Teaching Philosophy
Students are the masters of their own learning. Therefore, an effective instructor must, 1) guide the students to reach their full potential and 2) cater to a diverse student body with different needs. To manifest these goals, my teaching practice emphasizes supporting, encouraging and engaging learners.
The foremost aspect of supportive teaching is the mastery of pedagogical content knowledge. A teacher is a guide who propagates ethical standards, imparts organized information, and, most importantly, resolves doubts through their career experiences. When a student added a wrong reagent during DNA purification in 3rd year biochemistry lab, I salvaged the error on-the-spot by immediately precipitating and concentrating the desired product. While consoling the student that to err is human, I also explained why such an ad-hoc procedure reverses their mistake. However, nurturing such metacognition can be intimidating to novice learners. To address this, I curated protocols and troubleshooting guides from reagent suppliers; bringing them closer to what us as active researchers see on a daily basis. By showing students what scientists sees, they see the big picture on how methodologies are interconnected.
I also strongly believe that a growth-oriented space is essential to encourage competence. Students write many lab reports in their degrees; however, how to compose a scholarly presentable one may not be immediately forthcoming to them. By requesting writing samples, I diagnosed students who required intervention early, and organized small group discussions on how to annotate gel data and discoursed the best protein purification system in a concise manner. A workshop on creating publication-grade figures was employed using the open source software PyMol. As a result, the median word count decreased by 36%, their reasoning became more scientifically rigorous, and the protein structures generated were presented like works of a seasoned structural biologist.
Engaging an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students on a divisive topic like radioactivity is challenging, but engaging these conversations is a necessary skill for an instructor. When the course started, I noticed students were apprehensive with radioactivity due to its perceived danger and sociopolitical controversy. I leveraged the affective attention to introduce objective facts about different doses of radiation. Combing the psychomotor skill of using a Geiger counter to measure background radiation, students learned that radioactivity is not only around us, but also a natural phenomenon. After establishing the safety of low-dose radioactivity, we discoursed the environmental injustice on nuclear contamination around the Dene Nation, discussing the ethics of radiation infrastructure.
In conclusion, my overreaching instructional strategy is to guide students to think rigorously and self-improve. Practice does not necessarily make perfect; expertly practicing with tangible improvements do. Therefore, imparting expertly opinion is precisely my profession. These skillsets will remain universally useful to the students, regardless of their terminal career aspirations.