Teaching in the Classroom

Teaching undergraduates and guiding them as they develop as scientists has been a highlight of my scientific journey. I love the enthusiasm students bring, and I take pride in helping them reach their goals. I am very excited to be a professor at UTC because I have the opportunity to place the people I teach and mentor as my top priority.

One of my formative experiences in teaching was when I volunteered to be a teaching assistant with my PhD advisor, Prof. Stephen Craig, in his Team-Based Learning (TBL) general chemistry course.^1,2 The course structure required the students to use curated resources to learn initial concepts outside of class. We designed application-based problem sets that led the students to work through challenges with each other to meet high-order learning objectives from Bloom’s taxonomy. The philosophy reminded me of my own experience taking physical chemistry as an undergraduate, when my classmates and I would meet in the evenings in the week leading up to an exam. We would stand around the chalkboard and take turns working through problems, figuring out solutions and explaining our thought processes to each other. Some of my best learning took place as I was engaged in those discussions, and one of my goals as a future educator is to replicate some of that experience within my classroom. Integrating a tool kit of many diverse and innovative strategies into classroom teaching often increases student engagement.³ I believe that many teaching styles have a place in the science classroom, but that regardless of style, learning should be active and student-centered. I draw from a range of teaching strategies to fulfill my responsibility of providing inclusive instruction that challenges each student.

Learning science is not about accumulating knowledge, but about making connections between seemingly disparate topics, developing and testing hypotheses, and drawing conclusions based on data. The science curriculum should be presented so that students are working through this process.⁴ One of my goals is to have the students I teach in class and lab see themselves as scientists already, though they are currently in the undergraduate phase of their careers. Chemistry is such a vibrant field that has enabled many exciting, multi-disciplinary discoveries, and my past teaching experiences have inspired me to find opportunities for my students to engage in higher order thinking by exposing them to examples from scientific literature and real applications. Learning objectives should encourage students to engage in higher order thinking and building critical thinking skills. My goal is to design formative and summative assessments to evaluate student learning and adapt my teaching strategies based on the information I am receiving from assessments. I aim to make evidence-based decisions when I design course curriculum and learning objectives.

Each of the students I have taught in class collaborated with in lab are unique in their personalities, backgrounds, and long-term goals. I have learned that there is no “formula” for how to work with each student; rather, I adapt my strategies to the person and situation. Along with the entire global community, the events of 2020 have drastically changed the way I am mentoring and conducting science. I never imagined I would be teaching vacuum distillations to graduate students over Zoom or flash columns to undergraduates from 6 feet away, but we are all rising to the challenge and I am continuously reminded of how capable and resilient student researchers are and how important it is to adapt in teaching roles.

I am excited to be a part of the Chemistry and Physics Department at UTC, where I am able to actively engaging with students in the classroom, mentoring them in the lab, and conducting research alongside them. As a faculty member at UTC, I strive to continually improve and develop my teaching and mentoring strategies.

Teaching in Research Lab

I have mentored 6 undergraduate researchers in lab during my scientific career prior to UTC, and I can't wait to get to work with UTC students over the coming years! As a research lab leader, my goal is provide a positive learning environment for students to put the scientific method into practice by helping them learn to read the primary literature, plan and conduct safe experiments, draw supported conclusions, and become excellent writers and presenters. Read more about the our ongoing research here.

One of my formative experiences that informed my philosophy on undergraduate research was watching my first student mentees build confidence and realize their capability as a scientist. I challenged them early in our time working together to take an active role in deciding what experiments to conduct. This could potentially be a daunting task for new researchers, but by asking them the right questions and discussing the “big picture” of the project regularly, they quickly developed independent ideas. At a meeting a few months after one student joined the lab, I suggested a few experiment ideas to him. He responded: “I knew you were going to ask me that, so I already collected that data the last time I was at the UV-vis!” I was so excited to see this student take ownership of his project as he explained his preliminary results. During my prior training, I have been a part of this journey for several undergraduate students who became co-authors on publications with me. If you are a current UTC student and building your scientific expertise through undergraduate research, email me!

References

(1) Michaelsen, L. K.; Sweet, M. The Essential Elements of Team-Based Learning. New Dir. Teach. Learn. 2008, 2008 (116), 7–27.

(2) Barbee, M. H.; Carden, R. G.; Johnson, J. H. R.; Brown, C. L.; Canelas, D. A.; Craig, S. L. A Single Reaction Thread Ties Multiple Core Concepts in an Introductory Chemistry Course. J. Chem. Educ. 2018, 95 (6), 939–946.

(3) Bain, K. What the Best College Teachers Do; Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004.

(4) Nilson, L. B. Teaching at Its Best, Third.; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: San Francisco, CA, 2010.