Excellence in Teaching and Dr. Scher's Philosophy of Teaching Statement

   Every academic year, NJIT recognizes its best teachers in a special Fall Awards Ceremony, where the honorees are officially recognized before the entire NJIT community, and receive an honorarium, a certificate, and handshakes from our university President and Provost. The process by which the best teachers are selected is extremely competitive. Each of the dozen academic departments in the university carefully scrutinizes all the credentials of each person teaching, most particularly the student evaluations done each semester, and selects one individual in each of the seven award categories. A University Excellence in Teaching Awards Committee will then carefully scrutinize the nominations submitted by the 12 academic departments, reviewing the associated student evaluations and other supporting material, and then select only one individual for the University Excellence in Teaching Award in each category. 

   In the Fall, 1999 Awards Ceremony, Dr. Scher was the recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award. It represents the culmination of many years of dedication and effort. I consider it to be one of the proudest moments in my lifetime, and the Certificate, which sits prominently in my living room at home, is something I will always treasure.

    As part of the selection process, each Department nominee is required to submit a 2-page statement on their teaching philosophies. I am including below the teaching philosophy statement which I submitted at that time, since it quite possibly might be of interest to Dr. Scher's current and future students.

A Personal Statement of Educational Philosophy

by

Julian M. Scher, Ph.D.

Department of Computer & Information Science

          A good teacher must be an avid learner.  One who delights in the process of acquiring knowledge. And one who cherishes, with enthusiasm, the privilege and process of sharing this knowledge, and methods of intellectual inquiry, with students.

           I owe to my mother, and late father, the inspiration to pursue a career in college teaching, and for providing and nurturing the overall early environment that fostered the development of so many of my attributes and values, which (of course) have matured over the years. I have been teaching at NJIT since 1971, and I can state, emphatically and with complete sincerity, that these have been the most stimulating and exciting times in my life, that I love my work, and that I would not trade jobs with any other individual in the world.

          Moreover, and I would say this again with some degree of humility, I have always considered myself to be a good, dedicated, teacher, and even more likely, a very good and very dedicated teacher. It was not at all easy to achieve this - I consider myself to be somewhat charisma-weak (perhaps one of the least qualified of the NJIT faculty to ever be considered to serve as a toastmaster, or stand-up storyteller or comedian!) I have always overcompensated for this by being preparation-extra-strong. {In point of fact, I don't believe in the myth of the 'natural' teacher. Teaching is both an art and science, and is acquired through a mixture of talent, training, motivation, dedication, experience, innovation, and mostly "hard work." Many hours of preparation are required for each single hour of student-teacher interaction.}

Behind so many of our NJIT students, there is a story of hardships, of overcoming personal and family challenges, of struggling to achieve in the face of difficult to surmount obstacles, and of determination to realize the goal of the treasured academic degree that each will hold dearly, for it will lead  (hopefully) to a satisfying and rewarding job. In my heart, there is a place for each such courageous student (perhaps somewhat quantifiably commensurate with their level of effort and dedication). I have chosen to dedicate my efforts, my academic career, to do the most noble thing that I can do best, and that is to teach, to share with students the extensive CIS knowledge-base and insights that I have acquired over the years, and, moreover, to optimize, in every sense of the word, the learning process, and the oft-difficult and challenging subject matter. As a concurrent concern, there is the issue of dealing with the somewhat short-sighted perceptions of many NJIT-CIS students, who, from their primarily job-oriented perspective, have failed to gain a necessary appreciation of underlying CIS concepts, the theoretical underpinnings of our discipline, and a broader, more diversified knowledge and set of values, and instead favor learning material which can be immediately translated into a job in the workplace. This represents an additional challenge I seek to address in my teaching.

           I am proud to state that I teach primarily upper division undergraduate courses for our CIS majors. For some, if not most, CIS students, the junior and senior courses will represent the capstone of their formal education. For others, these courses are the stepping-stones into graduate study.  I recognize the ostensible dichotomy of these goals, but there is also a common ground of interests, which provides opportunity for designing and structuring meaningful lectures.  The pragmatics of the application environment can serve as the vehicle for illustrating the significance of topical content from the formal theory and conceptual models. In turn the formal theory and conceptual models can provide vivid explanations and lucid solutions to formidable issues arising from the (more pragmatic) application environment.

           In the Computer Science and Information Systems disciplines, we are exceptionally fortunate to have available the software tools and application packages which serve as our 'readily accessible' application environment. I feverishly seek to capitalize on this in my instructional approach, through a seamless integration of the more difficult (and abstract) formal theory and concepts which are an inherent component of CIS courses, with the 'hands on' software application tools I use with my students. This strategy combines student cognitive activity leading to skilled behavior in two distinct, yet complementary frameworks, and inspires with confidence the learning process of the student.

          As good teachers, we do a great deal of introspection in determining what it is we wish to achieve for our students, and we will match the content and style of our pedagogy to student-centered learning objectives. A teacher x course combination develops a unique personality. I seek to shape all aspects of this personality.

          My lectures are designed to be crisp, meaningful and motivating. Clarity of presentation is crucial - difficult course concepts must be prudently approached, most often with illustrative examples, and students must be able to gain confidence in their abilities to both master the course material as well as develop higher order levels of insight. Many years ago, I was one of the pioneers in CIS to introduce the use of presentation graphics software (am currently using Lotus Freelance Graphics ) to help deliver technical lectures, and was seen every day carrying a notebook computer into the classroom with an LCD projection panel. Presentation graphics software enables me to deliver lively and colorful lecture modules on screen, and cover topics and issues which would otherwise be time consuming or impossible to do. Concurrently with the presentation, I demonstrate and penetrate deeply into the application software vehicles utilized to 'concept map' theoretical issues taught in the course, be it a database management system (such as Microsoft Access) or Wall Data's Semantic Object Data Modeling software, both presented in CIS431-Database Design, or discrete event simulation software (such as Wolverine Software's GPSS/H, presented in CIS461-Systems Simulation).

 Each of my courses contains a required set of detailed Lecture Notes, keyed to the presentation modules, which enables students to focus on my lectures with minimal need to expend time copying material into their notebooks. The combination of detailed Lecture Notes and presentation graphics modules provides me with the capability to cover, in a more thorough, penetrating and efficacious manner, the subject matter of the course. (Aside: I have resisted the temptation to put all my Lecture Notes "on the Web" due to the unfortunate practice of some students who will use the printers in the Student Mall to print out the hundred or so pages of the Lecture Notes at NJIT's expense.)

 My weekly assignments/projects (about 12 per semester in each course) are a supportive learning experience, carefully designed and integrated into the topical structure, and meticulously corrected and commented upon. I do try to alternate the extremely challenging and demanding assignments with more straightforward and 'relaxing' ones. The standards for grading are high - only perfection will earn an "A," and professional standards of documentation and appearance are required for each submission. (Some students object to the 'strictness,' but most recognize that these documentation standards are consistent with the expectations of future employers of CIS graduates.)

 I have dedicated to students enrolled in my classes a vertical Web Portal Page ( at http://www.cis.njit.edu/~scher ), containing downloadable public domain utility programs used in my classes, sample databases and programs I have designed, assignments, links to relevant sites on the World Wide Web, etc. It is a vertical portal page in the sense that I have designed it to provide a 'one-stop shopping' experience to both regular students and Distance Learning students who are enrolled in my classes, with links to search engines, email, and relevant course materials. {Interested members of the University Excellence in Teaching Committee are invited and encouraged to visit.}

 There are numerous convictions and tenets I abide by in my classes:

·        Good teaching requires trust building, and I seek to maintain a high standard of concern, compassion, integrity and professionalism, at all times.

·        I begin each course by describing to my students the 'partnership in learning' created between each student and I, and detail the obligations each member has, if we are to 'succeed' in our mission. (The enclosed Lecture Notes contain this in the module "Welcome.")

·        I am a good listener, who enjoys building rapport with students, and welcomes all forms of feedback. Good teachers must continually reassess their effectiveness in the light of student performance, feedback, and innovation in both subject matter and educational delivery methods.

·        Teaching is an art as well as a science. A good teacher is not static in his/her pedagogy, but is open-minded, and will experiment with new ideas, and new approaches for teaching old topics. (Experiments are not always successful - when they are, we include the results in our teaching repertoire and enhance the personality of our courses, but when they are not, we must either correct or "can" whatever it is which failed.) Good teachers learn and benefit from their mistakes. But we are educating students who place their futures in our hands - we must always proceed with caution.

        University teaching is not a profession where you can rest  (or is it "rust?") on your laurels. There is excitement in creativity, and significant challenges in exploring and researching new approaches, and new technologies, for teaching subject matter in increasingly insightful ways. It shares many of the attributes of publishing in the most outstanding research journals, including a set of reviewers with the most demanding expectations, for they are the ultimate stakeholders in this process, our students.