DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Teaching Philosophy

Shruti Deshpande

 

Courses Taught
Since 2016, I have taught Introduction to Hearing Science (undergraduate), Electrophysiology-I (AuD), Pediatric Audiology (AuD hybrid course), and Central Auditory Processing Disorders (AuD).


Teaching Philosophy and Approaches
In the health care profession, today’s students are tomorrow’s clinicians. One of our greatest responsibilities is to ensure that our community has access to knowledgeable, responsible, ethical, and compassionate health care providers. The foundation for building a good clinician is laid in the classroom. I do everything I can as an instructor and a mentor to uphold this commitment.
Through my undergraduate and AuD courses, I aim to - 1. Get my students interested in the course and connect the materials with real-world applications; 2. Facilitate bridging theory/research and clinical practice; 3. Continuously improve my teaching methods to meet the diverse curricular needs of diverse students.
I utilize an eclectic approach and a variety of teaching techniques to facilitate critical thinking and culturally responsive learning. By incorporating a variety of formative and summative assessments opportunities, I help students scaffold on previously built knowledge and skills to learn new concepts. Lastly, I study the patterns reported via student and peer evaluations (written by my department chair and dean every fall semester) and work on improving my teaching.

 

Snapshot of my Classroom
I am passionate about teaching. My ability to connect with my students and my determination to incorporate a variety of high-impact teaching practices are two of my strengths. I am well prepared for my classes and always think of innovative ways to engage my students. My classes are generally broken down into small chunks or units. I use various approaches such as lectures, games (e.g., jeopardy, kahoot), case-study and article discussions, videos, labs, student presentations, peer-discussions to teach every chunk/unit. I believe these high-impact teaching methods enhance students’ motivation and learning. Research and teaching always go together. I strongly rely on evidence-based clinical and teaching practices. To that end, I do the following: (1) share/discuss research studies relevant to every topic that I teach; (2) share my own published research, when relevant. This helps my students understand that I am a clinical researcher/scholar who is working to connect clinical-work and teaching via research; (3) invite clinicians and guest speakers who are experts on a particular topic to allow students to not only learn from experts but to become passionate about following their own area of interest; (4) engage in my own learning to help deliver the best education to my students, for example, I regularly attending workshops and lectures organized by the Center for Teaching and Learning at St. John’s University, ASHA, and AudiologyOnline; (5) utilize game-based approaches to student engagement and for formative learning assessments; (6) engage in student learning and promoting St. John’s University’s Vincentian mission through Academic Service-Learning (AS-L). This experience has helped amalgamate teaching, research, and service experiences for myself as well as for my students; (5) evaluate and reflect on my own teaching practices regularly and modify them accordingly.

 

Academic Service-Learning (AS-L)
Since Spring 2017, my undergraduate and graduate students have participated in AS-L every semester. I am passionate about AS-L because it helps my students achieve several goals. For example, it makes my students aware of various real-world challenges in hearing healthcare in their communities, teaches them to use research/theory to understand and solve complex problems related to hearing health inequities, helps them think of the overall objective/goal and create multitude of logical steps to achieve the set goal, coaxes them work as a team, prompts them to empathize with people who may look or live differently compared to them, pushes them problem-solve, helps them learn to be creative and flexible, teaches them to learn to pre-reflect prior to the project and to articulate the outcomes via post-reflections presentations and writing. Most importantly, it helps them understand that we all are role-models for somebody else and have the power to leave this world slightly better than we found it. I love the experience of seeing a student who is quiet in class become a leader on the field. I am thrilled when a teenager who is at the risk for high school dropout approaches me and tells me that they realized that they might have some listening problems and need more help, or they tell me that they plan to work harder and become like the college students who “checked their hearing” or taught them so much. As an instructor and a person, I find joy and purpose through AS-L.

 

 

Teaching in the Era of COVID-19 via Online Platforms
I was able to use a variety of synchronous (e.g., WebEx, Zoom) and asynchronous technologies (e.g., narrated lectures) to engage students via online teaching in Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. Via online platforms, I used a similar approach that I used in the traditional classroom- of combining a variety of teaching approaches (lectures, case-study and article discussions, videos, online demonstrations of audiology protocols and tests, student presentations, peer-discussions via ‘breakout rooms’) and assessment techniques (online quizzes and exams, papers, formative game-based learning). Although the process was challenging, I was able to engage my students in virtual AS-L experiences (https://www.stjohns.edu/about/news/2020-06-02/st-johns-academic-service-learning-faculty-craft-unique-pandemic-responses). Students in various courses that I taught participated in the preparation and delivery of virtual AS-L projects and wrote reflection papers/reports (writing assignments) that I graded. I was invited to share my virtual AS-L experience as a panelist at an AS-L workshop at my university. Based on one of the virtual AS-L projects, I was able to publish a peer-reviewed paper (Deshpande, 2021). Through collaborations with audiologists in the industry, my students were able to observe how auditory electrophysiology tests (e.g., ABR, ASSR) are conducted. Lastly, via online game-based pedagogical activities, I was able to engage my students throughout the pandemic. I was invited to share this via a St. John’s University workshop (https://stjohns.libcal.com/event/6934743). Overall, I did my best to engage students via high-impact pedagogical experiences by utilizing technology through the pandemic.

 

In conclusion, my teaching approaches are adaptable to changing times. But my over-arching goal is to foster learning and build knowledgeable, culturally-responsive, caring, and compassionate clinicians and global citizens.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.