Megan Olsen - UMass Grad Student

Please e-mail me if you are interested in my full teaching statement.

How I became interested in Teaching:

I've been involved in and interested in teaching since I was a teenager. As a teenager I was trained as a camp counselor and leader in the Girl Scouts of America. Through this group I taught crafts, foreign language, hiking, knots, and many other short lessons to middle school and elementary school age girls. I continued this teaching every summer through high school. In late high school I began to also tutor fellow students, especially in our Computer Science and Math classes senior year. This tutoring continued in college, and in my senior year I became an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, responsible for grading, helping students through office hours, and helping students through an online discussion forum.

Throughout all of these experiences I was aware that I enjoyed creating lesson plans, explaining things both one-on-one and in a group, and just generally helping other people learn.

Teaching Experience in Graduate School:

Since my undergraduate years, I have continued to have an interest in teaching. I have been the TA for our Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence class, where I designed all homework assignments and created their solutions, designed and taught a series of lectures, and helped students in office hours and through e-mail. Last semester I was the grader for the Digital Forensics Undergraduate course. I am currently a TA for 2 classes: the Undergraduate Usability course at UMass, and the undergraduate Robotics course at Smith College. For the Usability course I am involved in grading and teaching a small number of lectures. For the robotics course I assist the professor with preparation of the course wiki, robots, demos, and software. I also help the students in lab and lead class when she is out of town.

I have also had a few teaching opportunities outside of being a TA:

UMass Science Quest: teach high school students the basics of my research in an interesting and interactive way in two 50 min sessions
Holyoke Catholic High School Career Day: explain to high school students what it means to go into computer science, and what I do with my career, in five 50 min sessions
Girls Inc. BuildIT program: helped teach middle and high school age girls about technology for 2 weeks.
Girls Inc. through CAITE: taught middle and high school age girls about binary numbers for an afternoon session at UMass. I developed the lesson based on the website CS Unplugged.
Bayesian Statistics Tutoral at SFI CSSS: Developed an hour long tutorial with a fellow graduate student to teach graduate students of various disciplines about Bayesian Statistics, how to use them, why to use them.
Numerous lectures within seminar classes when taking the class.

I took a Teaching Science to Undergraduates course in the spring of 2009, which helped me learn how to create an engaging classroom in which everyone can learn. This class also taught me different pedagogical techniques.

Teaching Philosophy:

A teacher should recognize that their students may have different learning styles and needs, and try to accomodate that in their lecture as best as possible. Information should be shared both orally and visually, examples that are understandable by more than just a select group of students should be used, and active learning techniques should be used in every lecture. If the class is kept engaged, they will be more active in their own learning, and thus more likely to learn the required material. Even in the large classrooms we often have in Computer Science at larger universities it is still possible to present material in a way that reaches the majority of students. The emphasis should be on understanding and not on grades, although graded work is necessary to evaluate progress.