Teaching philosophy

Originally posted on: January 21st, 2026. Last update: January 29th, 2026.

I enjoy research immensely, but I am also quite passionate about teaching. For one, this is because teaching forces me to take a step back and consider how my work fits within a bigger context. In addition, I find joy in interacting with students and seeing how their participation in my courses can motivate them to work on interesting projects that build on what was taught.

In this short post, I thought I would share the guiding principles that my teaching activities are based on:

• Coaching rather than teaching: I value direct interaction with students in my teaching activities, as I believe that nurturing personal relationships can be a strong motivator for students (after all, it was for me when I was a student). In fact, whenever I conduct courses, I see myself more as a coach that guides students to explore topics themselves rather than as a teacher that passively conveys knowledge. Through this, my objective is to encourage students to take an active role in the learning process, thereby ensuring that they can engage with the course material in a way that can optimise the learning outcomes.
• Teaching using a combination of modalities: In my experience, there is no single teaching modality that works equally well in all classes and for all students. For this reason, I try to use different teaching styles for different occasions, such as frontal teaching or flipped classroom, often driven by the topic of discussion. I am also open to using tools such as large language models to support my students’ learning process; I particularly try to incorporate such models in lab class exercises so that students obtain personalised problem descriptions that they are more likely to be motivated to work on.
• Combination of theory and practice: In my teaching, I attempt to strike a balance between theoretical and practical work so that students can benefit from my courses as much as possible. On the one hand, I want to provide students with a solid conceptual understanding of the covered material so that they can effectively work with it; on the other hand, I want them to have an ability to actually apply the learned concepts in the practical implementation of robotic systems. To support both goals, I usually combine lectures and course assignments with project-driven work; through this, students can explore topics that are covered in the course in more detail, or can even go beyond the course material and investigate aspects that they are personally interested in.
• Coupling research and teaching activities: The design of my courses and the creation of teaching materials is heavily inspired by my research activities. At the very least, I want to draw on examples from my research to motivate conceptual discussions in my courses, but I also try to translate topics from my research into concrete material that is taught in the courses. Through this, students can be exposed to ongoing research activities and can reflect on open research challenges; at the same time, I can benefit from this as a researcher, as I need to think about how to convey my work in a format that is digestible for non-experts.
• Openness of teaching resources: I have an open approach when it comes to both research and teaching, so I share my teaching materials openly through my personal website. This is one way in which I can give something back to the community, as I have benefitted from many open teaching materials in my own studies. Similarly, I hope that other lecturers may find some use for my teaching materials in their own courses; I have already gone through the effort of creating those materials, so I would be happy if their availability can save someone else some time.