Learning is an integrative process, which involves the engagement of both the student and the instructor. Therefore, I seek to foster a healthy relationship between myself and the students inside and outside the classroom. As a public health instructor, my overall goal is to produce students who can apply epidemiological skills and appropriately communicate their findings to the public in their future career as a public health practitioner. Furthermore, my hope is that my students will never stop growing and learning in their field even upon leaving my institution.
As an instructor, being prepared and organized for each session is essential to delivering a clear lesson to students. I give myself ample time to develop a lesson plan, slides, and activities. I also clearly write the learning objectives for each lecture and review them at the end of each lesson. In order to prepare myself, I review and rehearse the slides for each lesson. However, as an instructor, I also must be flexible if the activities do not go as planned. For example, there are times where I planned to cover more complex topics by the end of the lecture, but I had to allocate more time on earlier topics to ensure students fully grasped the material.
Furthermore, the first objective of each of my lessons is to foster attention and motivation. Therefore, the start of each class involves an activity to engage the students with the current lesson. For example, before teaching a lesson on outbreak investigations, I gave the students a fun trivia quiz on different infectious disease. Another example is before discussing a case-control study evaluating the association between coffee and pancreatic cancer, I gave a trivia quiz about coffee. After the quiz, students were eager to continue the lesson, and previous students have mentioned how much they have enjoyed these activities. During my lectures, I provide opportunities for student participation. For example, I may ask students to share their own examples of a concept. I believe incorporating student participation throughout the lesson promotes active learning during the lesson.
When creating learning assessments, I like to encompass a multitude of different activities. First, I believe assigning homework assignments is essential for students to fully grasp the material covered in lecture. Secondly, I typically include at least one exam to ensure students have successfully learned the material covered in class. I believe students should be familiar with current research and can discuss this research with their colleagues. Thus, I provide at least one assignment where students are required to read a journal article and lead a discussion about the article with class. In developing future public health practitioners, I believe communicating effectively to an audience is a fundamental learning objective. Thus, for each class, I incorporate a one assessment consisting of an oral presentation, where the focus is improving each student’s ability to design an effective slide presentation and practice their public speaking skills.
In addition, open communication between instructors and students is essential to promote a successful learning environment. For my classes, I have a designated forum on Moodle available for students to post questions they have about each lesson. In addition, students are encouraged to e-mail me directly for questions as well. I believe providing timely responses is an essential responsibility of a good instructors; thus, I hold myself to responding to each forum post and e-mail within in 24 hours.
Learning on how to improve as an instructor is not merely my responsibility but rather my duty. Therefore, my goal for myself is to continually seek methods to improve my lessons. I believe one of the best means to accomplish this is to collaborate with colleagues in my field, who can provide thoughtful insight to what teachings methods and activities have worked best for them. In addition, I look forward to receiving student evaluations on my teaching. Each year, I consider what students have enjoyed about my courses and what recommendations they may have to improve my teaching.
Outside of the classroom, I believe it is essential to be a leader and role model in my field. Thus, I like to enforce an open-door policy, where students are welcome to come to my office anytime to help advise and discuss their future aspirations as public health practitioners. I am eager to promote the future career advancement of my students by writing letters of recommendations as well. Finally, I believe being involved in student life activities is important in developing healthy relationships with students. Therefore, I enjoy participating in student-led activities, such as service projects, book clubs, and student government meetings that promote learning and leadership skills in real-life settings.