My overarching goal is to teach with kindness for all students, with the understanding that not all students are going through the same life experiences, beginning with the same background, or approaching the material with the same perspective. Each student is an individual, and all students should have the opportunity to learn and succeed.

Stress in a learning environment has been shown to inhibit learning, and while I cannot hope to solve all sources, I can take some actions to mitigate common sources of classroom stress. I aim to emphasize to my students that I understand they are human beings, and treat them as such.

One notable source of stress I have noticed in students is the feeling that they cannot ask for what they need. For example, students often ask for extensions with apologies, as if these extensions are an inconvenience to me—early on in the quarter and in my responses to students, I do my best to assure them that asking for an extension is not a big request. Similarly, students feel there is some set amount of them they can ask for during a quarter, so I in turn do my best to reassure students that this isn't the case—extensions are not some tangible object, nor do I expect students to schedule only one extenuating circumstance per quarter. With extensions in particular, I also work to find ways for students to get extra time without needing to explain why—students may not always be comfortable, or able, to explain to me what is going on in their personal lives. While I can reassure them of my support, it still stands that I am an authority figure in the classroom, and students may not wish to divulge exactly what is going on. Moving away from the specificities of extensions, however, this approach of both pre-emptively and responsively assuring students that I am here for their learning and willing to accommodate them in that process is essential to making sure my students know I care about them—about their success in the classroom, and also about their wellbeing in all areas of life.

Additionally, students also exhibit stress from feeling like they have to understand and succeed instantly. In my courses, I want to help them see that struggling, including "failure," is just a part of the learning process. It would be absurd to expect your code to always work correctly the first try, or even to compile, so I take time in lectures to go over error messages and debugging strategies (and accidentally make plenty of errors in live coding demos) to make sure students know this is part of the process.

Helping students to be resilient and push through challenges is essential to my teaching. Past evaluations have highlighted my patience in helping students work through difficult concepts, which shows both the fear that students have that instructors will be judging them, and one of my common strategies—I make sure to reassure my students when they ask questions that struggling, and working hard to get past sticking points, is a part of the learning process. I also emphasize collaboration and peer support because many students feel, from years of experience, that homeworks assignments are a place to show your knowledge (like exams), not a place to practice that knowledge. One of the steps I take in my classes, to refocus students onto the learning, is to emphasize collaboration—while students are all expected to write and turn in their own code, I make sure they know they can discuss, diagram, plan, and debug with their classmates during this process. I also plan ungraded (by completion only) "check-your-knowledge" quizzes so that students can practice the concepts without pressure and find out what they need to focus on (and actually had a student comment that it helped them know I didn't expect them to get the concepts right away).

As an instructor, it is my job to make sure every student can learn the material, by guiding them on their learning process. For this reason, I make sure to grade students without comparison to each other—this avoids the competitive atmosphere of grading on a curve, which also directly counteracts my collaboration policies—students should help each other to understand the material, not feel as if their help is harming their own success. By making this point within the first day of each course I teach, I emphasize to students that I want all of them to succeed, opening the door to greater resilience when encountering tough concepts, and letting the students know that I am there for all of them, not just the ones graded at the "top" of the class.

I believe that all students can succeed, and my goal is to facilitate that success. I continue to evolve my curriculum, explanations, and activities for students to allow them to learn and practice course material with the goal that every student leaves the class with a deep understanding of the topics we have covered. Thus, at the end of all of this, my final thought is not so much about any aspect of teaching, but rather about myself. No course design or implementation is perfect, and there are always things I can learn from my students about how to better support their learning experience. Through student feedback, both explicitly requested and through observations of student work and behavior, I find out what is, and is not, working in my courses. When things aren't working, I test out replacement ideas, and when things are working, I still test out modifications to see if they can work better. I keep myself open to learning new ideas, and aim to stay up to date on the current research in education, to find out what I can implement to help my students. I will always continue to evolve my teaching as I learn more about what helps students learn, and enjoy learning, in my courses.