Professional Development Plan

“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Being a teacher, I believe it is important to continually seek to deepen your knowledge of the field. New techniques are being developed and new research is being published every day. If we do not spend time to understand and grasp as much of this as possible, we won’t be developing  ourselves. Thirty years from now, I want to be a teacher with thirty years of experience, not a teacher who has been around for thirty years, with one year of experience.

After all, I am trying to help students learn. If I have forgotten how to do it myself, how will I ever succeed?

There are many ways in which to acquire this new knowledge. They are all equally useful, though everyone’s learning style is, of course, different.

Professor I would Like to Visit:

I would like to visit Prof. Magdin Stoica’s class one day. He is a professor in School of Applied Computing at Sheridan College. He mostly teaches courses related to mobile development, web development and programming languages. His courses are very practical in nature and that resonates with me as I also teach practical courses.

Over the few years at Sheridan College, I have noticed that students love and respect him a lot. Students have really good words to say about him.  I saw at the Sheridan’s convocation that students, after getting their degrees, were hugging Magdin, waving to him. This thing also showed that how much students loved him, and how much of important he has been in their success.

So therefore, if I got a chance to visit a professor’s class, I would love to visit Magdin’s class some day.

Courses you would like to teach in the future:

There are few courses that I’ve been interested in but never got a chance to teach. I love to teach courses that are practical in nature and have lots of hands-on activities. Some of the courses that I’ll like to teach in the future are:

  • PROG10082 – Object Oriented Programming 1 – Java:
    This is an introduction to programming course to first semester students, with emphasis on object-oriented programming. This course teaches how to think logically, and develop programs in Java. I have always loved to teach programming courses to students who are new to programming. The expressions on the students’ face is priceless when they write and run their programs.
  • PROG24178 – Object Oriented Programming 2 – Java:
    This course extends the concepts of object-oriented programming introduced in PROG10082. The students are exposed to more advanced topics such as inheritance, arrays and array lists, GUI programming. As this course is in continuation with PROG10082, I’ll love make my hands dirty with this course.
  • SYST24444 – Mobile Web-based App Dev:
    This course is built on PROG10199 – Web Programming, where students use their web app development skills to develop mobile based apps understanding the intricacies of the mobile ecosystem. I, having little experience in mobile development, would like to accept this challenge and deliver this course.
  • PROG20799 – Data Structures and Algorithm Development – C:
    One of my favourite courses, I never had a chance to deliver this course. I would definitely like to teach this course in future. Students are introduced to various data structures such as arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, recursion, trees, hashing, and graphs. They develop their skills to write an algorithm to work with a particular data structure, and then implement it in C programming language.

This is not the end. There are many other courses that are of interest to me and would like to deliver in future. I believe it is very important for a teacher to improve the teaching and learning skills. Every day is a new day in the class, every day the class behaviour is new, every day the concepts to be delivered in the class are new. Therefore, you need to be active, creative and up to the challenge every day.