Statement of Teaching Philosophy
My goal as an educator, a colleague and a leader is to encourage others to succeed, to give them the tools of empowerment. In a university setting, students can be challenged with active learning techniques that emphasize comprehension and problem-solving, focusing on science as a process for discovery. Creating supportive, collaborative and self-motivated environments is at the centre of my course design and teaching style.
Learning is a collaborative process and an effective learning environment fosters a sense of community. In lecture this can mean working on practice questions together, creating classroom dialogue and encouraging students to support each other through study groups. In lab spaces, starting discussions on relevant contemporary issues and designing collaborative experiments create that sense of mutual investment. Focusing on cooperative learning helps celebrate student engagement and reduce emphasis on class averages or competitive grading. In upper-years lectures, I use journal club activities to challenge the students with primary scientific literature and to let them showcase their topic expertise through seminar presentation skills in a supportive space. Labs can also reinforce that research is a team activity through group experiments that use shared data to build logical conclusions with data sets that would be impractical for a single student to collect. They are shown that they all have valuable knowledge, insights and skills to share with their peers.
Setting high expectations for students gives them space to excel and encourages them to take responsibility for their learning and participation. Students can be shown that their successes or failures are within their own control, they will need to demonstrate a range of skills to complete their coursework, and there are ample resources for them to draw upon. Lab reports are an excellent example of this type of challenge because they are long-term projects that require students not just to make connections between laboratory activities and background literature, but to effectively communicate those connections in a logical and persuasive narrative. Students are challenged to explain course concepts in their reports, putting them in the role of educator. Through assignment constraints, they can be encouraged to make connections between ideas and demonstrate that they can take concepts from relatively simple experiments and use them to approach new problems.
As students feel supported by the community around them and empowered to take ownership of their work, they can feel safe enough to show creativity and share their work. Public speaking is frequently ranked among the most common fears and students need support for presentations and seminars, as either a presenter or asking questions and facilitating discussion. Clear assignment guidelines, appropriate resources and a healthy and respectful classroom culture enable students to express themselves and show the diversity of approaches to scientific communication. Peer editing of students’ lab reports is an activity that exposes the students to other writing styles, requires them to practice editing in a way that they may not bring to their own work and focuses on identifying and encouraging strengths in each other’s work. The peer editing feedback emphasizes working with the other student’s ideas, identifying what makes a paragraph clear or effective or suggesting ways to improve the cohesion and flow of the paper. These are skills that will be helpful as the students revise their own work, as they teach and mentor throughout their careers and as they participate in activities like scientific peer review. When possible, students are given time in class to meet with their peer reviewers to discuss the work and the feedback. A teacher’s efforts to make a safe space where students are willing to speak up is often rewarded by a more vibrant classroom culture with active engagement.
The most prominent challenge to creating a safe and encouraging learning environment is overcoming passive learning. Part of the barrier is that passive learning, hearing the material without questioning it, pursuing it or incorporating it into a larger mental framework, is often adequate. The right educator can encourage learners to go beyond and see active learning as worthwhile. One of the ways to do that is to emphasize that learning is a continuous process and a skill that they can improve. There is a false dichotomy of novices and experts, of insurmountable or instantaneous jumps that undermine the value of putting in effort to steadily improve. As an instructor who is also a student, I see my own journey as a continuation of the journeys my students are on. I want to challenge my students to work on improving their own knowledge and skills and remind them that we all continue to learn throughout our careers.
Like all other classroom experiences, the assessment of learning should also be an opportunity to encourage critical thinking. Having the “right” answer is important, but students should also be able to explain what evidence they saw and how that led them to their conclusion. In a lab setting, focusing on effectively providing the results and making a logical, persuasive argument for what those results mean for the hypothesis teach the students both critical thought and communication skills. Future scientists and leaders will need to face questions to which there may be no right answers yet. Learning science as a process and set of thinking skills rather than a body of knowledge arms them with a resilient framework that they can build on throughout their careers.
My goal as an educator, a colleague and a leader is to encourage others to succeed, to give them the tools of empowerment. In a university setting, students can be challenged with active learning techniques that emphasize comprehension and problem-solving, focusing on science as a process for discovery. Creating supportive, collaborative and self-motivated environments is at the centre of my course design and teaching style.
Learning is a collaborative process and an effective learning environment fosters a sense of community. In lecture this can mean working on practice questions together, creating classroom dialogue and encouraging students to support each other through study groups. In lab spaces, starting discussions on relevant contemporary issues and designing collaborative experiments create that sense of mutual investment. Focusing on cooperative learning helps celebrate student engagement and reduce emphasis on class averages or competitive grading. In upper-years lectures, I use journal club activities to challenge the students with primary scientific literature and to let them showcase their topic expertise through seminar presentation skills in a supportive space. Labs can also reinforce that research is a team activity through group experiments that use shared data to build logical conclusions with data sets that would be impractical for a single student to collect. They are shown that they all have valuable knowledge, insights and skills to share with their peers.
Setting high expectations for students gives them space to excel and encourages them to take responsibility for their learning and participation. Students can be shown that their successes or failures are within their own control, they will need to demonstrate a range of skills to complete their coursework, and there are ample resources for them to draw upon. Lab reports are an excellent example of this type of challenge because they are long-term projects that require students not just to make connections between laboratory activities and background literature, but to effectively communicate those connections in a logical and persuasive narrative. Students are challenged to explain course concepts in their reports, putting them in the role of educator. Through assignment constraints, they can be encouraged to make connections between ideas and demonstrate that they can take concepts from relatively simple experiments and use them to approach new problems.
As students feel supported by the community around them and empowered to take ownership of their work, they can feel safe enough to show creativity and share their work. Public speaking is frequently ranked among the most common fears and students need support for presentations and seminars, as either a presenter or asking questions and facilitating discussion. Clear assignment guidelines, appropriate resources and a healthy and respectful classroom culture enable students to express themselves and show the diversity of approaches to scientific communication. Peer editing of students’ lab reports is an activity that exposes the students to other writing styles, requires them to practice editing in a way that they may not bring to their own work and focuses on identifying and encouraging strengths in each other’s work. The peer editing feedback emphasizes working with the other student’s ideas, identifying what makes a paragraph clear or effective or suggesting ways to improve the cohesion and flow of the paper. These are skills that will be helpful as the students revise their own work, as they teach and mentor throughout their careers and as they participate in activities like scientific peer review. When possible, students are given time in class to meet with their peer reviewers to discuss the work and the feedback. A teacher’s efforts to make a safe space where students are willing to speak up is often rewarded by a more vibrant classroom culture with active engagement.
The most prominent challenge to creating a safe and encouraging learning environment is overcoming passive learning. Part of the barrier is that passive learning, hearing the material without questioning it, pursuing it or incorporating it into a larger mental framework, is often adequate. The right educator can encourage learners to go beyond and see active learning as worthwhile. One of the ways to do that is to emphasize that learning is a continuous process and a skill that they can improve. There is a false dichotomy of novices and experts, of insurmountable or instantaneous jumps that undermine the value of putting in effort to steadily improve. As an instructor who is also a student, I see my own journey as a continuation of the journeys my students are on. I want to challenge my students to work on improving their own knowledge and skills and remind them that we all continue to learn throughout our careers.
Like all other classroom experiences, the assessment of learning should also be an opportunity to encourage critical thinking. Having the “right” answer is important, but students should also be able to explain what evidence they saw and how that led them to their conclusion. In a lab setting, focusing on effectively providing the results and making a logical, persuasive argument for what those results mean for the hypothesis teach the students both critical thought and communication skills. Future scientists and leaders will need to face questions to which there may be no right answers yet. Learning science as a process and set of thinking skills rather than a body of knowledge arms them with a resilient framework that they can build on throughout their careers.