TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I have been teaching science both in China and the United States; across the elementary school, secondary school, college, and teacher professional development. I like sharing my expertise with students; care about students' thirsty of knowledge, and enjoy observing and contributing to their growth. I learn from teaching and is always curious about learning sciences and teaching pedagogy, which formulate my beliefs and teaching styles. I had been a national-wide well-known physics teacher in China, winning near 30 awards in science teaching, mentoring science teachers, and doing action research. My major beliefs are:

Knowing students is more important than any sound teaching strategy. Students have different prior knowledge, experience, motivation, and learning styles, so they have different needs for the class. When I first taught high school physics, I learned this lesson and used it in my whole teaching life. While I was happy that all students seemed like physics very much after two-week learning, a parent told me that her kid said that the middle school teachers taught something wrong because the high teacher, I, taught the same content (i.e., velocity) in another way. Students had learned velocity in middle school as the ratio of path length and time. While some middle school science teachers had highlighted the presumption that this formula is appropriate only for one-direction linear motion, other teachers did not. Therefore, when I introduced the new definition of velocity as the ratio of displacement and time, some students, whose teacher did not highlight the presumption, found the results used my formula was different from that used their middle school teachers’ formula for double-direction linear motion. I could imagine how struggling students were when they had to build new knowledge based on rejecting the prior knowledge. From that time, I understand how important knowing students' prior knowledge and experience. I use every method I could to get a better sense of students' understanding, including (a) talking to students before class or during recess; (b) assigning survey to students before class; (c) assigning small quiz to students at the beginning of the class; (d) organize a student physics consulting team to suggest my teaching. This is a secret that keeps my physics class being welcomed by students because I care for every student and know what they need in my class.

Inspiration and motivation are more effective than didactics. I don’t like didactics when I was a student. I like science because I actively involved in science learning, developed my own assumption, did experiments to verify my assumption, etc. I found that the most interesting parts of science as a student is that I am motivated by the aesthetic of science, rather than teachers or parents’ instruction. Therefore, I believe every student, if given the opportunity to explore science, have the potential to learn science, love science, and be creative. When I was a Ph.D. candidate with many years of science teaching experience, I taught a cohort of physics novice teachers who are pursuing a master's in physics teaching degree. I taught Learning Progression based Scientific Modeling in Physics Inquiry. I never lecture students. Instead, I present teaching video clips and encourage teachers to raise questions according to students' learning progression. I then organized the students in groups to discuss. I was impressed that in a group. Two students, who had a different understanding of Physics Inquiry. One student suggested that physics inquiry is a teaching activity that teachers present scenarios to inspire students’ assumption, guide students to design experiments, collect data and analyze data, and then lead students to make a conclusion. Another students object this point—he insisted that Physics Inquiry is a student learning activity rather than a teaching activity. They consulted me, while I did not answer the question directly. Instead, I asked them to reflect the objective of Physics Inquiry and how the teachers and students could promote the objective. Eventually, this argument leads to a whole-class discussion and students learned that the Physics Inquiry is an activity in which students and teachers play different roles, but the objective is to promote students' active engagement in the scientific inquiry and construct knowledge by themselves. 

Learning Science by doing Science. In my view, students could not truly learn science without doing science. This view was evidenced when I audited Dr. Mark Windschitl’s Ambitious Science Teachingat UW and Dr. Alicia Alonzo’s Reflection & Inquiry in Teaching Practiceat MSU, where they both recommend doing science for teacher candidates. When I volunteer taught elementary science, I encouraged students to do science in projects. For example, When I taught Magnet Force and Electric Energy, I asked students to explore how to make an automated spin using a battery; When I taught How Energy is Generated, I asked students to make the energy generator using magnets, pop can, etc. I was so impressed with the students' creativity and capability. After five periods of teaching, I got an evaluation from the teacher of the class,

The students that worked with Dr. Zhai looked forward to each session, and they were thrilled to engage during the lesson. The students wanted to continue learning with him and were always disappointed when the session came to an end...They loved the hands-on experiences and gained a deep knowledge of content. Students truly enjoyed learning with Dr. Zhai. 

Experience of scientific inquiry is more important than knowledge gains. Science inquiry is time-consuming, so many teachers select to tell students the truth or to watch videos instead of to give students the opportunity to explore science by themselves. I never save time from students’ opportunity of experiencing science, because I believe students are supposed to not only gain knowledge but also experience the procedure of inquiry, during which they apply old knowledge, practice thinking, model phenomena, argue with peers, etc., and thus improve their scientific literacy. More important, students experience success and failure so that they know how science really looks like and how scientists work to investigate phenomena and discover new rules of nature. Many times, I saw my students failed during the class, but they continue to explore after class and eventually succeed. I conveyed this belief to the novice science teachers that I taught. I encouraged these teachers to design innovative science for their students by hands and provided evidence to convince them how the experience of scientific inquiry is more important than knowledge gains. After a few months' practices, the teachers believe this creed and would like to apply it in their future teaching.

Respecting students’ difference and meet their needs per se. While happy with most students’ excellent performance in science class, I was struggling with some students who were so not interested in science in my early career years as a science teacher. In order to encourage these disinterested students, I communicated with them and tried to understand them. I found that students were interested in other subjects even though they were not interested in science—some are interested in music, writing, drawing, reading, etc. I believe we, as teachers, should not require students to have equal enthusiasm with science, and we have to respect their diverse interest. Therefore, I start to use their interest in other subjects to promote their science learning. For example, I suggested a student, who was very interested in writing and reading poem, wrote a poem for physics concepts such as light. It is so amazing that the student included all the property of light in a poem and was encouraged by his performance. When I found students don't like science, I try to discover what they are truly interested in and use their interest to guide their science learning. This teaching philosophy derived from a believes: Every student is unique; understand them, respect them, and then we could encourage them in learning.