Teaching Philosophy Summary

I believe that experience – and what students learn from it – is the central force in education. As a result, I strive to emphasize the principle of utility in my teaching. One of the wonderful consequences of being a pragmatist and a statistician is that my philosophy and my field align neatly in the classroom as statistics is full of real-world applications.

I teach my students that the goal is to apply their knowledge to real situations by focusing on hands-on and minds-on problem-solving. One of my goals in the classroom is to teach students how to be critical consumers of statistics in their lives and careers; that requires understanding, retaining, and applying the material. As an educator whose pragmatist philosophy endorses experience as a driving force in his classroom, I have to be aware of how statistics is currently used in practice and anticipate how it will be used in the future to avoid training students only on the techniques at hand at the expense of learning how to be prepared for the ever-evolving landscape that awaits them upon graduation. My time as an industry biostatistician and my professional network can be leveraged to assist in properly preparing my students for careers in statistics or in fields that depend on statistics.

As the instructor, I must be equally concerned with identifying experiences that develop misconceptions and addressing those by replacing them with intentional experiences designed to develop deep understanding. This intentional approach to teaching is necessarily at the core of my teaching philosophy to maintain high-quality student experiences in the classroom.