Classroom Teaching Strategies & Research
Below is a general overview of my approach to teaching. For resources on teaching methodologies, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), Teaching-as-Research, and specific strategies for teaching in the geosciences, check out my LINKS page.
When teaching, I have three main goals in mind:
To impart an enthusiasm and love of learning
To help my students identify their own goals and create actionable plans to achieve both their learning goals and my learning goals for them
To teach students to apply their newfound knowledge to help understand real-world systems and help solve real-world problems.
In the classroom, I start by building a safe and inclusive classroom atmosphere, using our EEG Community Contract as a guide.
In my classes, we celebrate mistakes. Allowing students to take ownership of their own learning, emphasizing that while content is hard they can do hard things and sometimes we get it wrong - but those moments provide our largest opportunities for growth.
I prefer using a variety of teaching methods to augment lectures (e.g., guided- and structured-inquiry assignments, collaborative learning periods, demonstrations, active hands-on learning), as these types of teaching strategies often improve students' critical thinking skills, conceptual understanding of materials, confidence in scientific knowledge, and interest in and retention in STEM fields.
Average percent NLGs for “easy” questions, “hard” conceptual questions, and “hard” data/graph questions, for all students
Structured Inquiry in Environmental Geochemistry
With this Teaching-as-Research project, our goal was to determine if structured-inquiry assignments improve students' conceptual and scientific knowledge relative to traditional algorithmic-based assignments in an upper level course: Environmental Geochemistry.
Students used Geochemist's Workbench to model hypothetical systems in a series of modeling assignments --half of which were 'Practicals' (traditional rote-based) and half of which were 'Experiments' (structured inquiry). Using pre- and post-assignment questions, attitudinal surveys, and pre- and post-semester surveys, we assessed differences in normalized learning gains (NLGs) and student attitudes. Experiments and Practicals improved confidence, conceptual understanding, and data/graph interpretation ability to a similar degree. Interestingly (and quite unexpectedly), the Experiments improved understanding of simple scientific concepts more so than the Practicals, and consistently increased undergraduate students' and female students' NLGs, but had the opposite effect for male students.