Teaching Philosophy

Biology is an important, fascinating and alive subject and research can be an exciting and rewarding activity like few others. To help students experience and sustain this passion, my goal as a teacher and mentor is to make learning a smooth and joyful experience for students. Further, I want to help educate a generation of scientists that hold themselves to the high standard implied by an academic degree.

Teaching Strategies

I am a proponent of the flipped classroom approach to make best use of teaching time and focus on addressing questions and practice during classes. Importantly, students should actively participate in this process, rather than passively consume. As I however understand, that the demand on students to prepare for classes needs to be balanced against students` workload, I intend to aid with the preparation for classes with pre-recorded video lectures.

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Learning and memorization

To implement spaced repetition in my teaching, it is first essential to define the key facts or -more often- key principles worth memorizing. In a systems biology class, these would for example be core network motifs, principles of robustness and kinetic proofreading and techniques such as steady-state and linear stability analysis. Second, to aid retrieval practice, I will frequently hold non-graded quizzes at the beginning of classes. Asking students to think about earlier material, before briefly discussing the answers, will also serve to repeat background required for the class.
Finally, I recognize that the ability to make connections to existing knowledge is a second main facilitator of adult learning. I will aim to highlight these connections via elaboration to build bridges across subjects and to other topics within the same subject.

Understanding

While helping students retain and build on important facts is an inherent requirement of successful teaching, an at least equally important task is guiding them in the understanding of concepts.
Finding the reasons behind why explained material may not be understood, is a topic that I find highly interesting. Indeed, I believe that the reasons for failing to get a message across in the classroom or in a scientific manuscript are closely related. Frequently, the cause is as simple as the omission of a piece of information that the listener/reader was assumed to possess. In this respect, I believe that obtaining feedback from students is key to figuring out if they are able to follow the material presented. To obtain this feedback, I will encourage students to ask questions, while also myself asking questions so often that two-way communication becomes natural even in a larger lecture setting.
To tap into the benefits of self-explanation, I will frequently ask students to turn to each other and explain the content covered to their neighbor. An added gain of this interaction is, that the realization that one is not alone in lacking understanding will instill courage to come forward with questions that may otherwise remain un-asked.

Motivation

I consider it part of my job as an instructor to keep alive the motivation that initially attracted students to the subject. Possibly, the major risk for loosing motivation is feeling overwhelmed or incompetent. As detailed above, I will seek feedback from students to identify when this may be the case. Beyond correcting incorrect responses, I will aim to keep my own feedback positive. I am also convinced that frequently asking questions promoting active thinking during lectures helps even students that are too shy to volunteer answers.
Nonetheless, especially in smaller groups, it is desirable to have all students participating. In this respect, I believe that modesty as a teacher and willingness to admit the limits of my own knowledge are helpful factors in encouraging students` confidence. This will on the one side maintain trust in the taught content, but also establish an environment in which students feel safe to get things wrong.

Mentoring Philosophy

My experience from instructing individual students in the laboratory is, that motivation is largely determined by the balance between the feeling of sufficient competence (i.e. not feeling overwhelmed) and sufficient challenge (closely related to a degree of independence), which is consistent with observations expressed in the literature 1. I therefore aim to guide students in new experimental techniques, until they feel competent for the task on their own and maintain this confidence even in the face of occasional failure.

Students differ in the degree by which they are motivated by scientific progress vs. technical success. While technical accomplishments are a suitable motivator for early undergraduates, I believe, that from Master and PhD level on, a mentor should (while emphasizing that careful execution of experiments is a prerequisite for this progress) actively shift this inclination towards motivation derived from asking and answering the right questions. Accepting that a PhD is about learning to do science, rather than solely acquiring technical skills, puts a demand on both mentor and student to specify goals in small enough increments to make progress visible.

While I consider myself still a scientist in the growing phase, I have observed many negative and many successful behaviors in mentors to find myself equipped with the ability to serve as a mentor conscious of the challenges of the role.
Some of the principles derived from reflection on my experiences as a mentee, beyond the important balance between guidance vs. independence, include: I will generally ask students for their own interpretation of results and their plans for the next steps first, before providing my own suggestions. Even when students come to me with a question, I frequently first ask about their thoughts? I will never overrule by authority, but aim to convince by scientific arguments. I will frequently ask students for feedback on their experiences in the lab. This is not only to their benefit, but, the feedback from the ‘people on the ground’ is vital for maintaining smooth running of a research group. Interestingly, I have found that asking my students for feedback, prompted some of them to ask for feedback on their performance in return. I consider giving feedback an important task for a mentor and that it is best done in a structured form, for example in the context of an IDP. Last, but not least, I will put strong emphasis on organizational skills such as keeping a lab journal, organizing data or note-taking, by passing on approaches I acquired over the years.

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

1. Alon, U. How to Build a Motivated Research Group. Mol. Cell 37, 151–152 (2010).

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