Teaching Philosophy
My earliest teaching experience came while working as a naturalist guide in a Costa Rican cloud forest. While not a formal teaching position, the job provided me with the opportunity to engage a broadly interested audience with little prior experience in a study of tropical ecology and biodiversity. During this time, I quickly adopted the approach of pairing new content with tactile experiences. I later learned that my approach integrated stages similar to Kolb’s Experiential Learning model which integrates concrete experiences with reflective observations, abstraction, and experimentation. For instance the evolutionary significance of secondary compounds in plants may not be immediately obvious to a general audience. But by allowing the participants to crush the leaves of a Piper plant (Piper sp.), have them smell the peppery odor, and describe how early civilizations used this extract to repel mosquitoes, the connection between the object (the plant) and the concept (secondary compounds are used by plants to prevent herbivory) was evident. Most important to this learning experience was the opportunity for reflection and abstraction. The learner was able to develop a conception of secondary compounds through practical experience. From this conception, I was able to work with my learners to transfer ideas to other ecological concepts such as mimicry, inducible defense, and predator/prey cycles.
While working towards my doctorate I refined my teaching approach through my numerous Rutgers University teaching experiences. These courses include Ornithology, Ecology of the Jersey Shore, Field Techniques for Ecological Research, and Invertebrate Zoology. In each course I use a combination of lectures, self-directed group exercises, and field-based experiential learning to present and reinforce the material. Lecture-based content delivery works well to efficiently summary vast course material, but without opportunities to reflect, abstract, and apply ideas, the material might be memorized and forgotten. I seek to encourage my learners to connect course ideas to personal connections and abstract these ideas in future use. For example, in Ornithology, I present a lecture on bird song, highlighting the form and function of bird vocalizations. Concrete experience is gained when we take recording equipment into the field and each group spends part of the period recording bird vocalizations and observing bird behavior. The students then work in groups to quantify both patterns in sonograms of their recordings and the corresponding behavior of the birds. Thus students are able to form abstract concepts about bird behavior from which they develop hypotheses. Finally, working in small groups they test their hypotheses through experimentation. Last year these projects included such topics as “whether vocal patterns can determine hybridization in two species of Chickadee”, and “why timing of the dawn chorus varies between broad-leaf and coniferous forests”. Through this project-based assessment, I have found that my students improved their abilities to think critically about scientific problems, to find practical solutions, and to develop communication skills in an effort to translate their findings into usable information.
I rate my teaching as a success not only when my students improve their scientific abilities but also when they are able to develop skill in collaboration as well as earning and sharing respect for one’s peers. These skills will benefit the student on whatever career path s/he follows. Finally, in moving beyond the scientific concepts taught in my course, my students are able to foster scientific reasoning skills essential for broad scientific literacy.