Teaching Statement
Teaching Statement
I see myself not only as a researcher but also a science educator. From my undergraduate studies to my graduate training in Cognitive Neuroscience, teaching and mentoring has always been an important part of my career.
I was initiated into college teaching during my undergraduate studies, when I worked as a Writing Partner at the Pomona College Writing Center. Over three years, I conducted over a hundred one-on-one writing consultations with undergraduate students and worked as an “attached writing fellow” for three writing-intensive courses ranging from first-year writing seminars to an upper-level neuroscience course on neuropharmacology.
At Duke, I have worked as the Teaching Assistant for introductory neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience courses for three semesters. In the discussion sections I taught for introductory cognitive neuroscience courses, students learned to think like a scientist through activities such as reading published papers and designing their own research projects. These experiences have informed my approach to teaching.
My teaching philosophy is centered on two goals: fostering critical thinking and scaffolding transferrable skills through active learning.
Science is a process, not a collection of immutable facts. As a teacher, I train students to be critical consumers of scientific knowledge and critical thinkers in the scientific method. In Fall 2021, I led two discussion sections for Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience, where students read scientific papers related to each week’s lecture topic and presented published research in groups. To prepare students for digesting scientific literature, I modeled the process of reading scientific papers through scaffolding activities that move from comprehension to synthesis and evaluation. I have found that having students present on published scientific papers can be an effective way to help them learn to think like a scientist and engage with the lecture materials on a deeper level. At the start of the semester, I began with a mini-lecture on the basic structure of scientific papers and how to read them, followed by a demo presentation that focuses on the structure of each section according to the rubric that I co-designed with the other TA for evaluating student presentations. At the end of each presentation, I led discussions about the paper by first encouraging other students to ask questions to the presenters. Through presenting a paper as the “expert” and talking through the logic and limitations of published research with each other, students learn not just the “what” and “how” but also the “why” of science. In course evaluations, students found that “reading research papers that tied into what we were learning in the lecture portion of the class made everything feel more applicable,” and that “giving the presentations/having discussions made me think about the papers more critically.”
Building up tools of learning can often serve a student much longer than mastering specific content information from a course. In a different iteration of Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience in Spring 2022, I led discussion sections where students worked in small groups to design a research project on their topic of choice, which culminated in a scientific paper and a presentation at the end of the semester. Especially for those new to college, making the jump from knowledge consumption in classes to knowledge production through research can be challenging for undergraduate students. To break down the research project assignment into achievable weekly goals, I started each week’s discussion section with a short presentation on different components of conducting research, starting with narrowing down a general interest to a testable research question and combing through prior literature to identify a gap in knowledge, all the way to reporting (in the case of the class assignment, hypothesized) results in a written paper and an oral presentation (see example 1 and example 2). Like professional scientists, students waded through scientific literature and weighed the pros and cons of different experimental design in collaboration with their peers, with support and feedback from me at each step along the way. Feedback from students’ course evaluations showed that this approach was effective for learning many skills critical in science.
In addition to leading project-based discussion sections in small-sized classes (6 to 22 students in a section), I also have experience with team-based learning pedagogy in a large class of 100 students in my role as TA for an introductory neuroscience course. As part of the instructional team, I collaborate with two professors and another TA to develop in-class team-based exercises that challenge the students to apply information they learned from the textbook to real-world scientific questions. This offers the students an opportunity to engage with the course materials and understand their real-life relevance. As a first introduction to the field of neuroscience, the application activities allow students to take a deep dive into the process of scientific discovery while fostering teamwork.
From conducting writing consultations as an undergrad to TAing for intro classes as a graduate student, the repertoire of my teaching skills have continued to develop. As part of my pedagogical training, I have completed the Certificate for College Teaching program at Duke. In the future, I hope to develop my own courses in cognitive neuroscience and incorporate active learning strategies in undergraduate science education.