Teaching philosophy

I’m an assistant professor in the UTM Biology department, with a large focus on teaching numerical and coding skills to biology undergraduate students. I approach teaching from a highly conceptual standpoint, with exam questions that test understanding through word (or scenario) based problems.

Active learning

All courses I teach are ‘active learning’ in some form or another. They all require active engagement using multi-modal learning strategies. Why do I do this in biology? Biology might be the last field of science where powerpoint slides are still the norm. This maybe makes sense if it was a memory-based scientific field. It is not, and it would be hopeless to study the field if it had no ounce of logic. I believe that active learning prepares students better for the real world, where complex problems need to be broken down and addressed.

Statistics within the field of biology has to be one of the most challenging course students will take through their undergraduate curriculum. The main reason this occurs is due to our initial beliefs about the world. Biology is a relatively new science, and we witness so few of the natural phenomena we seek to study. Statistics is similar, where patterns form or disappear under long-term behaviors. Our brains take a lot of shortcuts along the way, and we quickly jump to conclusions even if they are innaccurate.

We can’t study anything without unknowing the wrongs. In both biology and statistics, there will be many wrongs. And dealing with this is sometimes uncomfortable. But, through feedback assessment techniques, we can work together to erase misconceptions, and start looking at the world from a different angle where we prioritize facts and reality.