Teaching and Mentoring

You point to differences in the human and the chimp, and then show how Lucy is somewhere in between. You also talk about the knees and the skull and how incredibly important it was for our understanding that our ancestors stood up before they got smarter. She looks up at you and you see it click- she gets it. A light bulb goes on somewhere inside her brain and she just understands what you have told her. And you have a feeling that she will probably remember this the next time she walks through this museum, and maybe even tell whoever she is with that next time.     This experience happened to me during my sophomore year of college at Case Western Reserve University. That bright look in my sarcastic sister's eyes is one of the main reasons I want to teach, and also changed my view of the world. Teaching is not just about spilling out knowledge and hoping that a student comes by and picks it up, but it is about creating an environment where they want to learn from you, and they will remember the things that you tell them. This spill-out method works with some students who are already invested in the subject matter, but there are rarely students who walk into a new class knowing that they want to learn everything (or anything) there is to know about a subject. Guiding a student through the learning process is a very important step in a student's learning. Force feeding statistics and equations will usually not get the job done for substantial learning. Perhaps they will go home, make note cards, and memorize those equations for the exam, but by the time the class is over, that information will be forgotten, since it is seen as unimportant in their eyes. My goal is to get them to understand why it is important to learn.

    To try to create such an environment in my discussions and lab sections, I ask a lot of questions of the students, and we have many discussions of topics that are outside the scope of the class, but which bring what we do in the classroom outside into their every day lives. For instance, when thinking about macromolecules, the food we eat, portion sizes, and the like, we had a discussion about health in the media, and how the media affects the lives of the health-conscious and children. Another instance was discussing Darwin’s work on sexual selection and debating whether and how sexual selection affects human relationships. Our discussions go very well, as I sit on the side only asking questions to further them, letting the students talk amongst themselves as if they were simply talking to friends. My students open up a lot more than I originally expected, and I learn where they are coming from, which can aid in my teaching methods. We are also able to use the diversity in our classes to change perspectives of the students- no one comes into any classroom with exactly the same backgrounds and that can be a great advantage.

    If I were to take my sister to the museum today, I would ask her what the differences she saw between the human and the chimp, and then show her Lucy and have her pick out what characters were more like the chimp or human, and what seemed somewhere in between. This way, she would come to the knowledge on her own, and then I could help explain the "why" and "how" behind it, and let her come to the same conclusions that scientists did when Lucy was first discovered. This way of guiding through the learning process, I feel, is the best way I can teach.

Mentoring Activities 

Undergraduate Research Assistant

• Undergraduate senior majoring in Zoology

• Aiding me in research focused on mammal paleontology

• Weekly meetings to discuss relevant literature

• Discussing all aspects of science and research

Huffington Post Girls In STEM Program

• National program to connect female scientists with motivated high school students interested in science careers

• Female high school senior with aspirations in Evolutionary Biology and Astronomy

• Personal communications on life, science, and college admissions

Bonding Undergraduate and Graduate Students (BUGS) Program

• Pilot program through the Graduate Women in Science

• Female senior undergraduate majoring in Physics and Astronomy

• Monthly face-to-face meetings with prompts from the program coordinators

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Classes

• Flipping the Classroom

  • Online flipped classroom on how and why to flip a classroom

• Teaching Evolution

  • Topics included: using literature to teach, hands-on activities and online curriculum development

• Preparation for Teaching

  • Assignments and discussions about teaching at the college level, including a final project creating an entire module for a class

• Teaching With Technology

  • Weekly discussions of technology use in the college classroom.

  • Topics presented on: presentation and mobile technologies

  • Other topics included: copyright, assessibility, etc.

• Instructional Materials Design

  • With a team of two other graduate students and a professor, created and implemented a hands-on activity on whale evolution

Teaching Programs/Workshops

• Delta Brown Bag discussions

  • Topics included: Backward Design, "Other" Forms of Diversity, PowerPoint Use and Abuse, and Technology as a Teaching Tool

• Delta Roundtable discussion events

  • 2012/2013 topics included: Tips for Grad Students and Young Faculty, Gender Bias in STEM Education, Science Storytelling, Work/Life Balance in Academia, Active Learning, and Flipping the Classroom

Conferences

• UW Teaching and Learning Excellence: Teaching and Learning Symposium (Madison, WI - May 2013)

• CIRTL Forum: Teaching, Learning and Research: Preparation of the Nation’s Future Faculty (Madison, WI - October 2011)

• UW Teaching and Learning Excellence: Teaching and Learning Symposium (Madison, WI - May 2011)

• UW Letters and Sciences Teaching Symposium- 20th Anniversary of the Teaching Fellows Program (Madison, WI - November 2010)

• UW Teaching and Learning Excellence: Teaching and Learning Symposium (Madison, WI - May 2010)

My Delta Portfolio

    The Delta program in Research, Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's completion honor. The program embraces the importance of teaching at the college level, but focusing on teaching-as-research, learning communities, and learning through diversity. More information on the certificate can be found here.