Teaching Aim and Philosophy
As a Neurobiologist, I want to connect to and engage more curious minds to “fire” together. Therefore, my primary goal of teaching is to provide a fostering environment for students to explore their interests in Science, and to inspire and guide them to build the mindsets to explore topics of interest.
To achieve this goal, my teaching strategies are student-oriented and encourages active learning. Instead of depositing knowledge into students’ mind bank in traditional teaching, as Paulo Freire described, I always encourage students to earn and invest with their knowledge “currency”. That is, to actively learn and apply knowledge in problem-solving scenarios, ranging from a practice question to real experiments. Specifically, to reinforce learning and to propagate the essence of empirical science, my students are encouraged and guided to generate and test their own hypothesis using properly designed experiments. I integrate primary literature-based class activities and research-based projects into my class to facilitate students’ acquisition of learning and researching skills, and to foster their critical thinking and develop problem-solving strategies.
Early Development and Reflective Teaching
My interest in teaching started in elementary school. Back to the 1990s, I was a transfer student new to the city of Chengdu. Halfly guessing and halfly confirming my guesses through the classes, I was only able to catch up a year after immersing myself in this new environment, where contents were taught in local dialect. One day, a friend of mine got warned to do better on final exam or “go home”. We were scared and I started to tutor him on homework and class reviews. However, he was falling far behind, and made little grade improvement. I realized he was just like me when I first sat in that classroom but guessing content-wise instead. The struggle comes from the lack of foundation for understanding. Just as I needed to learn the language before understanding the class material, the “language” he needs to understand are the fundamentals of algebra and grammars. Therefore, I went back to my previous years’ notes and compiled them together for a daily 30-minute mini-lecture for him. It was my first experience of curating a “class”. He made small but steady improvements. I had vague no better idea on teaching at that time, but I knew that I wanted to practice the opposite of my teacher’s style- I want to look for and appreciate the values of my students, and to make learning a happier experience in a non-threatening environment.
As I entered the best middle school of the city, I started to see what good teachers do. I enjoyed exploring new topics as my teachers empowered me to ask questions, come up with answers myself, and to challenge others’ views. I started to imitate my teachers when I continued to tutor my friend on weekend. I understood that the more I talk, the less he will learn. Instead, I started to guide him through learning by asking him questions. In high school, another friend of mine turned to me for help. My one-to-one tutor with her soon turned into a pre-exam boot camp, as other classmates came to join. And it became regular review sessions, as they found helpful for preparing exams. In those sessions, I summarized the key concepts and coached them to implement the concepts into practice questions. I asked my “students” to start by copying my problem-solving strategies and take ownership of it after practices. At that stage, my vague idea about teaching transitioned from passive transmission of knowledge to a more interactive mode of “lecturing” and “in class practices”.
When I TAed for the first time in graduate school, I was confident. However, I was not as good as I thought. In the mid semester evaluation, one student asked if I could explain things more clearly, as sometimes it is difficult to understand. I was surprised, because I was always being praised for being able to make concepts more straightforward with rich examples. What went wrong? I asked colleagues outside of my field for advices: I repeated some of the demonstration examples to them and asked them for feedback. Surprisingly, they understood well. I was puzzled, until I came across an article on the importance of walking around the room and having eye contacts with students. I suddenly realized why. In the past, I used to teach on a one-to-one basis or in small groups, I could watch individuals’ facial expression and slow down, rephrase or repeat as needed. Those interactions are subconscious. I haven’t learned to adapt to a bigger classroom, where I must attend to a bigger audience population with diluted attention on each of them. Also, I should had put more effort encouraging students to give me timely feedback. To improve, I regularly attended to professional TA’s lab sessions, to watch their interactions with the students- especially what they did to encourage more class participation. I implemented the changes immediately: more time is allowed for my shy students to think and respond, more “think-pair-share” activities are designed for them to gather the thoughts and organize the language before presenting to class, more formative assessments were given throughout the class period so I could make timely adjustment to make concepts more understandable.
As I ensured to clarify concepts to every student, some quick learners in the class started to complain about the pace and redundancies. I realized that I bored them out by hanging on the same topic for too long, so I implemented two changes: first, I integrated more examples and media-rich content, so they could learn from the repeated pattern and extract the concepts themselves, instead of listening to me talking; Second, I gave more classroom time back to my students, where they are engaged in data analysis, figure interpretation, and conclusion drawing to understand a phenomenon/concepts. Students got more interested in the topic and complained less about “lab section is too long” as they took ownership of the classroom.
Research-based learning
As I wade through my graduate studies, I realized that learning is not a process of summing up knowledge. It is a series of chemical reactions where ideas attack, merge, split, synthesize, override, on and on. Therefore, I’m dedicated to set my classroom as a “chemistry lab” of ideas, where all students actively participate in research-based discussions. In the Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology course, I was responsible for designing homework problem sets and leading a weekly discussion session. This course aimed to lay a solid foundation for students’ understanding of the nervous system and prepare them to explore topics in Neuroscience. My students worked independently on homework problems to contextualize the lecture materials in true-false, short answer and diagram drawing questions. During discussion session, I often gave them non-graded group quiz, where they were given the challenge to come up with the answer to a real-world phenomenon/in a scenario taken from classic experiments as well as recent publications. To get there, they need to develop a hypothesis, and devise a series of experiments to test their hypotheses. On average, my students were sophomore and junior students majored in the biomedical areas. They’ve learned various experiment methods from science discovery stories and examples in different biology classes. Giving them the challenge to design experiments is asking them to mine from their reservoir of knowledge, to extract any experiment methods, and to put different methods together to stick around the underlying hypothesis. My students enjoyed the “chemical reaction” of ideas they threw in and stirred together. Oftentimes, their designs were full of flaws, because the lack of understanding of how different methods work, and the lack of awareness of realistic limitations. These are mistakes unavoidable even to young graduate students, but exactly the best opportunity to learn about experimental design and methods. My students comment that they remembered better about different experimental methods after failing and analyzing their designs. In these group activities, students were able to draw connections to other Biology courses they’ve taken, and broadly throw in knowledge learned from various sub-disciplines to catalyze this “chemical reaction”.
Fostering supportive learning environment
I always gave my students opportunity to stumble. As a teacher, I want to be my students’ scaffold when they need to get up from failure, because in their independent learning in the future, no one is going to pave a way to success for them. I resonate strongly with Ken Bain’s statement that “give students opportunity to struggle with their thoughts without facing assessments of their efforts, to try, come up short, receive feedback on their efforts, and try again before facing any “grading”.” Therefore, I always gave students adequate opportunities to fail and re-try before graded assessments. For example, in the Gateway to Biology: Molecular Biology class, my students work on a semester-long genomic library construction project, where each of them isolates, identify and describe a unique gene. An exit interview takes place on the end of semester, which constitutes significant portion of their grading. In this interview, they need to give a 10-15 minutes presentation to me on this project, and answer questions regarding the rationales of experiments. My students perform well on this exit interview, partly because, as they described to me, they had “failed” this interview so many times before. Paired “mock interviews”, where my students are encouraged to come up with questions they think I would ask, and comment on the “interviewee” as I could do, were held every other week. In addition, students were given the role-exchange activity, where I would give five minutes’ lecturing material to a group to present and teach their classmates each time. Students learn better when mutual trust is established. During my teaching, I always remind myself the experience of my friend in elementary school. When students perform below their expectations, grades become a punishment rather than a form of feedback. Learning and assessment are effective in a more encouraging environment.
College teaching certificate program and Future Development
I believe that the first step to become a good teacher is to become an avid learner. In my PhD years, I attended seminars in diverse biomedical disciplines and strengthened myself as a knowledgeable expertise. Meanwhile, I am actively learning how to become a better teacher. I’ve TAed for six semesters in four different courses, ranging from intro level to intermediate and high-level undergraduate classes. My roles involve instructing lab sections, leading discussion sessions, holding review session and weekly help desk, providing one-to-one tutor during office hour, grading, designing quiz, homework and exam questions, and mentoring students for independent projects. I benefited greatly from these valuable experiences. I reflect on my teaching and mentoring constantly to improve myself. I watch other TAs and professors and learn from them better teaching skills and classroom dynamics. I am participating in the College Teaching Certificate Programs. I’ve learned how to lead effective discussions and design activities to encourage active learning in the Oral Communication for International TAs class. I am currently enrolled in the College Teaching & Visual Communication class, where I improved on delivering information in a more efficient, powerful, unobstructed way using visual aids, and I redesigned my lecture slides to improve delivery efficiency. I am also taking the College Teaching and Course Design class, where I developed syllabus, course projects, in class activities in a more student-oriented manner. Furthermore, I learned from the instructor, Molly Goldwasser, effective skills in creating a more encouraging learning environment. She inspired me to always question “why does the instructor do this?” in a classroom setting, and actively learn from others. I will be participating in the Teach Triangle peer feedback program in the Spring of 2020. In a long term goal, I want to teach college-level courses in Universities in my home country. As a student, I enjoyed being taught in classrooms. Eight years of traditional Chinese education, three years of international high school, and ten years of higher education in the US had gave me the valuable experience of being taught and inspired by many great teachers of diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. I want to integrate those valuable experience and create a fostering environment for students of diverse background to learn and enjoy Science.