Teaching Statement
Teaching Experience and My Students
As a retinal biologist and neuroscientist, the Departments of Ophthalmology and Cell Biology, I will have served as a teaching assistant in a foundational cellular & molecular biology course for graduate students and have experience as the teaching assistant for a basic neuroscience course for undergraduate students.
In the graduate courses where I will serve as a teaching assistant, my students will be primarily first and second year graduate students coming from the following graduate training programs for PhD students: Cellular & Molecular Biology, University Program in Genetics & Genomics, and Pharmacology and Cancer Biology. These students will have completed a number of pre-requisite courses in biological sciences prior to admission to their respective programs, and most will be coming into my classroom with an undergraduate background in biological sciences. During their subsequent studies, these graduate students will be completing a thesis project and conducting original research investigations. By contrast, my basic neuroscience course functioned as a general education requirement for science credit, and the undergraduate students in my course had limited prior exposure to biology-related topics. These undergraduate students planned to complete their studies in fields outside of the College of Science.
While these classrooms vary significantly in size (a dozen or so graduate students versus several dozen [>50] undergraduate students), I believe that establishing rapport with students and utilizing interactive classroom activities are important for success in both settings. Beyond the specific scientific and biology-oriented content of these courses, I aim to cultivate my students’ passion for scientific inquiry and critical thinking. For all students, developing hypothesis-driven thinking and critically assessing information are lifelong skills that can apply to their daily lives, no matter if their daily lives involve evaluating ingredients while in line at the grocery store, or troubleshooting experiments in the laboratory. I place a high value on learning to identify reliable sources of information, and as a result, all of my students will practice assembling and reading primary sources of scientific literature. These skills transfer to their ability to rigorously identify credible sources of information in their chosen disciplines of focus.
Goals for
My Students
At the most basic level, I aim for my students to develop a strong conceptual understanding of content in the course. The courses are structured in a flipped classroom style where students are expected to initiate their learning at home by reading from a textbook (which includes figures and visual aids) and by watching pre-recorded video lectures that include very short interactive elements (mini-quizzes) to assess for understanding of the material. These constitute opportunities for my students to receive formative feedback on their understanding of the material, and students complete this at-home learning for a completion grade. This allows for us to focus our classroom time on other aspects of learning.
Students can then maximize our classroom time and ask clarifying questions about the content covered in the textbook or video lectures. Based on responses obtained in the formative feedback mini-quizzes, I was also able to assemble topics that students had more difficulty with ahead of class. This allowed the instructor and I to spend part of our class time reviewing more challenging concepts. I plan to continue this practice in future courses whether I am a teaching assistant or the primary instructor. Opening class with a review of questions and difficult concepts also serves to reinforce content for students and emphasize the value of their at-home learning for directly informing the instruction they receive.
I highly value my students’ ability to communicate effectively and think critically. Presenting complex information in a short time limit can be exceptionally difficult, but challenges students to distill their message to only the most important points. If we present our work, but the audience does not understand, it can be like we did not say anything at all. Communicating such that our audience can actually understand (and potentially explain to someone else down the line) is extremely important for this reason. Some classroom activities that propel students toward this goal include “lightning talk” style presentations (~2-3 minutes), where students must clearly communicate information and make choices about the details that may not be as important to share. This activity requires students to give lightning talks summarizing original research articles on a shared overarching topic and to consider future directions or limitations from the work they read.
Effective collaboration and teamwork are also important skills for students to develop. To practice these abilities, students work together in small teams to create cohesive presentations about research articles. In teaching back content to their peers, they demonstrate their own mastery of the content while communicating effectively about subject matters their peers have not yet encountered in as much depth. In this way, the students have a chance to develop their own teaching skills that will be useful whether they are formally teaching others or training a new hire in their future careers. Similarly, much of the real world requires us to work in teams to accomplish goals that would be difficult for individuals on their own, and these activities provide students with additional structure to reinforce the value of collaboration.
The Learning Environment
An inclusive learning environment is paramount to creating a space where every student feels valued and has equal opportunities for success. To achieve this, I am committed to setting clear expectations for respectful behavior and routinely affirm the importance of acknowledging and appreciating diverse perspectives. Students are encouraged to play devil’s advocate as a critical thinking exercise and encouraged to share how their personal experiences tie into topics. With different students preferring different learning styles, the flipped classroom model accommodates students who may require additional time to absorb information compared to the timeframe typically allotted by an in-class lecture.
I also believe that part of creating this environment and safe learning space involves a willingness to admit to my students when I am wrong and to grow from those experiences. Modeling this behavior to my students is extremely important to me as an educator leading by example. Reflection on my teaching and adapting to student feedback makes up an important part of my growth as a teacher. Besides evaluations at the end of the semester, students have an opportunity to share midpoint feedback through a brief survey. Throughout each course, students also have continuous access to a feedback form that I review on a weekly basis.
My Future
Teaching Goals
I believe that a growth mindset is as important in life as it is in teaching. For future classes, I plan to incorporate a standing feedback form for students to quickly share thoughts at the end of class anonymously. I hope that working hard to establish a culture of freely exchanged opinions will allow them to share their feedback with me in person, but I also recognize that the teacher-student barrier can be intimidating at times. I will also implement more structured feedback opportunities at the end of units within the course or as part of the mid-term feedback. These check-ins will allow for students to voice their views while there is still time for me to make adjustments that will improve their learning experience during the semester.