I have been influenced by theorists since I began my teaching career in August 2002. As a teacher, my core teaching philosophies are to motivate students in life-long learning and design instruction to facilitate students' learning. Based on the theories I have learned, instructors can produce learning by transferring information to the student and helping them organize it in a way they can easily recall at a later time.

I use the ADDIE model for each semester or workshop to analyze each student's prior knowledge and individual characteristics. The acronym "ADDIE" stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. It is an Instructional Design model that has withstood the test of time and use. It is simply a "device" to help us think through a course's design. In the analysis phase, I want to clarify what the instructional problem is. I send out emails with surveys to get to know their individual learning backgrounds, preferences, and other relevant information. This encourages students to interact with me and helps build up a good rapport with students and base for the first class. Through the survey and welcome email, students provide me with robust ideas I can later use to design the whole semester's lesson plans in ways that are tailored to best benefit the students. Based on the teaching experience and my observation in class, I set well-defined and articulated learning objectives that guide students towards success. Additionally, I utilize the learning objectives to optimize class activities and strategies. For each class, I set specific goals and choose different activities and instructional strategies to achieve those goals in ways that help my students feel more connected to the content, peers, and myself as their instructor. All the assignments allow students to vividly and concretely see the relevance and value of otherwise abstract concepts and theories chosen as the fundamental framework for my course. For example, when T-PACK model was first introduced to the students, I didn't ask them to interpret what the acronym "T-PACK" means. I demonstrated how I used T-PACK model to design the lesson I was teaching at that time. Analyze an authentic, real-world task provides my students with a context for understanding T-PACK means and their applicability to any current situation that they want to explore. 
 
Cognitivism helps me understand learning because it explores the role the human mind plays in the process of learning. Cognitive theories emphasize intrinsic motivation and create situations in which students are stimulated to see answers. These theories have deepened my understanding of how to motivate students well. I have also figured out what kind of instruction I have been looking for. Effective instruction should provide experiences that facilitate mental processing, storing, and recalling of new information. In my daily teaching, I provide a rich classroom environment that fosters students' spontaneous exploration.​ I think the themes for content are very important because the information that lacks a theme can be difficult to comprehend. I also set specific stations for students' learning and choose relevant content for each that can activate the students' existing schema. Later on, I provide a sort of mental “scaffolding” for the new material. For students' retention after each class, I prefer to use more information mapping or advance organizers in order to help students make knowledge and skills more memorable. In addition, I designed relevant questions to determine what students’ current schemata might be to expound on how the process of learning occurs in different contexts by offering strategies that promote students’ learning. As teachers, we can benefit from this invaluable learning paradigm in the effort to help our students achieve the subject’s goals. Last but not the least, I am serious about giving students constructive and substantive feedback in time and paying attention to students' answers and remarks that may give clues about how they are organizing information.​ In this way, students key the goals, are given opportunities to practice and get feedback, and are able to show me their different levels of understanding. These diagnoses can help me determine set standards for each cohort that are challenging but attainable with student effort. 

I always keep the students' needs in mind. Since the American learning environment is quite different from China, I gained support from Dr. Jing Lei and Dr. Tiffany Koszalka, who are both outstanding professors in my field as they know almost everything about teaching and learning. As time goes on and I feel very confident about being an instructor here. My advisors always trust me and encourage me to participate more in the teaching process. I believe I will gain more experience as an instructor and know I will always learn from my students and other teachers on how I can improve. As being immersed in the IDDE program, I have developed the expertise to solve any human performance I encounter. I enjoy the time with my students and will continue to challenge and equip myself with advanced theories and practices to better assist my students through their learning journeys. ​​