Matthew Aghili, Ph.D., P.E. - Teaching Philosophy

For me teaching philosophy is a measure of social, psychological, technical and professional harmony. My motivation to teach is based on my understanding that teaching and learning are the two main components of a single core with bidirectional reflective relationship.  I believe in order to teach you have to be motivated and willing to learn and vice versa.  I fully appreciate the difficulties of teaching and learning processes, they are challenging tasks to formulate and implement.  I also recognize to explore and accumulate knowledge one must learn and apply the collective experiences of its own learning paths.

I use these general guidelines in formulating processes for my teaching approach.

My Teaching Objectives: As a mentor and an engineering professor, my objectives are

1. To communicate effectively with my students on the technical subject.
2. To provide my students with a set of tools to discover on their own.
3. To make available technical and professional processes to allow my students to apply as a guideline in their discoveries.

My Methods of Instruction:

1. To use traditional classroom lectures and laboratory instructions as well as individual and peer group observation and feedback processes.
2. To apply instruction technology to the extent necessary in a technical or advanced subjects.
3. To use oral and written learning instruments to observe, evaluate and provide feedback to students in a systematic way.
4. To motivate each student by understanding their technical, social, cultural and psychological need in the teaching and learning process.
5. To hold the professional standard and practices as a guideline to develop the instruction material.