Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

The allure of Earth science lies in a fundamental human tendency to wonder about the natural world. Earth science asks you to explore your curiosity and ask questions, whether you are standing in a National Park taking in a geologic marvel, or standing in your backyard watching a thunderstorm approach. Our principal role as teachers in Earth science is to engage this natural curiosity and cultivate a desire to explore and investigate within our students. Inspiring this kind of drive is not done by monologuing in lecture, dwelling on technical jargon, or obfuscating learning goals behind impenetrably complex assignments.

Instead, we should teach our courses with two goals in mind: prioritizing active learning in the classroom to keep students engaged with the material, and emphasizing accessibility in course materials and teaching practices to reduce barriers to participation.

Me (wearing orange/red) talking with University of Michigan students while teaching the capstone field course in Wyoming in 2017.

Teaching Experience

I have served as a graduate student instructor for a wide range of Earth science classes at the University of Michigan:

  • 2020 Introduction to GIS in the Earth Sciences

  • 2020 Structural Geology and Tectonics

  • 2019 Introduction to Geology in the Rocky mountains

  • 2019 Stratigraphy and Basin Analysis

  • 2018 Introduction to Geology in the Rocky mountains

  • 2018 Stratigraphy and Basin Analysis

  • 2017 Capstone Geology Field Course

  • 2016 Introduction to Geology


Guest teaching lectures:

  • 2020 Origins of topography - Invited by Prof. Tara Smiley at Stonybrook University

  • 2019 Origins of topography - Invited by Prof. Catherine Badgley at the University of Michigan



University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT)

Graduate Teacher Certificate

The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT website) at the University of Michigan offers a Graduate Teacher Certificate program. Over the course of the program, I have attended seminars and workshops on teaching topics including:

  • Developing a teaching philosophy

  • Evaluating student writing

  • Disability and accessible teaching: Current perspectives and best practices

  • Facilitating discussions of research literature in STEM courses

  • The science of learning: Fostering creativity through effective course design


Graduate Student Instructional Consultant

In fall of 2020, I was hired as a Graduate Student Instructional Consultant by CRLT. Consultants perform a variety of services for graduate student instructors at the University of Michigan, including providing feedback on course materials, teaching practices, course design, and teaching philosophies, as well as performing in-person (typically on Zoom now due to the pandemic) observations of instructors in their classrooms.

Specific examples

Improving course materials

Through my regular instructional duties, I have developed or revised a large amount of course material to better incorporate best practices including increasing the amount of active learning and making assignments and materials more accessible. Here are some links to examples of different kinds of small accessibility improvements that I think make an enormous difference for students:

Making implicit norms explicit

Incorporating reference material directly into an assignment

Making assignments visually more accessible

Allowing students to "fail" in a safe way


Developing a start- and end-of-term teaching form for my department

I have also spent time working with a small group of like-minded graduate students and faculty to improve the department level curriculum in my academic home, the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. Improving teaching practices at universities is a notoriously slow and challenging process, and the approach that we have taken is to create start- and end-of-term forms that guide a teaching team (all the professors and graduate student instructors working on a course) through a standardized set of questions that encourage best teaching practices and encourage clear communication.

Click here to see the form we developed.

Before developing the form, I was surprised to hear that our curriculum committee had basically no information on how individual courses are taught, and therefore was incapable of suggesting improvements that would address the constant complaint of professors and graduate students that undergraduates lacked the basic skills (math, statistics, computer skills, presentation skills) required to succeed in upper level courses. Part of the motivation behind this form is to collect data from all courses on what works well and what needs improvement. As this data accumulates, it will enable our curriculum committee to make recommendations for how to best improve the curriculum department-wide.


Useful ideas

Here is a running compilation of some of the most influential topics I have learned as a teacher, for my own reference as much as anyone else's.

Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's taxonomy is a tool for categorizing learning goals into different levels of intellectual difficulty. The modified Bloom's taxonomy shown below is organized along two dimensions, (1) the type of knowledge being processed, and (2) the type of cognitive process being used.

The usefulness of Bloom's taxonomy is debatable, and some teachers like to rail against its prevalence in the pedagogical literature, since it can be admittedly cumbersome to incorporate directly into lesson planning. However, as a new teacher I found it enlightening, especially in the modified form shown below. I think that some of the confusion arises when Bloom's taxonomy is presented as a lesson planning tool from which you can craft learning goals directly, and design assignments around those goals in turn.

Instead, I see it as a useful tool in evaluating an existing lesson plan. When reviewing the learning goals for an assignment, categorizing them using the chart below helps me evaluate the distribution of intellectual work in an assignment that I am asking the students to do, from the tedious and less arduous "Recall" to the the more intellectually tasking "Differentiate" or "Design." I find that assignments that work well and keep students engaged have learning goals across a range of Bloom's taxonomic levels.


Above: A 3-dimensional rendering of modified Bloom's taxonomy.

Soliciting feedback from the class correctly

One of my own bad teaching habits I am still trying to shake is the tendency to end every explanation by asking one of the following: "Does anyone have any questions?" or the worse, "does that make sense?" or the much worse, "does everyone get that?" For me, the desire to check with the class to see if everyone is following what I have said arises mostly from my own insecurity as a teacher, and I'm really looking for feedback from the students if they are not understanding my potentially confusing explanation. But my experience is that when I ask for feedback this way, usually nobody "has any questions" regardless of whether they understood my explanation or not.

The above ways of asking for feedback put the onus onto the student to admit their inability to understand. Instead, I now try to say, "is there any part of that explanation I can make clearer?" or "I realize that was complex, is there a part of that I can go over again?" This phrasing does two things: It implicitly normalizes the possibility that my explanation wasn't very good, and it makes me the subject of the question, lowering the barrier for a student to raise their voice and ask for a clarification.

In practice, I have found that this method is much more effective at getting students to tell you when your explanation is not working. It's important to mention that some fraction of students will rarely or never raise their voice in a classroom setting, and therefore it is important to track student learning through other methods, for example regular small-stakes assessments, or other opportunities to fail in a safe manner (see more about this in Specific Examples section above).

Engaging student curiosity by starting with open-ended questions

A great technique I learned at a CRLT-Engin seminar on creativity and learning involves starting a lecture or lab with an open-ended question or task that students will engage with before they have learned any actual material. The students complete the question or task in a small amount of time, usually 5-10 minutes, and work in small groups or via a think-pair-share scheme. Some examples:

If you are about to teach the geologic timescale to an introductory geology class, start the class with the following question before even showing the timescale: "Besides counting years, what are possible ways one could systematically describe the timeline of Earth's history?"

Another example: if you were about to teach Riemann sums, have students work for 10 minutes in small groups trying to find the area of a piece of paper cut into an irregular shape with only a straight ruler and pencil.

These open-ended tasks are fun for the students, lets them talk to their peers, and engages their critical thinking skills immediately at the start of a class. Most importantly, thinking about a genuinely open-ended question naturally engages curiosity and helps students listen to what otherwise might be a tedious lecture with a greater level of interest because they have already made predictions about where the lecture will go when answering the open-ended question.