As a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, I completed the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources' Certification in College Teaching program. This involved coursework on undergraduate-level science teaching, workshops, and completion of a mentored teaching project to advance five core competencies:

1. Developing Discipline-Related Teaching Strategies

2. Creating Effective Learning Environments

3. Incorporating Technology Into Your Teaching

4. Understanding the University Context

5. Assessing Student Learning

In this e-portfolio, I demonstrate evidence for my development and mastery of the five core competencies.

Description

Many pedagogical techniques apply across disciplinary lines, but certain subjects have ones that apply specifically to them or are especially useful, concomitant to those courses’ overall purpose. The purpose of science classes for science majors should be to train the next generation of science professionals, giving them the base of knowledge required to understand even most complex and/or cutting-edge of scientific literature and the practical skills needed to utilize and/or advance that knowledge in their future careers.

Artifacts and Rationales

• Syllabus for PLB 802 (Pathways to Scientific Teaching) - I enrolled in this course to learn how to foster effective learning in science classrooms. It is from this course that much of my perspective on majors science education springs.

• Syllabi for MI 830 (Foundations of Serious Games) and MI 831 (Theories of Games and Interaction Design) - I enrolled in these courses on educational game design, and am currently enrolled in MI 841 (Understanding Users) to learn how best to design educational games.

Material and Rationale

• In PLB 802, I created a slide deck for a lesson on soil organic matter formation along with three other group members. It demonstrates many of the techniques learned from the course.

Reflection

Tailoring your teaching approach to your discipline is important because the differences between disciplines go beyond the factual material covered in their courses. Business, philosophy, and biology call for different ways of thinking and approaching problems, and a good biology course will teach the field in a way that gets students thinking like a biologist.

Developing teaching strategies geared toward your discipline requires understanding your discipline at a higher, more abstract level than its key facts and major concepts. Biology, for example, is a field of infinite connections, connections between environments, between species, and between internal systems, connections made across scales from molecular to global. From there, you can infer that biological education should involve demonstrating and making students demonstrate how these systems fit together, which might lead one to assessments involving diagramming and modeling. It also requires understanding your discipline at the operational level, not just what should a good biology student understand or be able to demonstrate on a test or project, but also what do different types of biologist do in their day-to-day professions and what skills do they need for those jobs?

One unique area of discipline-related teaching I have personally delved into to a great degree is educational game design, which comes with another set of needed skills. First, you need to know what makes a game easy to learn and fun to play, usually achieved by striking a balance of low complexity (rules and systems players must memorize and understand to play) and moderate depth (strategic options those rules present to players at any given time). Second, you must be able to align the game to the content being taught as much as possible, which can be done through game components, game mechanics, or even a game’s overall experience.

Four graduate courses I’ve taken or am taking at MSU fit into this competency. First, PLB 802 (Pathways to Scientific Teaching) covered learner-centered teaching strategies for undergraduate biology courses, during which I helped develop a lesson plan built around a peer-reviewed paper on soil organic matter. I am also pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Serious Game Design, and so have taken MI 830 (Foundations of Serious Games), MI 831 (Theories of Games and Interaction Design), and am as of this writing taking MI 841 (Understanding Users). These courses focus on design strategies for educational games or other interactive experiences.

In regard to traditional teaching practice, I’ve learned valuable techniques for not just teaching students, but helping them develop the skills to teach themselves. Biology, like any scientific field, is only expanding in terms of the amount of information available, and so prioritizing fact retention alone is less and less feasible and useful for teachers even if it was an effective and engaging method. I myself never had a formal course in soil ecology, but research skills I gained from my other courses helped me learn a great deal about it from the scientific literature. At smaller institutions that may not offer many more niche biology courses, cultivating these skills are especially important to make sure students can explore and engage with their specific interests at a high level.

When it comes to educational games, from my experience deploying them in classrooms, I’ve learned that different types of games are best suited for different course levels. Simpler games designed to teach one day’s lesson, like my own Life for the Loam and Pest Quest, I would prefer to bring into more introductory courses. For a game to teach a more complex subject to an upper-level could would require increased depth and complexity, and for a game that deep and complex to be playable, it would need to be played over the course of several class sessions or introduced in stages to the students. This would be a much more ambitious design endeavor, though it has been done in the form of Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque role-playing campaigns mimicking real-life scenarios such as disease outbreaks.

In my future teaching for biology students, I intend to make sure students understand biology at the two higher levels I described and emphasize skill development. Not all undergraduate biology majors will become research scientists, but many jobs in the field still involve engaging with scientific information in some way. I also anticipate incorporating the game design process into future biology courses I teach. Gamifying a scientific topic requires understanding it on a deep level, because you have to translate the concepts into another medium. This would be unfamiliar ground for many students, so I would likely make it one option for a more open-ended assignment.

Description

We’ve long recognized that course delivery via PowerPoint and dry monologue are often insufficient for keeping students’ attention and helping them learn. In an era when students carry infinite distraction in their pocket, instructors must embrace novel instructional and assessment techniques that move the class beyond the traditional lecture format, such as clicker questions, think-pair-share exercises, and in-class modeling or diagramming exercises.

Artifact and Rationale

• Workshop Agenda (MSU Certification in College Teaching Institute) - To advance this competency, I attended MSU’s Certification in College Teaching Institute in May of 2019 and participated in a workshop on the topic.

Reflection

Students in the typical college classroom carry infinite distraction in their pocket. Attempts to stop students from goofing off on their phone or laptop are often futile and unfairly punish those with legitimate reasons for using those devices or keeping them at hand. Therefore, learning environments must be engaging to make sure students get their money’s worth out of their courses. Students also carry their own previous experiences, knowledge, and misconceptions about topics covered in a course, and just running your instruction into them or debunking false beliefs badly isn’t always effective.

Creating effective learning environments requires a range of skills and knowledge, some content-related, others more interpersonal. Understanding common misconceptions about your field and being ready and able to detect and address them directly but in a way that doesn’t attack students for holding them is one of the most crucial. Another important skill for this competency is being able to increase the level of thought required by in-class activities and exercises.

At the MSU Certification in College Teaching Institute, a workshop on creating effective learning environments taught me about different types of in-class assessments that can make a class session more engaging and let you gauge in real time how well students understand something.

Part of learning is unlearning, shedding misconceptions gleaned from one’s upbringing, from media, or from oversimplified early education. But if all you do is debunk something, the original misconception still tends to linger in peoples’ minds longer than the fact that they heard it debunked. You have to provide the truth in the form of a story that’s more convincing than the misconception. Teaching is storytelling, or at least it should be, since humans are good at remembering stories. Whether that comes in the form of the actual story behind a specific scientific discovery or a more abstract causal narrative linking disparate concepts doesn’t matter.

Getting students to apply their knowledge to complex scenarios rather than simply quizzing them on it is also important for student engagement. If a student sees a clicker question asking what something is and doesn’t know the answer off the top of their head, they have nothing to do but punch in a guess and look at their phone until the response period is over. A question asking students to predict an ecosystem might change in response to one species disappearing, on the other hand, makes students reason through it with their existing knowledge, while at the same time giving them the benefit of peer and instructor feedback to fall back on. While teaching ISB 201L, I developed an in-class activity for the lab on observations and inferences, which presented groups of students with images of different animal tracks and had them make observations and infer characteristics of the animal that made them (for example, movement speed based on spacing between the tracks). Students didn’t always guess the correct species, and weren’t required to, but still learned how careful observations could often get them close to the truth. A set of tracks could still suggest a large, slow-moving animal with clawed feet and a dragging tail, and so even if they don’t guess “alligator,” they’ve still gotten a better idea of what animal made the tracks than they had before.

One other insight I gleaned from taking Dr. Henry Chung’s Insect Physiology course was the value of diving into the methods and findings of published scientific experiments, specifically the ones behind key points of the day’s lesson. As a student, I greatly appreciated this approach. I found it easier to retain information when Dr. Chung described the process that generated it rather than just stating it as “the facts.” It also demonstrates intellectual respect for the students, as Dr. Chung was not expecting us to take his word for things, but instead backing up his own lecture content with published data just as he would with his own peers in the field. I saw it as especially beneficial for the undergraduate students in the course who may not have had significant research experience, thanks to Dr. Chung’s precise descriptions of the hypotheses being tested, the experimental designs, and interpretation of the studies’ results and how they supported or refuted the original hypotheses. I’ve done this when applicable in my own classes, and since I like to attach a photo of the lead author of each paper to put a human face to the science, I make sure to select a diverse group of scientists to feature, so that students of all backgrounds can see themselves reflected in the scientific community.

Description

Education can be enhanced through the use of technology, though there are many different kinds of technology that can be leveraged for different educational uses. Some forms of technology, like automated quiz grading and online gradebooks, simply make life easier for instructors and allow faster feedback for students, and thus are somewhat of a “no-brainer” to incorporate. Course material can be delivered to the students in unique ways, such as videos, animations, or games. Courses can also include student assessments or projects based around them utilizing a specific technology, for example having students present on a research topic in the form of a recorded podcast or video.

Artifact Rationale

• Workshop Agenda (MSU Certification in College Teaching Institute) - To advance this competency, I attended MSU’s Certification in College Teaching Institute in May of 2019. At the workshop on Incorporating Technology into Teaching, I considered what technologies would best support an assignment on debunking popular misconceptions about soil, settling on an audio podcast, as those are well-suited for detailed descriptions.

Reflection

We live in an increasingly technological world, and getting experience with different types of technology in a college course can help students in their future endeavors. However, poor implementation of technology in the classroom helps no one and only introduces a mechanical barrier to learning. The lure of new technology risks wasting time, money, and energy, and the benefits of any new technology must be weighed against what is required for the instructor and/or students to learn and implement it.

To use technology effectively in the classroom requires not only understanding the technology inside and out (especially if you’re expecting the students to use it as well, and in this case, you should also understand how it works on other operating systems) but also understand its place in the classroom and what types of lessons it’s well-suited to teach. Technology is a tool to be leveraged in service of specific course goals, not a goal in and of itself. Incorporating technology also requires recognizing that some students, particularly underprivileged students, may not have had the access to and experience with computers that their instructors, even a late millennial instructor like myself, would expect or have themselves. In the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters especially, I found myself having to play the role of tech support to an increasing degree to help students struggling with what I considered extremely basic computer operations, like saving files in specific formats. The types of troubles students approached me with surprised me at first, and while I can’t discount the possibility that the remote semesters just made some students’ technical ineptitude more obvious, we may be entering an era in which a significant portion of students had a phone or tablet as their primary electronic device growing up instead of a computer, and so aren’t as fully “tech-savvy” as we might anticipate. This makes it especially important to work with students and help them grasp any technology they will be using to participate in the course, not just the technology I consider to be beyond the basics.

The 2019 Certification in College Teaching Institute included a workshop on incorporating technology into teaching. The workshop covered different types of educational technology and stressed the importance of matching your technology to your learning goal. For example, a PowerPoint presentation might fit an assignment involving graphs, diagrams, and other visuals, while an audio podcast might fit one involving detailed explanations, especially if it’s a group assignment.

However, the main thing I’ve learned from my own teaching is to never assume students are as adept with technology as you expect and be proactive with providing help. For ISB 201L, the non-majors biology course I taught, students had to produce bar graphs and scatterplots in Excel for many assignments in the course. Rather than field students’ questions all after the fact, I produced tutorial videos detailing the processes in Excel as well as Google Sheets of students who weren’t able to access the desktop version of Excel (the browser-based version can’t add error bars or trendlines, which were necessary for these assignments). These operations are inordinately complicated and a demo in class or a static explanation on the slides often aren’t sufficient guides, especially for homework assessments most students don’t touch until a few days after class.

I am neither a tech evangelist nor a Luddite. I am not opposed to using novel technologies in the classroom or having students use technology for course assignments, but I only expect to do so when the benefits to students outweigh the costs, ideally if the technology both enhances the learning goal of the assignment and will give students useful experience beyond the course.

Description

Different types of colleges and universities have different goals for their students, different skills and mindsets they hope to pass on to their graduates, and thus different expectations for their teaching faculty. Understanding this university context is important not only for landing a job at any given type of postsecondary institution, but also effectively living up to that institution’s mission for students in your courses. Even within a single university, different courses fill different roles in students’ educations, and so instructors should approach those courses differently to ensure they’re giving their students the most helpful education possible. To advance diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in higher education, it’s also important for teachers to recognize the economic and cultural context in which students go through their college careers, which may differ from their own experiences.

Artifact and Rationale

• Workshop Agenda (MSU Certification in College Teaching Institute) - To advance this competency, I attended MSU’s Certification in College Teaching Institute in May of 2019. We discussed examples of mission statements from different types of college and university, particularly in the context of seeking employment at one of those types, and how one should align themselves to an institution’s goals.

Reflection

Understanding the university context is important for effective teaching because effective teaching has different meanings at different types of institutions. What an R1 university treasures in an instructor might not be what a community college wants or cares for.

In my view, understanding the university context and leveraging that understanding into your teaching practice requires deep reflection on the type of course you will be teaching, how it fits into the department’s teaching goals and other courses students may take, and what students will seek to gain from it. Then, you must be able to intuit how different aspects of a course’s structure or policies will align with those goals and be able to adapt them to fit. For example, rigorous instruction on the practical operation of a field sampling technique like a Berlese funnel would be important in a course for biology majors who may have to apply that skill in their future courses and/or research endeavors, less so for non-majors simply using the technique as a means to the end of learning about soil biodiversity.

The 2019 Certification in College Teaching Institute covered this competency with a discussion of different types of postsecondary institutions and their goals for their graduates. Some universities focus more on training future professionals while others seek to cultivate more well-rounded, effective citizens and send students out into the world as better, more compassionate people than they were before. Just like a farmer wouldn’t bring the same mindset to growing an annual cash crop and managing an orchard, teachers at these institutions must channel different mindsets during the interview process and while on the job.

As someone who’s attended a community college, an outlying state university, an Ivy League university, and a major public land-grant, I’ve experienced a lot of different educational contexts and seen how they shape the structure and content of courses. My community college soil science course taught me many practical field and lab skills, but nothing about searching the scientific literature, which made sense for the types of jobs most students in that course were bound for.

As an instructor for ISB 201L, a non-majors science course here at MSU, I sought to emphasize the how and why of science over individual facts and concepts. Most of my students will not use scientific facts in their future careers or day-to-day lives, but might need to think like a scientist, forming and testing hypotheses about why something in their world is a certain way. It’s also best for everyone, and in keeping with any university’s goal of producing effective, informed citizens, if students understand how and why scientists do what they do and why science is important for a functioning society. I of course still covered scientific content, but primarily to flesh out my core lessons with examples. And this goes both ways. In a majors course, how to think like a scientist is obviously paramount as well, but students must also learn the basic knowledge required for more advanced courses, and thus the instructor should ground that skills-based education in that specific content.

What I’ve learned from the CCT Institute will likely help me land a teaching position, and what I’ve learned from my own time teaching will help me tailor my teaching to the type of course and institution I find myself in. At an institution focused on building effective citizens, I would make my science courses, especially any geared towards non-majors, as much as about scientists as they are about science, teaching science not just as a field of study, but as a human-led process and a sector of our economy and society. In my view, for a future businessperson, artist, or journalist to be able to understand how science operates and be less vulnerable to misinformation about it is a valuable thing for a non-majors science course to do. Seeing a press release about a university professor “getting a million-dollar grant” could conjure negative impressions of scientists in someone who doesn’t know how grant funding works.

I also intend to translate my understanding of students’ variable experiences into fair and compassionate course policies. Although I never had trouble keeping up with mandatory attendance or strict assignment deadlines as an undergraduate myself, I know that was just as much due to factors outside my control (me being single, healthy, and not needing an off-campus job) as it was to my own organizational and time management skills. This is something I see as especially important for anyone professing commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in academia. Systemic racism has material effects. Students from historically excluded backgrounds are often more likely to have work and/or family responsibilities in addition to their academic ones. While in-class actions like highlighting the contributions of marginalized communities to science are valuable and necessary, the commitment to DEIJ rings hollow if attending that class session is mandatory and points from in-class assignments can’t be made up without a formal excuse like a doctor’s note (which students may not all have equal access to). It’s unjust and unfair to assume students have the free time and consistent technology access needed to always adhere to strict course policies.

Mentored Teaching Project Summary

The Test of Pest Quest: Evaluating an educational game’s effect on students’ understanding of Integrated Pest Management philosophy and decision-making

IRB: STUDY00005533

Educational games can represent an innovative way of delivering and teaching course material and can help students develop skills like strategic thinking and group decision-making. However, instructors must reckon with the complexity of the game rules and mechanics, as every minute spent learning them is time not spent learning content. My teaching mentor (Dr. Matthew Grieshop) and I evaluated Pest Quest, an educational game on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) we designed along with Tim Lampasona of Rutgers University. We introduced an online port of the game to students in an upper-division entomology course, having them complete eight open-ended assessment questions before and after playing. The assessments covered two primary learning objectives of the game (IPM Philosophy and IPM Decision-Making) and two secondary objectives (IPM Terminology and Economics of Farming). Though we observed trends toward higher post-assessment performance, especially on IPM Decision-Making, there were no significant differences, perhaps due to the upper-division nature of the course. These results suggest that Pest Quest and similar educational games are better-suited for introductory courses.

Mentored Teaching Project 6-Step Outline
Available here.

Mentored Teaching Project Artifacts and Rationales

• Pest Quest Print-and-Play File - A printable PDF containing a copy of the game. The version of the game students played on Tabletopia no longer exists on that platform.

• Pest Quest Tutorial Video - An instructional video students were given to watch explaining the game rules and process of one round.

• Student Pre- and Post-Assessment Questions - The list of questions students had to answer for the pre- and post-assessment.

• Student Pre- and Post-Assessment Responses - The list of each student's pre- and post-assessment responses, their names replaced by random numbers.

• Student Response Grades - The grades I assigned to each pre- and post-assessment response. Note that responses were graded without the grader (me) knowing at the time which response came from a pre-assessment and which one came from a post-assessment.

• Future Academic Scholars in Teaching (FAST) Symposium Presentation - The presentation I delivered on the project as part of the Future Academic Scholars in Teaching (FAST) Symposium on April 27, 2021 (one day after my oral comprehensive exam).

Mentored Teaching Project Reflection

My experience deploying Pest Quest in ENT 479 (Organic Pest Management) prompted changes both in the game and in how I plan to use it in the future, despite finding no significant differences between pre-assessment and post-assessment scores.

The course we deployed the game in, ENT 479 (Organic Pest Management) taught by my project mentor Dr. Matthew Grieshop, was likely not the best home for an educational game like Pest Quest. Most of the students in the course were juniors, seniors, and graduate students, who likely had already been exposed to Integrated Pest Management (IPM) earlier in their programs. We are thus planning a second evaluation of the game (an updated version, see below) in a larger, introductory entomology course in Fall 2021, to test the game’s effect on IPM knowledge and attitudes toward agriculture in non-major students who likely will not have heard of IPM before starting the course.

The game itself will also change. Following feedback from students, feedback from other game designers, and some of our own intuition, we sought to minimize confusing or overly complex elements of the game. The rules and mechanics of educational games always present a mechanical barrier to learning the content, and just like a worksheet with confusing directions or a complicated lab exercise, that barrier can be a significant one. Originally, Pest Quest was cooperative in that all players worked toward the same goal (making sure the farm turned a profit), but asymmetrical in that each player had a separate role and performed different actions. This made it difficult for students to learn the game from one another, since each student was responsible for understanding their own set of rules. The updated version is still cooperative, but each player performs the same actions throughout the game. The four in-game roles (Scout, Applicator, Farm Manager, and Extension Agent) now have small, additional abilities that still distinguish them and hint toward their real-world expertise, but don’t make the play experience significantly different from one to another.

From my time deploying Pest Quest and another educational game of my design, Life for the Loam, in college classrooms, three possibilities present themselves for my future use in courses I teach. First, I could use the game itself as an assessment. Just as educational games teach content, sometimes understanding the content already makes a player better at the game. Though this is partially true for Pest Quest, especially regarding IPM concepts such as the economic injury level. A row of the in-game “field” that makes sense to spray when planting a high-value, pest-susceptible cultivar might not be worth it when planting a low-value, pest-resistant cultivar. That said, I wouldn’t actually use students’ in-game performance as the basis for a grade. In Pest Quest, there is significant randomness involved in what insects end up on the field, what insects get revealed through scouting, and how effective the players’ insecticide applications are at killing pests and sparing natural enemies and pollinators. A group can play perfectly given the information they uncover, but still lose, which itself feeds into a secondary learning objective of the game—agriculture is difficult and full of uncertainty.

Therefore, I would instead prefer to design assessments that use the game as a springboard into higher levels of learning. For a game itself to reach much higher than the “Understanding” level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, it would have to be a fairly complicated game, more of a simulation, which is hard to design for tabletop and would likely require multiple playthroughs by students to really “get it.” However, assessments can use game components and mechanics to get students thinking about course content or independent research in new ways. For example, with Pest Quest, I could ask students to design a new item or insecticide card for the game based on a piece of IPM technology or novel chemical formulation or adapt the game to a specific cropping system. With a presentation or term paper-style assessment, students can always skate past a topic they don’t quite get, at least to some extent, paraphrasing a line from a source they think should be included without really knowing how it fits. To translate concepts learned in any typical classroom, whether using a traditional lecture format or even more active, evidence-based teaching practices, into game mechanics, however, requires understanding them intuitively and often at a very detailed level.

Mentor Evaluation Letter

Available here.