On Novmebr 9, I did my first teaching practicum with BIOL463. I gave an introductory lecture on CRIPSR, a recently created gene-editing tool based on naturally occurring immune system found in bacterium. The learning objectives of my class were by the end of my class, students will be able to 1) understand the working mechanism of CRISPR; 2) apply the technique as a tool for genome editing. I am personally not an expert in CRISPR, therefore, I spent a lot of time reading up on background information. When I was planning the class, I decided to challenge myself to incorporate activities other than think-pair-share, which I am most comfortable of using and was frequently used in my mentor’s class. So apart from preparing questions for think-pair-share, I created a worksheet for learning the biological mechanism of CRISPR, and designed a group exercise asking students how to apply CRIPSR on research. Also, in order to have adequate time for discussions, I purposely included less slides for my class (15 slides for a 50-minute class). I also did not provide any recommended reading in order to keep some surprises for my class.

During class, most things went smoothly as planned. I was able to create a motivated atmosphere with a lot of interactions throughout the class. One thing that caught me off guard tho, was quite a few students were stumbled when doing the worksheet. During the preclass meeting with my mentor, she told me that many students had proposed using CRIPSR for their final term project, therefore we both expected that students have some degree of knowledge about it. I therefore created a worksheet on the CRISPR mechanism with all the processed being illustrated, and have put in blanks for students to fill up the name of the processes and biological components involved. To our surprised, many students did not actually know CRIPSR involve a series of molecular mechanisms. Both me and my mentor reacted quickly during class and started giving hints to students. After class, I started think if it would be a better idea to provide required reading in this case. However, my mentor had a very different point of view. She thinks that the fact that students could not complete the worksheet smoothly serves as a really good opportunity to remind students not to just go for the name or popularity of the scientific techniques when it comes to designing projects, it is also a good preclass assessment for both students and instructor to identify the level of students’ content knowledge. Although I hate to see students being traumatized of how little they know about the topic (or simply puzzled), I do agree with my mentor’s opinion. I think as an instructor, the biggest lesson learnt here would be to be flexible during class. No big chaos was caused because both of us immediately joined the students for discussion about the worksheet. This would be something that I will keep working on.

My mentor was particularly impressed of the various class activities being incorporated, especially for the last part of my class, I designed an exercise where students had to apply what they learnt in the first part of the class to come up with strategies on editing genes for a cystic fibrosis patient. The part of the activity nicely wrapped up the class by addressing the second L.O. of the lesson. However, I have to admit that it took quite a bit of time to design these activities. In real life situation if I were actually an instructor in charge of the entire course, I wouldn’t have enough time to come up with activities every class. So my goal here (this is also a long term goal of mine) would be to practice more in order to be able to come up with activities better, and to have better grasp of when and what active learning activity would be appropriate.

Finally, for my next practicum, one suggestion from my mentor was do not afraid to give students more time to think before answering questions. Often, when classroom was quiet, I tend to start talking without noticing students are actually still thinking rather than being irresponsive. This is something that I am aware of, and would definitely be more conscious about it.