“Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.”
Abhijit Naskar
Over the past five years, I’ve had a breadth of teaching experience ranging from mentoring public high school students to teaching at the graduate level. Across these multiple and diverse teaching contexts, I convey to students both the practical and conceptual benefits of a scientific education: the ability to identify knowledge gaps, ask pointed questions and formulate hypotheses, critically read and analyze data, and re-examine the problem as needed. These skills and cognitive faculties not only foster a deeper understanding of the relationship between students and the natural world, but also prepare students for success no matter what career they pursue after they leave my classroom. My teaching philosophy is best summarized by a quote from neuroscientist Abhijit Naskar: “Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.” My ultimate goal as a science instructor is to cultivate my students into life-long learners. I accomplish this by encouraging collaborative learning, promoting critical self-evaluation, and practicing adaptive teaching myself.
Nowadays, excellence in science research and its translation to the public increasingly relies on interdisciplinary teamwork. One of my main goals is to enable students to work effectively and efficiently in multidisciplinary teams with their colleagues from various backgrounds and areas of expertise. To encourage this collaborative learning, I employ team-based quizzes in my classroom. At the beginning of each class, students take a brief (10-question) quiz. After first completing it individually, students then immediately retake it with their team – a group of students that collaborate the entire semester. These teams are formed intentionally, using responses to a brief survey I have created, to ensure teams are diverse and interdisciplinary. By first taking the quiz as an individual, students are held accountable to review the material and prepare to contribute to the group, as the individual scores count towards the overall quiz grade, which is a weighted average of the individual and group scores. As soon as the individual quiz ends, the classroom immediately transforms from a quiet, austere space to a lively, buzzing environment with students moving chairs around and pointing at the paper, each defending their perspective and advocating for what they think was the right answer. Students confide in one another in questions they were unsure of and exude confidence when they are certain of the correct answer. Students find this quiz format helpful for their learning, providing feedback such as, “I like the fact that…we have the opportunity to work in teams to figure out the answers.” Indeed, collaborative learning is highly effective; to date, quiz grades taken as a group have always been the equivalent or higher than the grade when taken as an individual, suggesting peer’s transfer of knowledge and group learning. I share data on individual and group quiz scores with the class for full transparency on this classroom strategy and its results on learning.
Another one of my goals as an instructor is to help students foster their ability to reflect and self-evaluate to cultivate self-sufficient, life-long learning. Too often, I have noticed that when students receive a graded exam, they focus only on the score they earned. To help students engage with graded exams more deeply and promote a growth mindset, I ask students to complete “exam wrappers” following each exam. The exam wrapper, which I adapted from several university teaching center examples, consists of metacognitive questions to help students self-evaluate their exam preparation, performance, and time management with the goal of adapting their future learning. Example questions include: ‘Did you create a study plan outlining a strategic way to study?’, and ‘Estimate the percentage of points you lost due to each of the following: trouble with applying definitions, not knowing how to approach the problem, careless mistakes, etc…’. After an exam, I collect and review the exam wrappers to see if there is anything I can do differently to support student learning and exam preparation. When the class size allows, I set up one-on-one appointments with students to review their exam wrapper and help them devise a strategy to revise their study habits and improve their future performance. After the implementation of exam wrappers, office hours that were once spent debating points became a space for students to identify individual areas of strength and weakness to guide future study and to understand the nature of their errors to correct any consistent patterns they identified. Exam wrappers are returned to students when it comes time to study for the next exam, to remind them of the self-discoveries they had made.Providing students with the necessary tools to claim agency over their own learning boosted student confidence and learning, reflected by the trajectory of exam scores across the semester. My students noted anecdotally that becoming adept in self-regulation and metacognition helped them know how to master the material needed for success not just in my course, but in their other courses as well.
My experiences have revealed the importance of taking time to reflect on my own teaching practices to enrich students’ learning experience. Just as I encourage my students to self-reflect after receiving feedback and devise a strategy for improvement, I also actively adapt my class and teaching approaches based on student feedback to improve the class over time. As noted in course evaluations for “Fundamentals of Toxicology for Health-Related Disciplines”, some students were daunted by this course’s heavy reliance on previous knowledge and believed that their peers who came from science backgrounds had an advantage. Upon receiving this feedback, the following year I implemented several changes to the course. For example, I developed a “crash course” so that all students could enter the course with the same baseline knowledge to feel adequately prepared for a trajectory of success. First, I offer an optional (but highly encouraged) pre-course assessment tool, in the form of an online quiz, that students use to self-assess their familiarity with prerequisite material. Based on their score (and a short ‘quiz wrapper’), students decide whether they are competent with the prerequisite material needed for success in the course. For students that feel like they need support, I offer in-person “crash course” lectures on biology and biochemistry relevant to course content before the start of the course. I also record and post these lectures online so students can continue to have a resource throughout the semester to access basic concepts not covered in detail by the course textbooks. This strategy ensures all students were on a level playing field at the beginning of the course and able to engage in class and with the material. Many students noted that attending the crash course and knowing what topics to focus on made them feel less intimidated by the course, and it helped make course content more accessible and increase learning.
My desire to be an instructor is fueled by my passion for my own life-long learning, which I aim to cultivate in my students and accomplish myself through teaching. With an understanding of their own cognition and ability to work as a team, students who leave my classroom are equipped with the tools for success in their lives no matter what their aspirations are. Through modeling my own growth mindset, I inspire students to practice ongoing, self-motivated personal development and pursuit of knowledge, in their academic endeavors and beyond.
My statement of teaching philosophy can be downloaded at the link below.
