ProfessorPhilip Cardiff

My main goal as a teacher is to generate passion for the subject matter within the students, and help them to learn and retain the taught content and skills. I strive to help students learn to think in a logical manner, and learn practical skills that they will use in their future careers. As problems in the real engineering world rarely fall within the course of one engineering module, I also endeavour to help students to understand how the various sub-disciplines and concepts fit together.

As a student myself, I am motivated by teachers who display genuine interest and love of the subject matter they are teaching; without such interest, whether real or superficial, I find it very difficult to engage with the teacher and the taught content. Such a perspective has shaped my own approach to teaching, where I aim to generate and nurture passion for a subject within the students. My most enjoyable experiences as a learner are figuring out a concept, where the previously foggy perspective comes into focus; in my role as a teacher, I am motivated by the enjoyment students receive when they experience this for themselves; in this sense, as a teacher I aim to facilitate student learning and realisation experiences. To achieve such an aim, I aspire to design module and session structures so that such learning and realisation experiences can take place; consequently, I see my role as stimulating and nurturing the students’ development, providing knowledge, skills, and, importantly, encouragement.

It is clear that my conception of learning strongly influences the teaching methods that I adopt. I find that students (including myself) learn best through a variety of complementary approaches: I most easily learn a new concept through one-to-one discussion with a teacher or peer, where the back-and-forth out loud dialogue facilitates moments of realisation; such a perspective is most influenced by contemporary theories of constructivist meaning-making, such as Piaget [1], Bruner [2], Vygotsky [3], Bandura et al. [4], Freire [5], and Habermas [6]. Through this social learning structure, my teacher or peer helps me to modify (or build-on) my own internal paradigm of understanding. This perspective is noted by constructivist approaches, where learning is an active process through which learners construct new meaning, and it is recognised that learners interpret and make their own sense of experience and the information they receive. On reflection, to achieve my goal of providing knowledge and skills to the students, I see my role as a teacher being to support the students in making-meaning of the content and challenging their existing internal ideas.

To me, teaching means more than simply reading aloud text from slides; my conception of teaching is that the teacher should bring the content to life for the learner, and teaching means guiding a student though the relevant content and pointing out the most critical pieces of information. In addition, I believe that teaching involves facilitating the students to adapt their own internal perspectives to assimilate the new knowledge; in this respect, teaching clearly involves some level of mentoring/guiding the students as their knowledge develops.

My teaching style is clearly influenced by my own preferred learning styles; however, I recognise there are a variety of preferred student individual learning styles; to allow for a more inclusive method of teaching, I aspire to incorporate multi-model approaches to teaching, including a combination of visual, aural, reading, and kinaesthetic approach, as categorised by VARK [7]; for example, I often combine traditional text-based presentations with embedded audio-visual content from YouTube, where a number of times during the session, the students will be actively asked to engage by solving guided example problems on their own and asked to discuss their results and methods with their neighbour. In modules where I teach the theory and practical use of an engineering analysis software, I provide both live demonstrations and recorded screencast videos (recording of my screen showing me using the engineering software with commentary) that are uploaded to the online system; I have found that such a combination works well at engaging the students and helping them apply their new found knowledge to related problems in a straight-forward manner.

The use of innovative learning and teaching strategies, such as problem-based learning, are concepts that I strive to include in my teaching sessions; from my own experiences as an engineering undergraduate, I often found my attention waning when lectures were monotonic slideshows; in reaction to such approaches, I strive to include active learning methods in all sessions, such as, discussing the relative merits of a particular approach with a neighbour and then giving suggestions to the class through a Student- Response-System. To complement such an approach, the inclusion of so-called scaffold learning techniques have shown to be beneficial e.g. as described by Tharp and Gallimore [8]; I actively try to include these techniques, such as:
- providing time for pupils to construct relationships with each other, via group discussions and comparing answers; 

- allowing pupils’ responses to drive the focus of the sessions, determining the teaching methodology and content;

- inquiring into the students’ understanding of the concepts, in particular their false understandings, before sharing my own understanding of these concepts; and seeking elaboration of students’ responses to questions; 

- encouraging pupils to engage in discussion with myself and with each other students;
- encouraging inquiry by asking open-ended questions and encouraging peer questioning.

I often ask questions to the class, and from the responses and/or reactions (often obtained using a "student response system"), it allows me to gauge the general understanding level of the students; in cases where I feel that the students are struggling with the understanding, I will create metaphors and use different teaching approaches in an attempt to aid mental representation and understanding. Certainly some students will find concepts more easily explained using some methods which others do not find so clear, justifying the use of a variety of teaching approaches. As outlined by Jordan et al. [9], the concept of social learning can be an important and useful tool: although learning is a personal process, it usually occurs in a social setting, or the stronger point, made by social constructivism, that that knowledge is the result of social interaction and language use [9].

My owns views on teaching are broadly in line with constructivist approaches; however, there are a number of aspects of my teaching, and the broader university teaching structure, that clearly display behaviourist features from the approaches of Pavlov [10], Thorndike [11], and Skinner [12], such as curriculum planning, learning outcomes, assessment and behaviour management [9]. As emphasised by Jordan et al. [9], it is important that the educator’s views form a coherent whole, and that they not hold scraps of incompatible theory that clash. By bringing my own conception of learning to light, it helps me to organise them so that they can be used more consciously to engage in on-going inquiry.

It is clear that my conception of a teacher is one of passing on theoretical knowledge, and supporting learners in the learning process. Analysing my own teaching conception further, a concept known as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), proposed by Vygotsky [3], is a useful abstraction: a ZPD is an intellectual space where learner and teacher interact; the teacher can gauge intellectual development of the learner and provide the appropriate support to advance the learner’s thinking; consequently, with teacher support (or a more knowledgeable peer), learners can achieve more than they would unaided. Upon reflection, it is clear that as a teacher I aspire to create such a ZPD, where I can point out the important topics, while also providing the supports necessary for the students to maximise their learning and nurture their interest.

Core to generating and nurturing the students interest is gaining and keeping their attention, a task that is not trivial in a class of 100 second year students. Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences theory suggests that any rich, nourishing topic, any concept worth teaching, can be approached in at least five different ways that will map onto the multiple intelligences [9, 13]. Gardner describes a topic as a room with several entry points that will each engage the attention of different types of learners, namely: Narrational by means of a story; Logical-quantitative by deductive reasoning; Foundational by discussing underlying concepts; Aesthetic by appeal to artistic sensitivity; Experiential by some direct experience. Traditionally, in my own teaching I have adopted the Logical-quantitative and Foundational approaches, somewhat necessitated by the engineering concepts being taught; however, being aware of the variety of methods available to me helps in the development of improved teaching strategies; for example, Experiential methods tend to work well at grasping the students’ attentions when I use show-and-tell and describe a particular engineering component and the students pass it around.

My own research has influenced my teaching in a number of ways: when introducing students to new methods and concepts, I refer to examples of where such methods are used in engineering industry as well as state-of-the-art research techniques in the field; I find that such an approach helps to motivate and interest the students, by providing them with the reason for the importance of the methods in the real world. In many cases, the teaching methods that I would ideally like to employ may be constrained by the class sizes; for example, in a second year module with 100 students I use predominantly slideshow style presentations, whereas in a fifth year module with 20 students, it is much easier to engage the students in class discussions.

The relationship I try to achieve with my students is a one where I am a knowledgeable, approachable guide that motivates students to actively participate in structured learning sessions and partake in self-learning. To achieve this, I operate an open-door policy, where I actively encourage students to approach me with questions and worries, while making them aware of my own time constraints.

The most important thing that I expect of my students is that they attend the structured module sessions, such as lectures, laboratories and tutorials, and enter the learning environment with a commitment to scholarship, a willingness to work, to actively engage and participate, and a sense of personal responsibility toward achieving their educational goals. I aim to be clear with what I expect from the students in terms of the timeline of assessments and what is required for each assessment. At the start of the modules, I give an overview of the course and try to make it clear the topics to be covered as well as the labs the students must attend, the online content the students must complete, and the makeup and content of the exams.

I have a number of expectations of myself as a teacher: above all, I believe it is important to treat all students with absolute respect and equality. In addition, it is my opinion that a good teacher is well prepared and well organised; this allows for a more structured and efficient learning environment that gives the students’ confidence in me as a teacher and the content being delivered. Toward this goal, in advance of a lecture sessions, I provide the students with the course materials to be covered, as well as complementary scaffold material; for example, in a Masters level course where I teach about the use of engineering analysis software tools, I provide the theory as lectures slides as well as screencast tutorial videos showing and explaining the use of the software, including explanations; this content is complemented by directions on where to find additional theoretical and practical information, as well as hands-on lab sessions. I prepare myself for teaching by reviewing session materials for lectures/labs/tutorials and by attempting the assignment work before the students; from this, I can note potential obstacles the students may face and try my best to give them the tools necessary to overcome such problems. It is my aim to provide an environment that is supportive of self-learning, while still being challenging; toward this goal, I will often ask the students to give their opinions as to what approach they might take to solve the problem being considered; I will additionally ask students to discuss their own opinions with their neighbouring students and then suggest their best solutions.

In order to assess the success of my teaching methods, I aspire to regularly take feedback from the students; Dunkin and Precians [14] stated that a characteristic of award-winning university teachers is their willingness to collect student feedback on their teaching in order to see where their teaching might be improved. Through in-semester feedback, something I aspire to include in every module I teach, it allows me to continually re-evaluate the success of my adopted teaching approaches within the given student cohort; and when methods are not working as intended, I can reconsider the approaches taken. As I go forward and gain further teaching experience, I intend to continually revisit my own teaching methods, in particular, the inclusion of more problem-based learning approaches and Student-Response-Systems are something that have shown initial promise for grasping the students’ attention and aiding in understanding.


[1]  J. Piaget. Mechanisms of Perception. Basic Books, 1969. 

[2]  J. Bruner. Toward a Theory of Instruction. Harvard University Press, 1966. 

[3]  L.S. Vygotsky. Thought and Language. MIT Press, 1986. 

[4]  A. Bandura, D. Ross, and S.A. Ross. Transmission of aggressions through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63:575–82, 1961. 

[5]  P. Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.
[6]  J. Habermas. Further reflections on the public sphere. MIT, 1992. 

[7]  Visual Aural Read/Write Kinesthetic. VARK: a guide to learning styles. http: //vark-learn.com, Accessed 2nd December 2016.
[8]  R. Tharp and R. Gallimore. Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning and School- ing in Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
[9]  A. Jordan, O. Carlile, and Stack. A. Approaches to learning: a guide for teachers. Open University Press, 2008.
[10]  I.P. Pavlov. Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. Oxford University Press, 1927.
[11]  E.L. Thorndike. Animal Intelligence. Macmillan, 1911.
[12]  B.F. Skinner. The Behavior of Organisms. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938.
[13]  H. Gardner. The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How School Should Teach. Basic Books, 1991.
[14]  M. J. Dunkin and R. P. Precians. Award-winning university teachers’ concepts of teaching. Higher Education, 24(4):483–502, 1992.