I still find the most effective method of teaching a complex reaction mechanism or an equation is using chalk and a black board.

When a teacher can connect a bookish theory/concept with a real-world problem or a phenomenon, the learning for the students is easy and they can easily digest the concept.

Demonstration is an excellent way to illustrate important principles. For high school/undergraduate students, I often perform liquid nitrogen experiments to demonstrate the effect of temperature on the properties of molecules/materials where I freeze a number of objects including balloons, rubber balls etc in liquid nitrogen to demonstrate how the movement of the molecules gets reduced or stopped and how that affect the properties of the materials.

I believe that the laboratory experiments should be relevant and related to the contemporary chemical research.

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Students should get a hands-on experience on the latest reaction and characterization techniques. Students must understand the reaction mechanism, relevant characterization techniques, analysis of the results and interpretation of the results. Teacher/mentor plays a crucial role, starting from the designing of the experiments to training and guidance through the whole process. I mentor undergraduate students of polymer science of the University of Southern Mississippi for a laboratory class where the students get first hand experience on working in a laboratory, working on different projects, chemical (monomer and polymer) synthesis and characterization and data analysis.

I teach and train students on laboratory safety, synthesis of organic molecules and polymers (advanced synthesis such as control polymerization and surface polymerization) and characterization of molecules. I teach a lab class on atomic force microscopy (AFM) for undergraduate and graduate students where I explain the theory, the technique, and the various applications. My lab class involve students prepare spin coated organic solar cell samples using P3HT/PCBM and then they measure the film thickness and investigate the morphology of the samples via AFM. I make it a point that the students understand the correlation between the thickness and morphology of a sample and its properties for example efficiency of a solar cell. Thus, my idea of teaching involves lecturing and hands on experiments.

I feel it is very important that my classes are organized, the study materials are available to the students at least a day before the class or the laboratory experiments, class requirements and my expectations are clearly conveyed to the students. I must check with the students that they understood the study materials and experiments and I must be available to answer any questions or clarify any doubts. Examination is an important mode to evaluate a student’s understanding of a subject. I prefer short bi-weekly tests or assignments and a final test at the end of a semester. The biweekly test helps me to gauge learning of the students from the class, which students need attention on which specific areas and also if someone is lagging behind who need some extra assistance. I appreciate students’ feedback which they can provide in anonymous manner and I act on the feedback to make me a better mentor/teacher.