Teaching is a way for me to pass on my passion for biology—passion for the big reasons why it is important to learn any of the little things. This involves a sense of passion for discovery, knowledge, understanding alternative views, and awareness of a larger context on which to frame a set of ideas. Passion, combined with a desire to test ideas with experiments and observations, also contributes to the scientific process.
In addition, teaching is a way to help people realize their full potential. This means giving people some important tools for understanding the world, and encouraging them to think critically about the material. Thinking critically implies that students understand how to build on what they already know and apply this knowledge to new situations. In addition, critical thinking implies that students develop informed opinions about aspects of the material where there are no clear answers. In the case of a scientific idea, these opinions may be presented as hypotheses, and I encourage students to think about ways to test these hypotheses. However, many ideas in science also touch on moral, social, or political issues. I likewise encourage students to think about these issues, and offer them tools to cultivate informed opinions about them. Once students have developed a broad knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they will be better equipped to realize their full potential as world citizens. I believe biology and the scientific method in general can offer a great template for helping people to achieve these skills.
When I teach, I share my passion and enthusiasm through experiences, with hands-on demonstrations in classes and labs, field trips, group field research projects, case studies, and individual research projects. Sharing passion involves clarifying the most important concepts in the material and stressing their relevance to everyday life, helping students to put ideas into context and understand why people care about different aspects of biology. In all of these activities, I try to stress how smaller concepts fit together into a bigger picture. For instance, throughout the botany course I taught, I related plant phylogeny to structures in plants that allowed them to survive during major transitions in the evolution of plants (e.g. adaptations to land, and the evolution of secondary growth), and stressed why plants are essential to humans and other organisms.
In my role as a teacher, I try to help students develop both knowledge and critical thinking skills by asking questions of students in different ways. First, I intersperse my lectures and laboratory exercises with questions. This encourages students to process the information I have given them up to that point in lecture, using what they already know to form their own ideas about a possible answer. I also ask students to talk briefly with each other in small groups about potential answers, prior to discussing concepts from text books and other literature that answer these questions, in order to help inspire more creative thoughts from a confluence of different perspectives. Further, this method of generating alternative hypotheses parallels the process of doing science. I ask questions in several different ways on quizzes and exams—incorporating multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions, questions using pictures or graphs, and questions that are also read aloud—to reach students who learn in diverse ways. In addition, I will use these and other means of assessment to collect data about which concepts are most difficult for students and whether current curricula are effective at teaching those concepts. I will then use these data to drive modifications in future curricula.
I hope that the qualities I stress in my teaching will help awaken in students a sense of appreciation for life on earth at all levels of complexity, including physiological/molecular processes, behavior, species interactions, populations, communities, and ecosystem processes. I aim to help students appreciate why these topics are important or interesting, whether or not these students ultimately decide to pursue a career in biology. This will in turn help people to realize their potential, either as future scientists, or (just as importantly) as future citizens of this world.