We have all had teachers who have impacted our lives; Mrs. Smith, my fourth-grade science teacher, was one of mine. She loved science and was so passionate about it. She did so many amazing experiments and allowed us to build and investigate. In her class, I won the simple machine science fair with a bike I built for my Barbie® out of popsicle sticks, cardboard and elastic bands. It was a moment I realized I like science and winning. As I grew older, I had many other great teachers, but none of them impacted me like Mrs. Toews, my grade 11 and 12 Chemistry teacher. She is the reason I studied Chemistry at university. She made Chemistry fun with demos, experiments and just a good attitude. But the woman I aspire to be most like now is Dr. Gottardo, my third-year Organic Chemistry professor, she is simply brilliant, but not in the boastful, superior kind of way. I struggled with Organic Chemistry in second-year, Org 1 and Org 2 were the lowest grades on my transcript, but the way she taught Org 3 and the way she designed the lab is the reason I have a doctorate degree in Organic Chemistry. She made the content approachable, achievable and enjoyable. She herself was so kind and spent hours sitting in her office teaching me complex processes. She brought understanding, openness and compassion into the classroom. Charles Kuralt said “good teachers know how to bring out the best in students” and that is exactly what Dr. Gottardo did for me; she changed my trajectory as an undergraduate student, she built my confidence in Organic Chemistry and showed me that I was capable! This is something I aspire to do as a professor.
My true love for teaching came in the first year of my Master’s degree when I was working as a graduate teaching assistant in an Organic Chemistry laboratory. It was here I first experienced seeing the “aha” moment in a student’s eyes when a concept clicks, and I was hooked. I loved seeing students get excited about successful experiments, troubleshooting less successful ones and gaining an appreciation for a field I enjoy so much. It was then I realized I wanted to teach Chemistry at a university. At the end of that year, I transferred into a PhD program to get the credentials I needed to become a professor.
My teaching philosophy is built upon making content accessible, achievable and enjoyable. I strive to make the content accessible to learners with all knowledge-levels and abilities. Analogies and personification are my favourite ways to describe complex scientific topics; I have personified more molecules than I would like to admit. I also like to use my body to depict chemical concepts, which are often hard to visualize since they occur on an atomic scale; often my corporeal demonstrations serve as comic relief as well! I endeavour to encourage the learners that they can achieve an understanding of the content and I try to make the entire learning experience fun. I include trivia games with review as well as ample science jokes. I think that laughing and learning should go hand in hand.
Accessible:
I think accessibility is of the utmost importance in teaching and learning. No one can learn content they cannot access. In my learning spaces I try to meet students where they are figuratively and literally. I offer all my courses in a hybrid setting by livestreaming and recording the lectures, allowing students to attend class physically or virtually. This provides flexibility and can alleviate barriers around access to transportation, health, finances and busy schedules.
Additionally, I do my best to provide students with different modalities of content beyond the lecture recordings, including incomplete and complete notes to accommodate different types of note takers, extra videos of myself explaining complex topics using the Light Board, written summary notes for each section as well as my annotated class notes. Learners do not need to engage with all these learning modalities; however, I hope to provide different learners with different preferences equal access to the content in a medium that suits them.
Building a positive, encouraging and accepting learning environment that allows me, the educator, to work with the learners to optimize their learning experience is of the utmost importance. This includes creating a safe space for learners to ask questions and make suggestions. For this reason, I use an anonymous muddiest points questionnaire to get feedback from the learners as to what they are struggling with and any suggestions for how I can improve the course to suit their needs. This helps give them a voice in how the course is structured. I also find this helps me to learn from them, and being a lifelong learner is one of my core values. I also have an open-door policy, whenever I am in my office the door is open and students are welcome in, and I always have snacks! I want my students to feel as though they can come to me with questions, concerns and struggles, so I do my best to be available, open and approachable. Additionally, I like to use polls throughout lectures to allow for quick recaps, to breakup large stretches of content and to give the opportunity for the learners to reflect upon what they have learned and ask any questions they may have. I also find that building in review lectures throughout the course and scheduling additional Q&A sessions prior to large evaluations is very helpful for the learners; it allows them to bring any questions forward and is a much more conversational experience than the conventional lecture format. I do my best to make myself accessible to students in a variety of ways to suit everyone’s comfort level and to ensure they are not missing out on valuable learning opportunities.
Achievable:
I find that a lot of my students lack confidence in Chemistry, which is often considered a difficult course in terms of content. It can be very intimidating for learners, and they habitually come into class thinking they will not do well. They are discouraged and feel like chemistry is not for them because it is “hard”. I hope to build up learners’ confidence in themselves, show them they are capable, and that Chemistry is for everyone.
To make learning more achievable I like to build flexibility into my learning spaces including flexible deadlines, as well as with multiple ways in which students can submit their work. In my CHEM 4600 special topics course, students were given the option to submit their research on Indigenous medicinal plants as a typed document, brochure, poster, video, podcast or any other way they wished to present the information they collected. I got a range of different submission and I believe it allowed students to exhibit their knowledge in a way that best suited them, allowing them to achieve success in the assignment. It also helped the students to build their confidence with the content and perhaps make it feel more achievable.
Giving the learners a reason why something is important and how it can be used as opposed to just a what it is really helps them to build a better, more complete understanding of the concept, which in turn allows the students to achieve success in the course. I also like to use real-world examples of the content discussed in class. I find this brings the content out of the textbook and makes it much more tangible. Wherever possible I like to link content to my own research. I found that giving the students my first-hand experience with the principals required for the course helped them to understand the content better and even helped them to build connections between seemingly isolated techniques or concepts because they could see how they all worked together in my research. Where my research was not applicable, I found that using other cutting edge, exciting research helped in making content tangible.
Enjoyable:
I am a firm believer that a learner’s mindset immensely impacts their ability to interact with and retain information. I strive to build an environment that allows students to have a calm, positive and open mindset. To build this environment I enjoy including a lot of science jokes and memes. These jokes and memes are often aligned with the content being discussed in class, so they can even be used to help the student recall the information. I have had students reference memes or jokes I have shared with them in class in their short answer portions of midterms and exams. I also enjoy including demonstrations throughout my courses to give students a tangible examples of cool chemistry concepts and of course because they are awesome.
I believe providing students with autonomy and a voice in their educational journey will make any course more enjoyable. In my CHEM 4600 special topics course in medicinal chemistry and drug design, I deferred to the students to select which types of drugs they wanted to investigate. This allowed me to curate the course to my students’ interests making it more enjoyable and in turn giving students a sense of ownership of their own education. Similarly, in my CHEM 4450 Chemical Biology course, the content is student driven, where students find current literature in the field of chemical biology and bring them to class for us to discuss. Additionally, the students design the entire lab component of the course to investigate a chemical biology topic more in depth. Learner’s are able to pick areas they find interesting and enjoyable, which I think can only enhance their educational experience.
I also like to provide students choice and flexibility in the laboratory setting in my CHEM 4420 and CHEM 3240 labs so they have a sense of proprietorship of their work and can feel truly proud when their experiments work, and they create something they designed. I think this is a great feeling for a chemist and can truly help to build confidence in their laboratory skills.
Goals:
My goals as an educator are first and foremost to make learning more accessible, achievable and enjoyable. I hope to impart my students with a good understanding of the basics of chemistry and its importance and relevance in our community and daily lives. I want to inspire the next generation of scientists and prepare them for their future careers and academic endeavors not only by providing them with content but building them up and making them feel capable, confident and cared about.
My personal goals are to continue to grow and become more familiar with course content. I aspire to build my teaching practice to reflect my personal values once I am more comfortable with the new institution and courses I teach. I hope to build a reserve of assignments that reflect universal design for learning (UDL) as well as a reserve of short informative videos and H5Ps for students to review and interact with content in more diverse ways. Some concrete goals I hold for myself are to have a successful 3-year review in 2025 and a successful tenure and promotion application in 2027. I would also like to transition into a tri-partite position to offer students research opportunities to enhance their learning experience. Additionally, I aspire to earn my PIDP certification as well as my Master’s degree in Education.
Phil Collins, my top artist on Spotify if you were wondering, sums up my feelings about teaching and learning very well in his Son of a Man song from the Tarzan soundtrack when he states, “in learning you will teach and in teaching you will learn”. I hope to continue learning and growing as an educator and a lifelong learner.