Teaching
In an age of information abundance, the university is now a place where students come to learn active strategies for navigating this sea of information in a scientifically literate way. Through my experience I have found that one of the best ways for students to achieve this goal is to have a safe environment centered around projects where asking questions and thinking critically are encouraged. Scientific discovery is not achieved in a vacuum. Science is a social activity based on communicating ideas and structuring arguments supported by evidence. However, science is often not taught in an interactive way, but in a passive way. Biology is a particularly bad offender of teaching material as a long string of facts to be memorized. As a graduate student and a postdoc, I have used and refined many project-based learning strategies to engage students of different age groups, skill levels, and class sizes. I consider teaching and mentoring to be successful when students become more scientifically literate and/or gain the tools necessary to pursue their chosen careers in science or related fields.
Mentoring students on independent research projects is the most rewarding teaching experience because the project can be designed and individualized for the learning and career goals of the student. My approach is to ask for a one-year minimum commitment, allowing time for mentorship and for skill development. Students first learn the big picture view of science that includes how to read a scientific paper and perform a small literature review. At the same time, I help students design a short experiment to answer a simple question and collect a small dataset. This dataset is used to start teaching programming and data analysis as soon as possible because it takes the longest for students to learn. During weekly meetings students use a white board to explain their project and progress to myself and the other undergraduates that I mentor. This exercise has the students teaching one another about their projects and prepares the students to present a talk or poster at the undergraduate research conference. This research year takes students through the scientific process from question to experimental design to data analysis and interpretation to writing and presentation. After the first year, students are usually interested in staying for longer and then we write up their preliminary results as part of an undergraduate research fellowship to NSF or ASPB. This approach has successfully trained seven undergraduates and technicians that have gone on to scientific graduate programs.
Through my teaching and mentoring I have found that programming, data analysis, and data visualization are all necessary skills missing from most biology curriculum. An intro class on this topic is challenging to teach because in addition to learning new biological topics, students must also learn a new programming language. At UC Davis, I developed part of an open-source genomics lab class that teaches undergraduate biology students these skills. The course was taught using Linux virtual machines that ran off of portable USB drives allowing students to make mistakes and explore data sets without fear of crashing servers. Students also learned how to use Git for version control and www.github.com for collaboration and turning in assignments. The module that I created was on genetic networks. After a brief intro lecture each day, the students worked through an interactive online tutorial that taught the basics of network and graph theory. The students were then challenged to apply what they learned towards analyzing, visualizing and interpreting a large RNA-seq data set. This module emphasized the usefulness of applying mathematical abstractions and concepts towards understanding biological systems. Setting small programming goals designed to answer increasingly complex biological questions on real data sets is an effective way to teach computer science and bioinformatics in the same course. For example, a student in the class used her new skills to analyze a large sequencing dataset as part of her senior research project.
I was a teaching assistant for the undergraduate-level general education class, Global Warming, Biofuels, and Food, which had 75 students at University of Illinois. Halfway through the semester, the instructor could no longer continue, so I stepped up to take over lecturing. This offered a unique opportunity for me to create and deliver lectures for a large lecture hall, and receive feedback on the student’s conceptual understanding during small-group discussion sections. For this course, I made the university wide “List of Teachers Ranked Excellent” based on student evaluations and received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Department of Plant Biology. This opportunity sharpened my lecture preparation and delivery to focus on the important concepts by providing examples from the scientific literature or popular science articles.
As a teaching assistant for the graduate level class at University of Illinois, Plants and Global Change, I led or participated in two unique project-based learning approaches which engaged students and taught them course material in innovative ways: podcast development and formal debates. The podcast assignment aimed to teach science communication skills and to improve students’ knowledge of the topic area. Small student groups chose recent high-impact papers in the climate change literature as a focus of their podcast, and conducted literature reviews. I created tutorials on podcast recording and editing using the open-source audio editing software, Audacity. The students used this tutorial to record in-person or Skype interviews with the author, and add intro music and background information. This mixed media approach was a favorite with the students because they learned how media, other than writing, can be used to communicate important scientific ideas. These types of creative projects will be incorporated as part of future teaching opportunities that actively engage students beyond textbooks. This early content and methods were used as the precursor to the Audible Ecoscience podcast database project.
Another successful project-based teaching method used in this graduate-level course was a formal, parliamentary-style debate for scientifically contentious issues. After learning related material in lectures, teams of students were assigned to formalize arguments for or against a scientific proposition under the guidance of debate coaches, who were experts in the field. Debate topics included the role of human activity in climate change, and the potential for cellulosic biofuels to mitigate environmental impacts of fossil fuel use. I moderated the debates as a gavel-wielding judge in a powdered wig, preventing the debate from going over time or off topic. Students were personally invested, and so became well-versed, in their side of the debate, and they enjoyed the theatrics. These debates became so popular that students, postdocs, and professors who were not enrolled in or teaching the class would attend the debates and pose questions to the teams. The podcast and the debate were active learning exercises that engaged the students to work in teams, communicate science to a general audience, and make scientific arguments based on the literature. It is not only the volume of material that can be fit into a semester course, but also the quality of critical thinking and student engagement that determines their ability to comprehend the subject matter.