Yangzi Zhao (赵扬子）

In my teaching, my overarching goals are  two-fold. First, I aim to cultivate students' critical thinking skills and stimulate productive discussions based on facts and reasoning. Second, by assigning students unconventional tasks, I invite them to the process of teaching themselves. 

      I believe classroom should be a place where students feel safe to express different opinions and able to reflect their prior beliefs by hearing different voices. To help students put different opinions into perspective and have a productive conversation, I motivate students to first learn the factual knowledge and encourage them to think what evidences are needed to back up their argument. To achieve this goal, I always pair opinions frequently discussed in the mass media or social media with scholarly research. Before letting students taking positions on which opinion they are for or against, I give them exercises of designing a research that could validate or invalidate an opinion. Then, they get  the chance to compare their ideas with findings published in academic journals. After that, students can reflect and critique what they hear from the mass media or social media with a solid foundation. 

        I also motive students to be active in the learning process instead of receiving knowledge from textbook passively. By giving students data report assignments, I encourage students to dive into real data archive and extract needed information themselves. By do the exercise of extracting data, summarizing data, and interpreting data, students can master the knowledge more efficiently and effectively. 

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