Teaching Statement
My objective in each of my classes is to focus heavily on the upper tiers of Bloom’s taxonomy. Students in my classes should be able to apply concepts in new ways, analyze how the concepts relate to each other, evaluate experiments and their interpretations, and create their own ideas for testing hypotheses. Though neuroscience has much material to be learned and memorized, this field is inherently the application of concepts from other fields. For example, optogenetics, a method to explore the role of specific neurons, is a manipulation of algae DNA: a manipulation of a single-celled organism to study complex neuronal interactions. Being able to apply scientific concepts in new ways is the foundation of the field, and instilling these instincts in the classroom is imperative to understanding the field and training skeptical and inquisitive minds.
In all classes, an exercise I use frequently is composing scientific questions and how to answer them. Specifically, a phrase I often use in class discussions is “how would you test that?” To ensure my students engage with the material further than learning the base concepts, I favor a flipped classroom with team-based learning, especially in introductory classes like Neuroscience 101: Biological Bases of Behavior. Students prepare for class by reading the appropriate chapters in the textbook, and are encouraged to seek out answers on Google and YouTube (specifically Khan Academy) to any questions they may have about the material. If unsuccessful, they are encouraged to bring these questions to class. At the beginning of each class meeting, learning of this material is assessed by short individual quizzes applying the concepts in new ways (clinical cases, which part of the brain do you think is most responsible for this effect, etc.). After taking these quizzes, students in groups (composed based on background surveys on the first day of class) discuss the questions and retake the quiz as groups. After these answers are passed in, groups defend their answer choices before the answer and rationale is revealed. In one exercise, students apply, analyze, and evaluate the material in new contexts.
In smaller seminar/discussion classes, I favor a “teaching to learn” approach.. In groups, students present the material (often each figure of an empirical paper) for the rest of the class. Importantly, they are not allowed to use notes – only an annotated copy of the paper itself - notes do not help the retention of material otherwise seen in the “teaching to learn” approach (Koh et al., 2018). After going through the material in detail, I ask the students (based on volunteered participation or at random) deeper questions, such as designing an experiment to answer a specific question. In a similar way to team-based learning, students evaluate the material, analyze and apply previously learned concepts (such as methods from previous papers).
Truly answering questions as they arise based on previous experiments in the lab is how neuroscience is discovered – learning how to experiment is critical to scientific development and progress. In this way, mentoring undergraduates in a lab environment is the most individualized form of teaching, and often prompts questions and experimental ideas that are typical of graduate students and postdocs in a neuroscience laboratory. I find gratification in mentoring because I can see both the progression and culmination of scientific thinking in my students. I find that mentoring has helped me in my teaching in that I can more easily anticipate the searching questions that only come from deeply engaging with the material. As well, teaching in the classroom helps me to be more intimately connected with the concepts my mentees should know thoroughly.
Overall, my teaching tactics are based on educational research and ways to incite excitement about the material and ways in which it can be used. I aim to be transparent about the empirical bases behind my teaching tactics, just as I aim to be transparent behind my experimental rationale. Students who understand that there is research behind specific methods are more likely to engage, rather than viewing a task as "busywork." To improve upon these principles, in the future I hope to use more technology in my classes. Specifically, instead of reading from a textbook, I hope to record my lectures on the material as a supplement to the reading in order to further focus on the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.