Moving around a lot growing up exposed me to a range of education systems and teaching styles. Throughout those experiences, the teachers who had the greatest impact on me were passionate about teaching, excited about the material, and open to learning with their students. These experiences have had a significant effect on how I approach my teaching philosophy. While teaching is a two-way effort, there is a significant difference between lecturing on the importance of human factors and exploring how the increasing speed and complexity of aircraft forced designers to rethink cockpit controls around the capabilities and limitations of the human pilot. I want students to engage with the concepts they are learning and ask questions such as: Why was it done that way? How could I improve upon this? How else has this been solved? This can lead to a deeper understanding rather than simply memorizing solutions.
During my PhD, I have had the privilege of co-teaching Ethical Vibe Coding (TECHIE 1121), a summer high school intensive offered at Cornell Tech in NYC. This experience was the first time I designed and built a new course from scratch. The course focused on teaching high school students about the technical and societal implications of generative AI tools for programming, how to build powerful tools responsibly, and how to think critically about what they create. Much of the course consisted of hands-on activities where students developed their own projects, experimented with tools, and worked as teams to think through difficult problems. It was very rewarding to see a class of more than 20 students hard at work discussing topics that are affecting the world they live in. When questions arose, I would step in to give my perspective and pose another question to push the students further while keeping them on track. This experience also reinforced for me that open-ended learning still requires structure. Student feedback showed that the hands-on activities were valuable, and it helped me think more carefully about how pacing, guidance, and flexibility can support students as they work through unfamiliar material.
In most educational settings, students enter the classroom with different levels of experience and confidence. Providing equitable support does not mean lowering expectations, but making those expectations clear and giving students the resources they need to succeed. In technical courses, once prerequisites have been met, understanding what students already know and adapting explanations accordingly can lead to stronger engagement and faster learning. As I continue developing as an instructor, I want to become better at balancing open-ended exploration with enough structure and pacing to support students with different backgrounds. As a future faculty member, I hope to build courses that bring together computer science, psychology, and communication while giving students opportunities to build, question design decisions, and think critically about the impact of what they create.
