Lo Ying Tung’s Teaching Philosophy Statement

Teaching science is a very rewarding experience for me. As a science educator, I aim to provide my students with a comfortable and caring learning environment where they are encouraged to express their ideas and participate in the learning process actively. As a caring and innovative teacher, I would like to make science learning fun and accessible to all students.

To provide my students an all-round learning experience, I use a variety of pedagogical methods grounded in my beliefs about teaching and learning. First, time is spent on eliciting my students’ prior knowledge before introducing a new topic. Building new concepts based on students’ preconceptions is crucial. I usually ask my students to study the lesson materials before coming to class and motivate them to do some self-study. Second, I provide my students a wide range of learning activities during the class. For example, I proposed some scientific questions and students need to design fair investigations to figure out the answers based on evidence. Third, I always use the time after class to get to know my students more. By knowing my students more, I can incorporate their interests into the lessons, making the lesson more attractive to them. To engage students in the class and let them feel that I concern their personal development far beyond their academic success, it is crucial to build a relationship with them. I always try my best to provide my students with an interactive classroom and construct new knowledge with them. I hope they can enjoy the collaborative dialogues in my classroom.

Besides my teaching pedagogies discussed above, I also use different kinds of assessment tools to facilitate teaching and learning. First, I provide immediate and meaningful feedback to my students. After receiving students’ homework, I would mark their work immediately and distribute it to them the next time. I believe that timely and personal feedback can let students feel that their work is being appreciated and motivate them to do each piece of homework seriously. Furthermore, I give specific feedback based on students’ strengths and weaknesses, which would help students to identify the problem and make improvement. Second, I would adopt guided learning and mastery learning in my class, e.g. designing a quiz for students by the end of each chapter. For students who fail to meet the minimum requirement, I would arrange small tutorial groups to ensure that the whole class can keep on track. In addition, extra challenging questions would be provided for more capable students to motivate them to keep up their good work.

Last but not least, I understand that being a professional teacher is not easy and I still have plenty of room for improvement. To continuously improve myself, I always reflect on my teaching after each lesson and participate in ongoing teacher professional training to keep myself up-to-date. Having a reflective mindset in my teaching, I am sure I would be a teacher who can offer constructive suggestions to my working team, besides loving my students and my job.