"The challenge in teaching is not covering the material for the students, it's uncovering the material with the students"
~ Johnson, D.W. & Johnson, R.T. 1997. Learning Together and Alone: cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning.
~ Johnson, D.W. & Johnson, R.T. 1997. Learning Together and Alone: cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning.
In the face of accelerating global environmental change it is important to have ecologically literate citizens (e.g. Jordan et al 2009). Yet some discouraging studies have shown a lack of relationship between the understanding of basic biological concepts and the number of biology classes a person has taken (D’Avanzo 2003). I think the most important role of university undergraduate science programs is to produce scientifically literate graduates who are aware of environmental issues, whether or not they end up working as scientists. My teaching philosophy was developed during the graduate course Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences, and over the course of my experience as a teaching assistant at UBC.
Teaching Philosophy
I see learning as the process of developing one’s own unique mental model by which to understand how something works. My overall goal as a teacher is to help students build these models, and I believe the best way to do this is by connecting new topics to everyday life, showing students my own process of understanding something, and giving lots of opportunities for students to practice and discuss ideas with each other.
Biology is a large and complex subject, and it is also an extremely important subject, after all it is the study of life itself! As the world’s population continues to expand, we face more and more environmental problems but an increasingly urban population has less and less experience with the natural world. So it is vital to help students relate the particular aspect of biology under study back to the “big picture” as much as possible. Ecology courses should get students out into local forests, fields, wetlands, intertidal zones – or even campus lawns! In my experience as a teaching assistant for ecology courses, going out “into the field” challenged students to think about and evaluate ecological theory in terms of real systems.
As an ecologist with experience working in many beautiful and varied ecosystems, I have first-hand knowledge of how ecology relates to issues involving the management of natural resources. More than anything, I want to inject my own fascination with the study of the natural world into each lesson, and also to reveal some of the confusion, challenges, as well as ‘aha moments’ that I experienced myself as a student of science and as a professional ecologist. Students often perceive science as a body of ‘facts’ to be memorized. I want to show students that science is actually a process of figuring out how the world works, and I think this can be done by showing them the false starts and incorrect theories that have gone before. This relates to the characteristic of modesty, which situates the teacher as a mentor and guide, but not from a high pedestal. As a teacher, I want to be able to answer a question with “I don’t know”, followed up with assistance to the student in finding out the answer. After all, teaching is not about transmitting answers to students, but helping them learn how to ask questions and figure out the answers themselves.
For me, a lot of things I “learned” during my undergraduate degree didn’t become clear or useful until I was able to connect them to my experiences working in the field. That is why I think it is so important to provide students with chances to apply new concepts to real-world problems, with lots of opportunities for improvement and feedback on their first attempts. After all, scientists never write a manuscript or conduct a research experiment in only one attempt; it takes a process of trial-and-error to get it right. Students should have the same opportunity as they are learning the important skills of critical thinking, scientific writing and how to be good observers. The other thing that is essential in “real” science is collaboration. I aim to give each student a chance to contribute their own unique knowledge and personality to the learning environment by giving lots of opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among groups of students in solving problems and discussing issues. I want to establish in my classroom an environment that fosters interdependence of students, good interaction skills, and accountability of each student for their own learning. This will mean utilizing a great deal of participatory techniques, asking good questions and developing significant and important problems for students to work on.
The final issue that I would like to address in my teaching is the issue of evaluation. University degrees these days are often seen merely as a means to a job. As a result, many students are motivated to learn mainly by the pursuit of good marks, which will hopefully result in obtaining a good job. This pits students against each other in competition for the best grades. In his book “What the Best College Teachers Do”, Bain (2004) asks: “is there a way to use grades that will not cause students to feel like they are being manipulated by the evaluation process?” I have thought about this a lot, and I believe that without evaluation that rewards students for being able to think critically and apply biological concepts to real world issues, rather than just memorize, even the best teacher’s attempts to put concepts in context and to foster problem-solving skills may fail. Evaluation that tests ability to memorize and regurgitate content in reality only motivates students to cram, and most of this information is forgotten after the test. I believe that evaluations designed to assess students’ conceptual understanding can make students feel less manipulated, and provide more incentive to actually work on grasping concepts rather than merely memorizing. A major goal for me as a teacher is to learn how to design evaluation tools that actually do this.
I believe that research and teaching are at their core essentially about the same thing: asking good questions. I aim to continue reflecting on the priorities I have developed so far in my teaching career, to utilize what I’ve learned in future teaching opportunities, and to observe and learn from the teaching of my colleagues with the perspective I have obtained through the study of pedagogy in mind.
References
Biology is a large and complex subject, and it is also an extremely important subject, after all it is the study of life itself! As the world’s population continues to expand, we face more and more environmental problems but an increasingly urban population has less and less experience with the natural world. So it is vital to help students relate the particular aspect of biology under study back to the “big picture” as much as possible. Ecology courses should get students out into local forests, fields, wetlands, intertidal zones – or even campus lawns! In my experience as a teaching assistant for ecology courses, going out “into the field” challenged students to think about and evaluate ecological theory in terms of real systems.
As an ecologist with experience working in many beautiful and varied ecosystems, I have first-hand knowledge of how ecology relates to issues involving the management of natural resources. More than anything, I want to inject my own fascination with the study of the natural world into each lesson, and also to reveal some of the confusion, challenges, as well as ‘aha moments’ that I experienced myself as a student of science and as a professional ecologist. Students often perceive science as a body of ‘facts’ to be memorized. I want to show students that science is actually a process of figuring out how the world works, and I think this can be done by showing them the false starts and incorrect theories that have gone before. This relates to the characteristic of modesty, which situates the teacher as a mentor and guide, but not from a high pedestal. As a teacher, I want to be able to answer a question with “I don’t know”, followed up with assistance to the student in finding out the answer. After all, teaching is not about transmitting answers to students, but helping them learn how to ask questions and figure out the answers themselves.
For me, a lot of things I “learned” during my undergraduate degree didn’t become clear or useful until I was able to connect them to my experiences working in the field. That is why I think it is so important to provide students with chances to apply new concepts to real-world problems, with lots of opportunities for improvement and feedback on their first attempts. After all, scientists never write a manuscript or conduct a research experiment in only one attempt; it takes a process of trial-and-error to get it right. Students should have the same opportunity as they are learning the important skills of critical thinking, scientific writing and how to be good observers. The other thing that is essential in “real” science is collaboration. I aim to give each student a chance to contribute their own unique knowledge and personality to the learning environment by giving lots of opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among groups of students in solving problems and discussing issues. I want to establish in my classroom an environment that fosters interdependence of students, good interaction skills, and accountability of each student for their own learning. This will mean utilizing a great deal of participatory techniques, asking good questions and developing significant and important problems for students to work on.
The final issue that I would like to address in my teaching is the issue of evaluation. University degrees these days are often seen merely as a means to a job. As a result, many students are motivated to learn mainly by the pursuit of good marks, which will hopefully result in obtaining a good job. This pits students against each other in competition for the best grades. In his book “What the Best College Teachers Do”, Bain (2004) asks: “is there a way to use grades that will not cause students to feel like they are being manipulated by the evaluation process?” I have thought about this a lot, and I believe that without evaluation that rewards students for being able to think critically and apply biological concepts to real world issues, rather than just memorize, even the best teacher’s attempts to put concepts in context and to foster problem-solving skills may fail. Evaluation that tests ability to memorize and regurgitate content in reality only motivates students to cram, and most of this information is forgotten after the test. I believe that evaluations designed to assess students’ conceptual understanding can make students feel less manipulated, and provide more incentive to actually work on grasping concepts rather than merely memorizing. A major goal for me as a teacher is to learn how to design evaluation tools that actually do this.
I believe that research and teaching are at their core essentially about the same thing: asking good questions. I aim to continue reflecting on the priorities I have developed so far in my teaching career, to utilize what I’ve learned in future teaching opportunities, and to observe and learn from the teaching of my colleagues with the perspective I have obtained through the study of pedagogy in mind.
References
- Bain, K. 2004. What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- D’Avanzo, C. 2003. Research on learning: potential for improving college ecology teaching. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1: 533–540.
- Jordan, R., Singer, F., Vaughan, J. and Berkowitz, A. 2009. What should every citizen know about ecology? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 7: 495-500.
"If a teacher, in his busy life, can find time for a field day with his pupils, it will have a good effect upon all his relations with them. [...] Any plan is good that takes the pupil into the fields and woods, not on aimless walks, but with a botanical purpose."
~ from Cosens, A., & Ivey, T.J. 1930. Botany for High Schools. Ontario Ministry of Education. The Educational Book Company, Ltd., Toronto, Canada. |