Alex Koo, an assistant professor in the Teaching Stream, has won the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Outstanding Teaching Award–Early Career. The award recognizes excellence in undergraduate and graduate education, with a focus on classroom instruction, course design, and curriculum development.
“The quality of our undergraduate and graduate teaching is essential both to our success as a university and to our ability to attract and retain top-quality students,” says Arthur Ripstein, the Department of Philosophy’s acting chair. “It is good to see Alex’s outstanding work of many years recognized in this fashion,” he adds.
For Koo, the award is meaningful not as a declaration of mastery, but as a validation of process. In teaching, “there’s a ton of uncertainty about whether or not things will work,” he says. “And even if they do work, whether or not they’re effective, and whether or not the students like them. These are all essentially independent.” Teaching, for him, is a space of experimentation, iteration, and reflection. The recognition from the Faculty of Arts & Science “is not validation that everything is a smashing success,” he adds. “But it’s really amazing to just have my other faculty members—who are senior and experienced teachers—look at that and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s the way.’”
Koo’s approach to teaching is both thoughtful and dynamic. He teaches a range of courses, from logic to philosophy of science and mathematics, and he tailors each one to the students in the room. “I really pay attention to the student demographic—who’s taking the courses, what their backgrounds are, what they want from the class,” he explains. “That has really shaped my course design decisions.”
One of his most impactful innovations has been in the teaching of logic, a course both foundational and famously challenging. “When I first started teaching PHL245, it was a course with 300 students,” he recalls. The students had a wide range of technical backgrounds and varying abilities to do the work, he remembers. To meet that challenge, Koo began creating supplementary videos—short, focused, and accessible. “At first I started with a very small amount of video, just testing it out. But the feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive.”
Those videos, initially filmed with a webcam pointed at his hand solving equations and puzzles, have since evolved into a full-fledged Logic Lab initiative. “It just became so popular that more and more students were asking me to make more and more video content,” Koo says. “At one point I was like, OK, maybe I need to actually design a class around this idea.” The videos are now publicly available on YouTube and U of T’s MyMedia platform, and are used by students at other institutions as well.
“Alex is an enormously gifted teacher,” says Jim John, the department’s director of undergraduate studies. “He is an authoritative yet approachable presence in the classroom who excels at carefully explaining complex ideas and inspiring interest in philosophy among his students. His teaching is informed by his careful study of the philosophy pedagogy literature, and he has made several contributions of his own to that literature, publishing articles on philosophical skill building and blended video and in-person logic instruction.”
Koo’s commitment to pedagogy extends beyond the classroom. He is deeply engaged in curriculum development, and his work has transformed the department’s approach to teaching introductory logic. “Alex completely revamped the department’s approach to teaching introductory logic, creating the highly successful Logic Lab initiative and overhauling the course PHL245H Modern Symbolic Logic,” John notes. “Thanks to Alex’s initiatives in this area, we now offer multiple sections of 245 every year, reaching upwards of 1,000 students.”
But for Koo, the heart of teaching lies in the relationships it fosters. “In terms of the most satisfying things, the things that I find incredibly rewarding, it’s got to be student interactions,” he says. “I’ve come to really appreciate interacting with students at all sorts of different levels in terms of their performance in a class, but also levels of interest, and all sorts of different backgrounds.”
He is especially attuned to the social dimension of learning. “I don’t want my students to have an experience where they’re just a solitary individual who’s very passive,” he says. “I want them to remember that they had a good experience—anchored in social learning experiences.” To that end, he uses tools like Perusall, an online platform that allows students to annotate readings collaboratively. “They can leave comments and questions about the reading throughout the week, and they essentially can engage with each other,” he explains. “It opens up the door that they are hopefully more willing to discuss in class and in person.”
Koo’s path to teaching was shaped by both passion and pragmatism. During his own studies, “there was a real possible future where I was just going to go to teacher’s college and become a high school teacher–because I just loved teaching so much,” he says. After graduate school, he faced a crossroads: continue pursuing research or focus on teaching. “I basically just made a calculation that I was more likely to succeed by trying to be a really great teacher,” he says. “Partly because I loved doing it, and partly because I thought I was pretty good at it anyway.”
He credits a network of mentors and colleagues for helping him grow. “Jim John has just been such an invaluable resource,” he says. “And early on I also sent a cold email to Mark Kingwell . . . and we talked for two hours. He accelerated my development so much.” Koo now pays that generosity forward, mentoring teaching assistants and collaborating with colleagues across campuses.
Is he pleased he took the Teaching Stream route to focus on pedagogy? “I’m extremely happy with my choice,” he says without hesitation. “It’s amazing.” His students and colleagues agree.
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