Statement of Teaching

My current teaching philosophy - a result of my personal experience and readings of science education literature (1,2) can be summarized as follows: Learning is an active process. In order to acquire knowledge, learners must reconstruct it in their minds. Consequently the role of a teacher is mainly to sustain the conditions under which learning takes place. In more practical terms, my pedagogical approach is based on the following general ideas:

• Keep students actively engaged in class. An active classroom environment is a prerequisite for knowledge construction.
• Develop and teach cognitive maps of the subject and general problem solving strategies. Students must always be aware how the goals of a particular week are related to the big picture of the course. Moreover they must learn to differentiate general strategies to solve problems with the particular techniques involved in each case.
• Foresee conceptual difficulties and deal explicitly with expected student misconceptions.
• Design exam problems that combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of physical phenomena. Stress in open ended problems and avoid at any cost problems solved by random equation hunting.

Concerning the choice and organization of the material:

• I would organize the material around a few fundamental ideas. The course as a whole must have unity.
• I would stress common concepts and would avoid cover too many subjects superficially. Deep rather than breadth.
• I would include some of the recent (first half of the twenty century at least) progress in the field adapted to the level of the course. In a course about waves and electromagnetism I would also touch quantum mechanics. In a course about mechanics I would include special relativity and some basic notions of cosmology.
• I would focus on phenomena rather than abstractions.

My main teaching goal is to create an effective learning environment that will help student acquire both problem solving skills and a deep conceptual understanding of the subject. It is my intention to teach according to the state of the art results in physics education research and be especially aware of the student needs and misconceptions.

Teaching experience

Since Spring 2006 I am a lecturer in the Physics Department of Princeton University. I am teaching an introductory physics course for science majors. In addition I am one of the members of the committee appointed by the chair of my department to revise the curriculum of these courses. Finally I would like to stress that the decision to teach was largely due to my interest in education. Previously, as a graduate student, I held teaching assistant positions in Stony Brook (Classical Mechanics), U. of California in Santa Cruz (Introductory Physics Lab) and U. Autonoma de Madrid (Complex analysis).

References:

(1) R.D. Knight, Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Succesful Physics Teaching, Addison Wesley, 2004.

(2)J. Bransford (Editor), A. L. Brown, R. R. Cocking,How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, National Research Council (1999).