MY WAY

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is not easy to make one short text about all my professional activities (school and college physics/math teacher and tutor, researcher in the educational field etc.), but I will try.

There are three things that I enjoy doing and am capable of doing very well. I enjoy teaching Mathematics and Physics to students. I enjoy teaching students to think using Mathematics/Physics as material examples and creating new training/educational tools. And I enjoy helping other teachers to effectively teach students mathematics, physics, and developing students’ ability to think. Hence, during all of my professional career I performed duties of several job positions at the same time. For example, I have worked full time as an associate professor, and part time as a teacher, as a tutor and as a management adviser.

I have a successful experience of 1) teaching physics and math to middle school, high school, college and university students; 2) educational research (the focus of my studies is the following problem: how to teach students to think and to understand a subject; in particular, my Ph.D. thesis were about how to develop teachers’ ability to create the own design for the single lesson, the series of lesson, the whole course); 3) lecturing and consulting to teachers and administrators the city of Perm and Perm region.

For more then fifteen years of my teaching practice I have prepared dozens of math and physics school and college curricula, syllabus and lesson plans. I have written more than 30 publications on ways of improving the results of teaching. I have taught at least 2,000 persons, from 5th grade school students to schoolteachers. I have spent at least 15,000 hours in lecturing and training my students. All my students respected me (or at least were not afraid coming to my lessons) because I like to teach, and I always do everything what I can, helping students to master the subject. It was very helpful for me taught mathematics and physics at the same time because mathematics is a language of physics and physics is a field for applying mathematics. Also, my long years tutoring experience was very useful because the tutoring allows “penetrating” inside a student's head to understand the way of student's thinking (even although I have been living in the US for less then three years, I already have an experience of private tutoring, tutoring to middle and high school students at Roxbury Clubhouse of Boys and Girls Club of Boston, tutoring to college students at Wentworth Institute of Technology, plus I am lecturing at Norwood branch of ITT Technical Institute).

I have a broad experience of social connecting. I understand relationships between various parts of an education system; what parents want from school, principals - from teachers, teachers - from parents, college - from students, politicians - from principals, students - from college etc (I am not sure about a possibility to apply this experience in the US, but at least I can compare).

I have a solid background in Mathematics and Physics (see my diplomas). I graduated from Perm State University, which is one of the best Universities in Russia. The courses I learned include Calculus, Analytical Geometry and Higher Algebra, Theoretical Mechanics, Methods of Mathematical Physics, Symmetry Theory, Nonlinear Oscillations, Principles of Tensor Analysis, Differential Equations, Solution of Problems Using Computers, Computing Mathematics, General Physics, Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics, Electrodynamics, Magnetism Theory, Quantum Mechanics, Theory of Numerous Particles etc.

I have an equal training experience in Mathematics and Physics. My professional experience includes 10 years of teaching, training and tutoring in physics and mathematics to school students; 6 years of lecturing, training and tutoring in physics and mathematics to university students (including night classes for working students); 7 years of research in educational science and 6 years of lecturing and consulting in educational science to school teachers.

Teaching is my life. I can teach and I love to teach. Maybe because of it, my students usually give me back at least understanding of the necessity to study Math and Physics.

I could say on myself that I have in some point of view an unique experience. I am a lucky man, I have taught students of almost all possible grades. I have taught middle school students, high school students, college and university students and adults (school teachers and principals). I have worked together with teachers of big city schools and with teachers of small rural schools. My professional experience includes types of work such as an examination of teachers’ curriculum, an evaluation of the quality of teaching, an evaluation of the professional level of teachers and principals. Also, I have participated in a development of an educational policy for Perm district, in particular, in creating of the Perm district’s law “Development of the Perm districts educational system during 2000 – 2005”.

America and Russia could have big cultural differences, but I am sure that some of my experience may be useful in the US.

I have worked with “ordinary” students, gifted students and with students, who had problems with education. Usually, I have taught students of several types at the same day. For example, at the morning I had to teach school students, then I to go teach undergraduate students, and at the evening I had to train youths for the entrance university exams. This situation had allowed me to observe the evolution of knowledge and understanding from grade to grade. It has allowed me to observe the transition from lack of knowledge to the “birth” knowledge, from the failing in problem solving to skillfulness, from mis-un-non-understanding to understanding. Also, it has allowed me to develop some tools for helping students to make these transitions. Since I have taught hundreds of students of almost all possible grades, I am able now to recognize what is going on in the student’s head, when he or she can not solve the task/problem.

More than ten years I have been studying the reasons for students’ misunderstanding and searching ways for overcoming it. In addition to my own teaching experience, I have been observing lessons of dozens and dozens teachers and analyzing together with the teachers the lessons. We discussed what kinds of a new information students had to find out, what kind of new skills students had to develop, what kind of old skills students had to train, what the students had to understand, and what results really happened. My goal was to became an expert on misunderstanding of Physics and Math. Usually I can predict where the student’s misunderstanding may appear, why the student did not understand a that part of the subject, and what the way can help the student to understand it. I have been developing the educational tools, which can help students to overcome misunderstanding without the presence of the teacher.

The larger portion of the lectures that I taught to students was in physics, and the rest in mathematics. On the other hand, the larger part of my work as a tutor was in mathematics. I have equal experience in developing curricula and tests in mathematics and in physics. In particular, I have developed curriculum in physics for university students focused on developing problem solving skills; also for high school students, which included all basic mathematical material necessary for understanding of Physics (I am a fan of the idea of integrated Math+Physics school course).

In Russia I directly participated in developing, implementing and testing contemporary pedagogical techniques such as a student-centered classroom (differentiation in training, individual focus training) The big influence on me exert publications of G. Altshuller, E. de Bono, V. Davydov, D. Elkonin, J. Peaget, G. Shedrovitsky, V. Slobodchikov, L. Vygotsky. My main achievement in this area was developing a technique to be used by teachers to help students who are experiencing difficulties in educational problem-solving situations.

I have developed a number of tools that allow the teacher to help the student without replacing the student's thinking, but motivating him to perform the logical steps that gradually lead to the completion of the task (see examples here). Such tools involve the system of operationally-connected categories (SOCC helps to visualize a students’ knowledge structure), the table of correspondence between everyday lexicon and subject terminology (helps to interpret the text of the problem), the classification table of typical subject models (helps to recognize the model that useful for the problem), generalized algorithm of reasoning (helps to make a correct sequence of actions), educational games and puzzles (help motivate students and to develop their ability to think), and others. I am sure some of them can be useful to American students.

Shortly before moving to America I have written and published on my WEB-site a collection of physics problems on Kinematics for high school students and non-physics college students. My collection of problems has an essential dissimilarity from sets of analogous collections. The solution of each problem is written in such a way, that a student can understand how this solution was “invented”. I have verbalized a process of creating of the solution, i.e. a process of reflection the result of which is the solution of the problem (usually this process is latent, is “hided” in a head of an author). It allows student during the studying of Kinematics to realize a specificity of a physical thinking and gives a positive effect for a speed of studying and a depth of understanding of the subsequent sections of Physics.

As a management adviser, I helped dozens of school principals and teachers to improve their educational process.

I am going to keep working as a teacher/tutor and as a researcher simultaneously. I think that it is very helpful for the students, for the teacher, for school, and for the educational science when the teacher and the researcher are the same person. I think that it is very helpful while carrying on any pedagogical research to be doing some actual teaching. I believe this way is the best way to collect a scientific material for the subsequent analysis and to prove the usefulness of the researches to the real practice.