PersonalTeachingPhilosophy:
I am fortunate to have a few years of continuous teaching experience, which has enabled me to develop a ‘teaching philosophy’ of my own.
I believe that it is my duty as a teacher to make students understand ‘how to learn the subject matter’ and not merely to deliver the class material. I avoid ‘spoon feeding’ the knowledge, but try to motivate and guide the students to learn more. I also believe personal touch is essential for a healthy teacher – student relationship. With the diversity of our community reflecting in our classroom, it is also critical to identify ways to reach out to each individual.
I conduct my class with a personable approach and put adequate emphasis on out-of-the- class interaction with students. I believe students must be treated with respect and the classroom must be free from undue tension and anxiety. Openness, honesty and ability to

maintain trust are highly conductive to effective learning. I welcome feedback from students, which help me to organize my sequence of lectures. Particularly, for higher degree classes, I have found that, feedbacks from students about what knowledge they currently possess and problems they face with learning in the new system is essential to plan lecture material as students come with diverse level of back ground preparations. In order to stimulate student’s desire to learn and effective knowledge transfer, it is essential to keep student’s attention in the class. It is not unusual to see me moving around in the platform, varying pitch of my voice, scanning the whole class to maintain eye-to-eye contact while explaining a concept. My humours are sometimes celebrated, sometimes detested, but I apply them to keep student’s attention.
In order to stimulate interest and to increase sense of participation, I challenge the students with occasional questions, preferably linking real life experience with the text. My classes are well organized. Before starting a class, I prefer to list out the ‘objectives of today’s class’. At the end of the class, I prefer to pose one or two ‘open questions. I have made use of Over Head Projectors as well as Power Point Slides for some of my presentations, but I still rely on Black Board for more than 30% of my contact hours in the class.
I believe in continuous evaluation, spread over components like Tutorials, home assignments, Team works, Tests and Quizzes. While setting papers, I try to bring out how much a student know, not what he does not know! To judge a large class, questions should be formulated to cater to different level of preparedness. I detest lengthy question papers. I always display a fully worked out solution for the questions along with a marking scheme and stick to it. Although some students brand me ‘very strict’, feedback has shown that largely students are satisfied with my evaluation and awarded marks.
Finally, as a committed teacher, I am aware of my obligations and responsibilities to uphold the reputation of the University I am working for. As a teacher, I ‘preach’ my students to adopt Engineering as a way of life and try to impart sense of responsibility towards the society and our nation.