Due to the original class time coincided with Remembrance Day holiday, a make-up class was scheduled on Wednesday night at 6-9pm. This was something I had to take account of, as the time change would affect students’ energy level and motivation. I might have to put in extra effort to get students’ participation, and I have to make sure I stay on task so class doesn’t go overtime. Learning from previous experience, I gave more thoughts into how much emphasis I should put on different materials, and how to rearrange the content on the teaching guide in order to make my teaching more effective.

Having a better idea of the class dynamic, I felt more confident teaching this time and did much better in time management. I still went overtime for my first activity, as there was so much information to cover. However, knowing I could make adjustment for the subsequence activities, I was calmer and wrapped up the first activity properly. During the second activity when I had to facilitate discussion among individual groups, I again did better compare to my previous practicum. I was able to keep track with the whole class from time to time while helping with individual groups. The class was more engaged in their task rather than losing focus to chatting.

This practicum with BIOL140 gave me valuable experience in teaching some activity-dense classes. I learnt about how to balance between content delivery and in-class activities. I also learnt about how to control time better when running multiple activities in class. During the reflection session with my mentor, Dr. Nomme, I wondered if I were to start instructing the course from the beginning, what I would need to do in order to run classes smoothly. I think my mentor made some very good points – for any discussion-base activity, it is important to motivate students to take ownership of their work. It is often hard to entire everyone is making meaningful contribution during activities, especially when class size is big. By laying out learning outcomes and goals clearly at the beginning, we could let students know what they should be expecting during class, and that they should work towards the goals together. It is also important to develop respects from students, which would help with motiving students to participate in class activities. With this being my very last practicum through the CATL program, I hope what I have learnt from all my practicum experience will shape me into a teacher better helping with students’ learning.

It has been a long time since I last looked at first year undergraduate materials. In preparation for my first experience of teaching a first-year Biology laboratory class, I had to revisit some technical terminologies and definitions used in BIOL140. I also requested for students’ assignments that would be relevant to this class’s activities, so I was more prepared for facilitating class discussions that were based on these assignments. After the observation, I knew the students in this class were a little quiet. My goals for this practicum were to 1) motivate students to share their answers and thoughts with their group and the whole class, 2) to be able to facilitate confidently this activity-heavy class.

This class had three activities, and the content to be delivered was pre-designed in order to align with all 36 sections of the course. The first activity was an exercise on experimental design critique. Students would read two passages and answer a list of questions. As an instructor, I had to encourage students to share their answers. Through discussing students’ questions, I delivery lecture content and highlight key points as well. I spent time addressing each key point, and since there were quite a few things I would like to address, I ended up going over time by 15 minutes just on the first activity. After noticing the time, I rushed into giving instructions for the second activity, which was to have students to plan for their animal experiment in a group discussion. My role was to go to each group and facilitate their planning using a list of guiding questions. Since I was focusing heavily on catching up with time, my attention was solely on different groups, rather than on the class as a whole. Fortunately, my mentor helped with facilitation from the opposite end of the class, so it did not seem like the rest of the class was neglected. And before moving onto the last part of the class, I then realized I was doing fine time-wise.

Facilitating an activity-heavy class was quite a challenge. It was hard to predict students’ responses, hence difficult to control time. In this practicum, I think I had some good interactions with students. I was able to encourage students’ participation by setting a friendly and relaxed learning environment. However, I need to work on my flexibility for facilitating class activities. I need to make sure I am not cramming too much information within the class, and learn how to move forward smoothly when needed. Furthermore, group discussion is a great tool of learning for students, and I will work on its facilitation skills for the upcoming practicum. My goal is to be able to care for individual groups without neglecting the rest of the class.

For my third semester of practicum, I wanted to experience something different. After being a guest lecturer for a small and a big class during my first and second term respectively, I decided to approach Dr. Kathy Nomme for mentoring my teaching in a laboratory course. BIOL140 is a first-year level lab course that is mandatory for almost all students in the Faculty of Science. Compared to upper year lab courses, students in BIOL140 spend more time on doing “dry lab”, in which they learn about scientific writing, planning fair experiments, and how to do scientific critique. Therefore, the opportunity of facilitation in BIOL140 is lot more than other lab courses.

The class I was observing today had just about 30 students. This was one of the 36 sections being offered in this term, and was opened to only students in the Science One Program. The class started with introduction of the agenda, with the estimated time scheduled per activity being provided. Three activities in total were carried out in this 3-hour course, each with specific learning outcome. There were not much actual “lecturing” happening during class. In order to reach the different learning outcomes, Dr. Nomme asked a lot of questions to guide students to think about the topic. There were also class activities like group discussion and PBL-style exercises. In order to keep track with students throughout the exercise, Dr. Nomme would start with giving instructions, then give time to students for working on the exercise, and check in again halfway through. Time cues were given throughout so students knew if they were falling behind or not. What I also noticed was that students were generally quiet and needed lots of encouragement for speaking out. The classroom was also quite long width-wise, which could impact students in either end hearing comments from their fellow classmates.

After the observation, I learnt some techniques in teaching an activity-heavy course. Before my practicum, I will be thinking of how to engage students in participating discussions and answering questions. Although the in-class activities were pre-designed to align with all 36 sections, I will think of ways to provide my own input to the teaching material. I am looking forward to teaching in this new environment.

On March 28, I had an opportunity to do my first large class-teaching with over 200 students. My class was one of the three sections offered by BIOL201. Since my teaching has to align with the two other sections of this course, it was important to ensure I had delivered all the content needed. Originally, my practicum was scheduled to be two 50-minute classes, but since the progress of class had changed during the term, I had to deliver all my lecture material in a 90-minute class period. It was important for me to reflect on my teaching during class based on students’ reaction, and make changes accordingly.

Overall, I was able to capture my students’ attention throughout the class with the help of a few techniques/tools I used. I used the cam doc as a white board to write as I was teaching about the different steps of the Ticarboxylic Acid cycle, rather than displaying everything on the Powerpoint slides at once. I was able to breakdown the materials better for students to follow. I also designed some iclicker questions for students to answer alone the class to test their understanding. I always shared the respond with class right after and addressed any common misconceptions in order to give students chances to reflect their learning timely. During class, there was a little accident – a student asked me a question which I was not entirely sure about the answer. Understanding the importance of being accurate in answering, I turned to my mentor, Dr Chowrira, for suggestion. Though feeling a little embarrassed, my mentor told me that it was done very naturally and was definitely the right thing to do. According to my mentor, I also did well in pacing and setting up a friendly environment. Furthermore, I repeated the questions students had asked, which was a good practice that I should keep doing in a large classroom like that.

As for something that I could improve on, my mentor pointed out that I occasionally “formulated things”. Rather than asking students to “see the pattern” of how reactions work, I should have tackled from the point of “why” certain things happened. This is to encourage students to understand the reasoning rather than memorizing contents, which is an important concept in teaching in general. Furthermore, I should have spent more time wrapping up the class. Not all activities could be run all the time within class. It is more important to provide a summary at the end of class, rather than trying to squeeze all contents and activities at the end. This was a mistake I made in my previous practicum, and will definitely be something that I need to pay more attention on in the future.

Despite a few things that I should work on, the class was generally smooth, and I gained great experience in teaching a large class.

In preparation for my next practicum, I paid a visit to a BIOL201 lecture on February 16, instructed by Dr. Sunita Chowrira. Dr. Chowrira is an experienced instructor who cares about helping students to learn more efficiently. She readily uses active learning techniques to help enhancing students’ learning experience. BIOL201 is an introductory course on biochemistry offered to students by the Biology Department. This course serves as a prerequisite for many upper level biology courses, hence it has a high enrollment rate. A total of 750 students are split into three sections, with one taken up by Dr. Chowrira.

Today’s class was on enzyme kinetics. With pre-class reading and quizzes assigned, most students came with some knowledge on the topic. With a large class of over 200 students, my goal was to observe in what ways Dr. Chowrira was able to run different class activities to keep students engaged throughout class, yet still be able to control the crowd.  Students were sitting in rows, facing the podium in the centre front. There were two big projector screen side-by-side at the front. The instructor showed the learning objector on one screen, while teaching with Powerpoint slides on the other one.  Students could refer to the L.O. at any time during class to ensure they did not miss any key points. An in-class worksheet with some concept questions was available for students. These questions were designed to prepare students for the assigned problem set. Students were given time to discuss and tackle the questions as the class proceed. Other than worksheet, there were many iclicker questions asked throughout the class, in which Dr. Chowrira would show the class results and explain the answer after each question. Other than asking concept questions, the instructor also used iclicker to check on students’ understanding during class and their thoughts on homework and problem sets. There were questions like “How did you find the homework questions”, or “Do you understand the section we just covered”. Students were less embarrassed to share their thoughts in form of clicker questions. There was an useful gadget that I would like to use was the cam doc. It is sometime useful to write down notes for students as you talk, but the white board in class is too small for students at the back to see. The cam doc project document on the desk to the screen as live video. The instructor wrote on the paper as it was being projected on the screen.

After visiting this class, I had a better idea in how to run activities in large classroom without aid of TAs. It is important to have means to provide any form of feedback promptly to the class. Walking around the classroom during discussion time would be one way. Also, showing the class the iclicker results right away and explaining any major misconception would be very useful as well. My goal for the upcoming practicum will be to try running activities effectively to help with students’ learning and engagement during class.

On Novemebr 30, I did my second practicum in BIOL463. The class was in the module “canonical development and cancer”. Rather than researching on a completely new topic, I have decided to design my class as an extension from my last practicum. I picked a scientific journal about generating an animal model for studying human cancer with CRISPR to talk about, and have assigned it as preclass reading. The learning objective of my class was by the end of my class, students will be able to model the general procedures of creating animal disease models using CRISPR. In my last practicum, I was teaching the background knowledge about CRIPSR; this time, my class material was based on a publication. I feel like the content I could cover was being limited, which I think is an unexpected yet good challenge for me.

I think time management was my biggest challenge in this practicum. My first discussion with the class was on a piece of data generated by a technique that I thought everyone knows (this technique is typically taught in second year). Unexpectedly, many students stumbled on understanding the data from that technique. Although we had very meaningful discussion about that piece of data and the rest of the class went smoothly, I did not have as much time as I would like for my last activity, which was a debate that I thought would be the most interesting part. My mentor still thinks that all discussions and activities were essential, and she would rather have a longer class time than to cut down any activity (I was very relieved to hear that!). Another thing I notice was the class energy was lower than before. Since it is the last week of class, students expressed that they have multiple deadlines and many exams are coming up. Unfortunately, this is something beyond my control, and I have experienced this phase before as well.

Overall, my mentor gave me very positive feedback. She thinks the structure and content of the class were very appropriate. I think something I could work on in my future practicum would be how to be more flexible in terms of modifying class activities according to time and students’ reactions. For example, before I started my last activity, I already knew time is running short. Instead of insisting on having a debate, I should use the same material I designed and have a class-wide discussion. This way, I could speed up the process by having students shared their opinions directly with the whole class rather than first within the group. I will also have time to properly wrap up the class.

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.

Structure and observation of the class
On October 24, I sat into Dr. Pamela Kalas’s BIOL463 class on Gene Regulation in Development. This class has about 35 students registered. The entire course was divided into several modules and each one of them involves different aspects on gene regulation. The class I was in talked about gene imprinting. For each module, Dr. Kalas would pick a few scientific papers and assign them to students to read prior class. During class, she first started with giving a short talk on some background information, then went through the content of the assigned papers with the class. Dr. Kalas asked a series of questions related to the figures in the paper. For example, “what kind of information are you getting from this figure?”, “Why do you think a certain observation is seen?”, and “What kind of conclusion could you draw from this figure?”. She then allowed students to think about the questions, discuss with their neighbour, and share the answers with the class (think-pair-share). Dr. Kalas almost never “lectured” about the paper, rather, she asked meaningful questions to guide students to come up with the information or knowledge that she would like them to learn. During the discussion, she also walked around the classroom and listened to what students say. She would give hints to students who were stumbling on the questions, or redirect students to the right track if she found any misconception. During sharing time, students usually participated enthusiastically. However, for harder questions, students sometime hesitated to share. So Dr. Kalas would say she actually heard some pretty good answers during the discussion time in order to encourage students to speak up. In general, there was always an on-going discussion between instructor and students during the class.

Reflections
I have really enjoyed being at Dr. Kalas class because of the active dynamic of the class. Dr. Kalas was able to ensure most of the students participated actively. One key thing that I learnt is to be sure to design meaningful questions to ask in order to guide students to the right direction of thinking. Asking questions during class is one of the tools that could stimulate students to think. But certainly not all questions will help students to learn. One needs to be able to ask questions that could lead students to think about certain key points or concepts in order to help students in learning. Another thing that I learnt is how to be able to include every (or most) students in the class. It is inevitable that some students are more willing to share. In order to make sure most students’ voices were being heard, Dr. Kalas walked around the room and talked to different groups throughout the class. She would also invite some groups to speak first during the sharing session to avoid some students dominating the discussion. I think these are something I should model when I am teaching. However, I would like to challenge myself to use more than just this active learning technique. Given the size of the class and time, I could see how think-pair-share is an effective way to stimulate student participation while covering a descent about of content. However, I would like to enrich my class by using at least one more technique. I am currently in a process of coming up with other strategies. My goal is to create an enthusiastic dynamic with active discussion in my class.

When I was doing my observation, I focused on investigating how my mentor applied the principles of PCK. The class I went to was a forth year biology class focuses on gene regulation in organism development. This is such a sophisticated subject that could go really broad and in depth. I was interested in how my mentor delivered the content knowledge in a language that would be understood by senior undergraduate students. I discovered that the approach she used was simple – the use of student-led activity, think-pair-share. By using think-pair-share, my mentor asked a series of meaningful questions that would guide students to think through answering. She was able to gauge the knowledge level of students through informal assessment while students are presenting answers. She provided feedback and amended misconceptions immediately, which helps with students absorbing the knowledge. Since the language of content knowledge was developed by peers, students were able to understand better. This activity also enhanced the interactions within the class.

For my practicum, I am planning on model this skill. In preparation of my teaching, I will design a set of questions which will help stimulating students’ thinking about the subject. These questions have to be meaningful in terms of being able to guide students towards the learning outcome. During my class, I will pay attention to the language I use, and frequently ask for students’ feedback in order to adjust my pedagogical techniques.

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