Education can be achieved by increasing the student’s motivation with effective teaching. I have always believed that my best teachers were not necessarily the most knowledgeable, but were the ones who took each class as a challenge to deliver a concept and develop a holistic view of what the course is about and how it is employed in the real world. This reflects an important aspect of my teaching philosophy, which is to tailor teaching to individual student differences. I believe that how I lecture and manage class activities should allow all types of students to learn. Students learn best when they are engaged interactively with the class. Interactive student engagement is necessary for conceptual reasoning and quantitative problem-solving. In teaching classes and labs, I aim to bring this forward to help my students achieve higher levels of learning and retention after graduation. My teaching prioritizes active and student-centered learning.

During the past four years, I had the opportunity to experience different teaching roles at Auburn University. My teaching experience began as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for Methods Engineering, Linear Programming, Statistics, Deterministic and Stochastic Operations Research classes. My responsibilities included teaching labs and class sessions, along with one-on-one and group interactions with students during office hours, and grading homework, exams, and projects. In teaching Methods Engineering lab, I created a diverse and inclusive environment by giving team-based learning problems to students and challenge them to think critically through solving real-world problems. They correlated what they learn in the classroom with real-life situations and processed the information with these structured exercises. My aim in designing the related lab-work, and reforming teams each week was to foster the development of students’ critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving skills and effective communication. My GTA work was recognized by being selected to receive ‘Dr. Saeed Maghsoodloo Annual Assistantship’ by Industrial and Systems Engineering Council in 2018.

To further develop my teaching skills, I will teach the Big Data I course with full authorities in the Harbert College of Business at AU during the fall 2018. The course includes the concepts about data quality, security, cleaning, preparation, warehousing, processing, and mining. For this course, I have the responsibility of creating a student-centered learning environment for 40 undergraduate students. Building rapport with students, interactions before and after classes, and initiating and maintaining class discussions are key components of my teaching. I have planned several interactive teaching activities for this class such as think-pair-share/alone-together-alone methods, gallery walk/carousel, digital response systems, online discussion boards, and jig-saw group activity to foster the students’ learning.

To measure the understanding of my students, and my own success as an instructor, I use a variety of assessment methods. I believe that a combination of homework assignments, periodic tests and a project would provide a good assessment of the students’ understanding. Using all these methods, in addition to the self-assessment tools such as in-class interactive group activities would provide me with an overall representation of the students’ understanding and consequently, I could evaluate the effectiveness of my teaching methodologies for that particular group of students.

My academic background and teaching experience prepared me to interact with a diverse range of students and teach various courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels in operations research, data analytics and statistics. In teaching an undergraduate course, my aim is to emphasize how these fundamental concepts are related to other concepts that the students have already studied. In teaching a graduate course I would focus more on the process of generating new knowledge through the scientific methods. In the process, I would utilize examples from my research, as well as the research of others, to ensure that the students become exposed to different research strategies so that they can find a strategy that would work for them. This would enable the graduate students to become researchers and confident in their ability to tackle problems and generate knowledge that would be of benefit to the scientific community and/or industry.