Teaching Philosophy

    Students at the university level are essentially similar to students at any other level. Every individual student approaches the task of learning with a unique set of skills, learning styles, and motivations. A good educator is one who can weave together this diverse collection of skills, styles, and motivations to produce a course that touches every student and not just a few. By helping students learn to learn, by inspiring them, by engaging in inquiry-based and student-directed learning and by addressing the needs of all learners, a good course and a good instructor should transcend the required material and impart the skills and passion needed for life-long learning in any field.

    The most important task of an educator is to help students become independent learners. Long after specific lessons are a distant memory, abilities such as critical thinking, self-motivation, and research skills will continue to serve students in academic pursuits and beyond. In my courses I encourage my students to question and analyze. Through discussions and assignments I strive to foster critical thinking about the material rather than a one-way process of handing down immutable “facts”. Where possible, I like to include projects that require students to research topics on their own and then I help them build a solid repertoire of research skills to accomplish the task. It is my goal that all my students leave my courses better equipped to face challenges both in academics and in the “real world”.

    A good course and a good educator communicate a passion for the subject matter that inspires students to learn. As I mentioned above, each individual student begins a course with different motivations, and different motivational levels. Despite these differences in motivation and regardless of the level the student begins the course with, I feel that each student has his or her own “lever”, which once pushed will lead to a greater interest in the material and eventually a fuller understanding. My goal as an educator is to find and push as many of these “levers” as I can. Ideally, by the end of a course I would like to have found the “lever” for each and every student in the room. While I do want to teach my students to motivate themselves when it comes to learning, I think that the major responsibility for engaging the interest of the students, at least initially, falls with the instructor. Helping the students to then find their own “levers”, with which they can approach any learning task, will serve them well throughout their educational lives and beyond.

    I believe that one important way to address the two issues above is to engage students in the learning process. Two ways to do this are through inquiry-based learning and student-directed learning. Inquiry-based learning is particularly important in the sciences, because it teaches students how to do “real” science. Cookbook labs where the students try to achieve an already pre-determined “correct” result or where students observe the important aspects of static pre-prepared display specimens do not teach students anything about realities (and the excitement) of the scientific process. Wherever possible in my courses, I try to give opportunities for the students to choose the learning goals that most interest them and in my labs, I try to let the students form the questions and design the experiments. While certain facts are important to impart to students in a given scientific field, for me the process is the most important part of the learning.

    Each student also brings real differences in learning styles and abilities to the classroom. I am a firm believer in the idea of “multiple intelligences” as proposed by Howard Gardner. In my courses I strive to use a diversity of techniques to engage a diversity of learners. Even within large lecture courses I try to use discussion, demonstrations, and even hands-on activities as tools to reach every student in the room. Sometimes it requires being really creative or taking a big risk in the classroom, but I try to design activities and assessments that touch on many of the “multiple intelligences” within my classroom, rather than just one or two. I also strongly believe that the goals of learning and my expectations should not be a mystery for my students. Through the use of tools such as detailed grading rubrics I try to make the learning process transparent and give the students (and myself) a clear picture of what I expect from them.