Teaching Philosophy
When I reflect on the most meaningful learning experiences I have had, at the center of each of them is a teacher who is both demanding and supportive. Now as a teacher, I balance those two attributes, being rigorous and holding high and realistic expectations for my students, while also being responsive to their needs and supporting their learning.
Being a Responsive Teacher
An important component of my teaching identity is being responsive to students’ needs. For example, as a teaching assistant in an upper-level Stream Ecology class, I implemented a mid-semester feedback survey to identify strengths and weaknesses in teaching strategies to inform the remainder of the semester. When I am teaching, I check in frequently with students using various assessment techniques to be sure that students understand concepts and then adapt my class to address misconceptions. In an introductory biology course that I co-developed and taught with another graduate student, we flipped the classroom and administered pre-lecture quizzes on the material students had learned outside of class, using misconceptions that arose in the quizzes as a springboard for the day’s activities. Checking in with my students’ understanding also provides me opportunities to reflect on which learning exercises are working well and which need to be tweaked moving forward in the semester, or in the next iteration of the course.
Scaffolding Student Learning
In tandem with being a responsive teacher, I scaffold my students’ learning by making expectations clear at the outset of courses, providing rubrics and learning outcomes to my students with each lecture or lab activity. In the introductory biology class that I co-developed, we created a capstone assignment where students presented on a primary research article on a topic of their choosing. We built up to that final activity, studying the scientific method and biological concepts during the semester to prepare for interpreting original scientific research. My goal is to always provide constructive support while intellectually challenging my students.
I also work to make my classes engaging for students from a variety of backgrounds by understanding what motivates and excites them, giving students latitude to design their learning experience in my classroom. For example, when I taught an ecology writing course largely geared towards first-year biology majors, I also had some non-major students who took the course. While I still held those students to the same grading standards as the other students in the class, I met with all my students to discover what aspects of ecology interested them and where ecology intersected with their majors even if they were not biology majors (e.g. environmental economics and policy, design inspired by biology). I gave students the opportunity to do their final writing projects on topics that they found interesting, which made them more engaged in my course.
Fostering an Inclusive Classroom Community
A large component of my teaching philosophy is that students learn better when they feel like they belong to a classroom community. I continue to educate myself about strategies for building classroom community. I participated in a Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning inclusive teaching institute and an Intergroup Dialogue Project course for graduate students, where I developed my skills in facilitating and participating conversations around identity and privilege. I also foster a sense of classroom community by having students do group work and meet their classmates. In the stream ecology lab that I taught, I designed and implemented a group contract exercise for the semester-long group project after getting feedback in a previous semester that group work sometimes led to interpersonal issues around unequal group member contributions.
Self-Improvement as a Teacher
In addition to being rigorous with my students, I am strongly committed to improving and preparing myself as a teacher. I developed my own courses as a graduate student to more fully cultivate my teaching skills. I co-developed and co-taught both an introductory biology course and an introductory environmental conservation course through the Cornell Prison Education Program with a fellow graduate student. I also developed and taught a writing-intensive introductory ecology course for undergraduates at Cornell University.
I am actively involved with the Center for Integrated Research on Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and the Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI). I was a Graduate Research and Teaching Fellow with the CTI. I developed and delivered teaching workshops on effective teaching practices to other graduate students and post-doctoral associates in that capacity, in addition to receiving teaching training and improving my teaching practices. I have taken six CIRTL and CTI courses on teaching. In 2017, I attended the annual national conference of the Society for the Advancement of Biological Education Research and presented a poster on my experiences flipping an introductory biology classroom in a prison setting. I incorporated active learning strategies I learned about at the conference into my teaching, as I worked with my fellow instructors to partially flip our stream ecology course.
Practicing Teaching as Research
Both as a teaching assistant and instructor, I learn from teaching strategies and classroom activities that have worked well and those that could be improved. I have taught the same courses multiple times, which has provided me the opportunity to improve my teaching in each iteration and learn from course evaluations, student work, and discussions with fellow instructors. In all of my lectures, I developed and implemented active learning activities and supported other instructors in incorporating similar elements into their lectures. For example, I developed two hour-long workshop-style class sessions for an introductory stream ecology course: one dealing with physical data analysis using publicly available data and another simulating a structured decision-making meeting about hydroelectric development in the Amazon. When I give lectures, I ask the other instructors to observe my teaching and solicit their feedback to improve my lecturing and active learning activities. As a CTI Fellow, I developed a research project evaluating the effectiveness of teaching written argumentation in the ecological sciences to further approach my teaching practice deliberately and effectively.
By being a reflective and responsive teacher who creates a classroom community that includes all students, I always aim to help all of my students succeed, while also consistently striving to improve my teaching practice.
Being a Responsive Teacher
An important component of my teaching identity is being responsive to students’ needs. For example, as a teaching assistant in an upper-level Stream Ecology class, I implemented a mid-semester feedback survey to identify strengths and weaknesses in teaching strategies to inform the remainder of the semester. When I am teaching, I check in frequently with students using various assessment techniques to be sure that students understand concepts and then adapt my class to address misconceptions. In an introductory biology course that I co-developed and taught with another graduate student, we flipped the classroom and administered pre-lecture quizzes on the material students had learned outside of class, using misconceptions that arose in the quizzes as a springboard for the day’s activities. Checking in with my students’ understanding also provides me opportunities to reflect on which learning exercises are working well and which need to be tweaked moving forward in the semester, or in the next iteration of the course.
Scaffolding Student Learning
In tandem with being a responsive teacher, I scaffold my students’ learning by making expectations clear at the outset of courses, providing rubrics and learning outcomes to my students with each lecture or lab activity. In the introductory biology class that I co-developed, we created a capstone assignment where students presented on a primary research article on a topic of their choosing. We built up to that final activity, studying the scientific method and biological concepts during the semester to prepare for interpreting original scientific research. My goal is to always provide constructive support while intellectually challenging my students.
I also work to make my classes engaging for students from a variety of backgrounds by understanding what motivates and excites them, giving students latitude to design their learning experience in my classroom. For example, when I taught an ecology writing course largely geared towards first-year biology majors, I also had some non-major students who took the course. While I still held those students to the same grading standards as the other students in the class, I met with all my students to discover what aspects of ecology interested them and where ecology intersected with their majors even if they were not biology majors (e.g. environmental economics and policy, design inspired by biology). I gave students the opportunity to do their final writing projects on topics that they found interesting, which made them more engaged in my course.
Fostering an Inclusive Classroom Community
A large component of my teaching philosophy is that students learn better when they feel like they belong to a classroom community. I continue to educate myself about strategies for building classroom community. I participated in a Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning inclusive teaching institute and an Intergroup Dialogue Project course for graduate students, where I developed my skills in facilitating and participating conversations around identity and privilege. I also foster a sense of classroom community by having students do group work and meet their classmates. In the stream ecology lab that I taught, I designed and implemented a group contract exercise for the semester-long group project after getting feedback in a previous semester that group work sometimes led to interpersonal issues around unequal group member contributions.
Self-Improvement as a Teacher
In addition to being rigorous with my students, I am strongly committed to improving and preparing myself as a teacher. I developed my own courses as a graduate student to more fully cultivate my teaching skills. I co-developed and co-taught both an introductory biology course and an introductory environmental conservation course through the Cornell Prison Education Program with a fellow graduate student. I also developed and taught a writing-intensive introductory ecology course for undergraduates at Cornell University.
I am actively involved with the Center for Integrated Research on Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and the Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI). I was a Graduate Research and Teaching Fellow with the CTI. I developed and delivered teaching workshops on effective teaching practices to other graduate students and post-doctoral associates in that capacity, in addition to receiving teaching training and improving my teaching practices. I have taken six CIRTL and CTI courses on teaching. In 2017, I attended the annual national conference of the Society for the Advancement of Biological Education Research and presented a poster on my experiences flipping an introductory biology classroom in a prison setting. I incorporated active learning strategies I learned about at the conference into my teaching, as I worked with my fellow instructors to partially flip our stream ecology course.
Practicing Teaching as Research
Both as a teaching assistant and instructor, I learn from teaching strategies and classroom activities that have worked well and those that could be improved. I have taught the same courses multiple times, which has provided me the opportunity to improve my teaching in each iteration and learn from course evaluations, student work, and discussions with fellow instructors. In all of my lectures, I developed and implemented active learning activities and supported other instructors in incorporating similar elements into their lectures. For example, I developed two hour-long workshop-style class sessions for an introductory stream ecology course: one dealing with physical data analysis using publicly available data and another simulating a structured decision-making meeting about hydroelectric development in the Amazon. When I give lectures, I ask the other instructors to observe my teaching and solicit their feedback to improve my lecturing and active learning activities. As a CTI Fellow, I developed a research project evaluating the effectiveness of teaching written argumentation in the ecological sciences to further approach my teaching practice deliberately and effectively.
By being a reflective and responsive teacher who creates a classroom community that includes all students, I always aim to help all of my students succeed, while also consistently striving to improve my teaching practice.