My name is Ahmad Mohammed Kamal, and I’m excited to be entering my fourth year as an undergraduate student in Integrated Science at UBC, where I’m exploring the incredible diversity of the life sciences.
I’ve had the privilege of being one of the inaugural Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs) for BIOL 200 and continue to be a UTA for Science One Biology at the first-year level. Recently, I was honoured to be awarded the Kathy Nomme Award for New Teaching Assistants.
I’m also working as an Undergraduate Academic Assistant (UAA) under the guidance of Dr. Pam Kalas, who was the first to allow me to develop my teaching ABCs. In this role, I’ve helped design educational activities that “de-simplify” undergraduate biology—primarily genetics—to reflect its real-world complexity. You can read more in this Teaching Spotlight: A Student-Directed Project to De-Simplify Genetics.
What do you most enjoy about being a TA?
Before I had the privilege of being in a formal teaching position, I deeply admired how my favourite educators didn’t just convey information–they helped me cultivate my own system of thinking. However, once I became involved in education, I realized that teaching is not a one-way relationship. Students can and often do impart just as much knowledge to the teaching team. As a TA, I’ve never left an office hour without learning something, be it a new fact or a different way to interpret data. Ultimately, this reciprocal learning is what drives me as an educator. My role is to create a welcoming, active learning environment, and in doing so, I help foster a space where students from all educational backgrounds and I can come together to build new understandings in our learning.
What has being a TA brought to your undergraduate experience?
Being a TA has taught me that the best way to learn is to teach. It’s changed how I study in undergrad. I don’t mean that as just blurting everything I know about a topic from memory (although this can also be an effective learning strategy!). Instead, I focus on engaging in meaningful conversations about the material, where both people actively contribute to the other’s understanding and critically challenge each other’s reasoning by asking thoughtful questions.
That’s how I try to set up my office hours. When a student asks a question, I often respond with questions of my own. I begin by asking what they already know and how they’re thinking about the topic. From there, we walk through their reasoning together. If there’s a major gap in understanding, I’ll gently point it out (by posing a question!); if not, I’ll add my perspective and see how it resonates with them.
Sometimes they agree and everything clicks. What is more beneficial (and I think more fun) is if my explanation didn’t make sense to the student! Firstly, it gives me valuable feedback. It often means I’m missing something in how I’m explaining it, or perhaps I’m contradicting something they’ve seen before, hence the confusion. More importantly, it allows the students to ask clarifying questions. It should be noted that asking these clarifying questions can be hard for students. I know that feeling…when I’m only wearing my student cap, I sometimes feel vulnerable and even stupid for asking. But often it is these questions that usually get to the heart of the student’s misconceptions! Even though it can be uncomfortable leading up to it, I often feel way better after asking a question (especially if encouraged by an instructor!).
These mutual exchanges sharpen both of our understandings. I encourage my students to then play my role by having a new exchange about the same or similar topic with their classmates (this works particularly well for topics that are known to be tricky for many). If there are multiple people there in office hours, I nudge them to converse right there and then! As a bonus, this can also build rapport between classmates who don’t know each other! I do these conversational exchanges in my study teams too, and they work great! It’s only because of teaching that I’ve been able to develop a rich and rewarding study method in my learning journey. If you’re interested, UBC educators have even built a formal “Study Buddy” program into Canvas to help students connect and study collaboratively.
What has been an interesting outcome of your TA experience?
Over the last few years, I’ve slowly realized that while we’re privileged to learn and work on this land, academia has many deep-rooted issues when it comes to how education is delivered. Once I started questioning education, I realized the rabbit hole goes deep.
A major issue I’ve observed alongside my friends is how some learning environments feel unwelcoming or hierarchical, with a stark divide between instructors and students. These spaces often lack student voice, agency, or warmth. This absence of a positive classroom culture can manifest as poor student engagement levels. Most importantly to me, it takes away the fun of learning.
To share these reflections and how to create a supportive classroom culture, I was fortunate to be able to give a talk at this year’s Biology Teaching Retreat. Giving a talk that critiqued faculty—in a room full of faculty—made my stomach twist and turn in the days leading up to it. Of course, I made sure to acknowledge and give instructors their flowers for the effort they put into their jobs!
Luckily, it turned out to be a fun and humbling experience. The audience played their parts perfectly…just like a typical classroom. There were the eager hand-raisers, the quiet observers, the deeply engaged few, and even the distracted folks in the back. It pleasantly reminded me how universal classroom dynamics are, regardless of who’s sitting in the seats. With great surprise, the power dynamics were flipped as during the talk, I felt like I was in charge! Afterwards, some professors came up to me and were interested in my ideas, which I do have to emphasize are not original. They were heavily inspired by some of the amazing classes that I have taken here at UBC.
Ultimately, it was empowering to know that a student’s voice can matter, and although it may be difficult to engage with authority, I think students who have experiences in courses with a positive classroom culture know that it’s worth bringing up some friendly suggestions to an instructor. An example of this is if a student is finding it hard to meet study partners. Maybe gently ask the instructor of the class to enable the “Study-Buddy” program on Canvas so that other students who are struggling with the same thing can opt in and study together. It could be the start towards building a positive classroom culture!
What opportunities relating to teaching and learning have you been a part of?
The most exciting teaching and learning opportunity I’ve had so far was presenting at SABER West, an international biology education conference, this past January. I co-presented a poster on my UAA work. What made this conference so special for me was that for the first time, I realized that students weren’t alone in noticing the systemic issues in education. The issues I had questioned were just a mere drop in the ocean of what was being addressed. There’s an entire community of researchers working to name and even solve these challenges.
For example, one workshop focused on how assessments are often flawed, not because they’re inherently bad (although some might argue otherwise!), but because they’re poorly designed. Often, exams don’t undergo thorough editing to make sure questions are appropriately formed. That means the first real “test” of the exam is taken by students in an exam hall with 500 seats. For me, this leads to situations where I answer a question differently than expected, which then gets marked wrong, even though being different does not necessarily mean being wrong. Many exams don’t accommodate different but still biologically plausible ways of thinking. This may repeat itself next time the course is offered (if the exam/question of interest is reused). The issue is that there is often no channel for students to give feedback on an exam, let alone for some to even see their exam. In that workshop, I learned that 40% of students (from a subset of Anatomy & Physiology classes across the United States) have zero access to their final exams. Ultimately, the key takeaway was that assessments should feel more like nuanced conversations, not one-sided judgments. After all, there is no test that assesses what it’s designed to do 100% of the time.
That was just one session out of many I attended at SABER West. It was the first time in academia that I felt truly heard, and it showed me how powerful education research can be. I strongly encourage students (and faculty!) to attend more educational conferences. I was nervous at first, but I was blown away by how supportive the community was, especially when they found out I was an undergraduate. For more local options, the UBC Biology Teaching Retreat and the UBC Skylight Science Education Open House were informative and rewarding as well.
What is a fun fact about you that people may not know?
Slightly embarrassing, but I think I’ve dozed off in a large number of UBC buildings. Never while TAing, though!