Answers to four teaching-related questions from Teaching Affairs at Reykjavik University

The Teaching Affairs Office at Reykjavik University is creating a video in which several faculty members answer some questions related to the principles that guide their pedagogical work. I am taking part in that enterprise and was asked to answer the four questions below. Here are the written versions of the answers I intended to give orally, as a note to myself and in case they are of interest to anyone. 

What would your answers to those questions be? 

Q1: What is your teaching philosophy? or What is your approach to teaching? 

My approach to teaching is eclectic. Overall, I try (and often fail, alas) to create a stimulating learning environment in cooperation with my students and teaching assistants, where anyone should feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. 

I'll do anything to entice my students to engage actively with the material covered in my courses provided it is in reasonably good taste and conveys my enthusiasm for the subject I'm asked to teach. This includes the much-maligned lecture, since I firmly believe that telling a good story is still one of the best ways we have to inspire our students and to provide the context and intellectual history of the ideas we cover in our courses. However, I view lectures as arenas for a game of intellectual table tennis with the students, as "commedia dell'arte" performances in which we interact and learn from one another. 

Q2: Has your teaching philosophy changed? If so, how and why has it changed? 

At the beginning of my career, I focused too much on the content I thought I was expected to deliver during my courses. However, over the years, I have come to realise that less is more and that we should "distil and conquer". Today, students can access content from a huge variety of sources, but they can't typically get context and enthusiasm for the subject they are learning, which, to my mind, comes from the development of a good story as a course progresses. I also think that we should try to avoid being boring in our teaching. This is especially true when we teach the topics we love in theoretical computer science. Students find those topics exotic, hard and dry, whereas our subject has a long and extremely interesting intellectual heritage that every cultured person should know and that we could covey to our students as keen storytellers. See Scott Aaronson's book and his teaching statement, which I still find inspiring after all these years. 

Q3: How do you promote active learning in your teaching? 

I try to emphasise learning in every component of my teaching. Note that I wrote "learning" because I believe that all learning is an active process. 

Even when I lecture, I do my best to play intellectual table tennis with my students by asking them "why" and "what if" questions, and by encouraging them to think about the concepts we are covering in real time. Apart from using the Socratic method in my lecturing, I set students assignments so that they can deepen their understanding of the course material by practising the skills they have learnt. In several of my courses, I also give students a couple of open-ended group projects that are just beyond their current abilities, so that they can challenge themselves and engage in peer learning. 

The most extreme form of active learning I have used in my teaching is exemplified by an intensive three-week course I designed with Anna Ingolfsdottir and that I have taught each year in the period 2013-2023. After a brief introduction putting the material the students are going to learn and the work they are going to do in context, I give them material they should read and start experimenting with independently by the end of day one of the course. From day two of the course and over the following three weeks, I set students challenges that they tackle in groups at their own speed, acting as a facilitator in the classroom and introducing new course topics on a by-need basis. 

Every year, students rise to the challenge and do work which often goes beyond my expectations and of which they are proud. 

Q4: What have you found to be the most effective active learning strategy in your teaching context?

I don't believe that there is a "most effective active learning strategy". However, having worked at Aalborg University for a decade in a previous life, I have come to appreciate the Aalborg model for problem-based learning as an extremely beneficial strategy to foster creativity, critical thinking and the ability to learn independently in students. To my mind, Reykjavik University would stand to gain by embracing more aspects of problem-based learning in earnest.