Teaching
Philosophy
My goal as an educator is to provide students with fundamental information and help them build the skills to use it. I do this by alternating short chunks of traditional lectures and interactive, group based activities.
My full teaching philosophy statement explains the reasoning behind that viewpoint and the specifics of how I implement it.
Training
In addition to the usual mentoring from my advisors, I have also received formal pedagogical training. Some of it has occurred through workshops, such as those offered at AEESP (Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors) conferences. A large portion of my training, however, has come from my work towards the NCSU Teaching and Communication certificate program, which was specifically developed to train graduate students and postdocs to teach more effectively and communicate more clearly. For completeness, I have included a full list of workshops attended at the bottom of this page.
Experience
As a TA, I have logged many hours both lecturing and developing lecture materials for undergraduate courses, particularly CE 484 (Water Supply and Wastewater Systems). I have also given guest lectures in various courses. For example, I annually provide the lecture about metagenomic data visualization in the graduate level BIT 477/577 (Metagenomics) course.
Beyond lectures, I have experience facilitating hands-on activities, such as the microscopy/gram staining lab which is part of CE 373 (Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering) and also activities for the annual Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America Engineering days hosted on campus.
Finally, I have individual instructional experience both as a formal tutor and as a mentor to many undergraduate research assistants, often through our RISE (Research Internship Summer Experience) program.
Examples
Lecture Style
The slide below is representative of those I have developed for traditional lectures. My aim for most slides is to transmit the most relevant facts associated with a specific learning objective.
Informal discussions with students after the lectures often revealed that they deeply appreciated seeing how each slide was tied to explicit learning objectives. They also appreciate how each slide is ‘simple & focused’, although that format does present the danger of going through the lecture too quickly.
Short Interactive Activity
Interspersed within my lectures are short (30s to 5min) activities designed to reinforce and extend learning. I use the prompt shown below when introducing the chemistry of biological nutrient removal and it is representative of the activities I facilitate.
The main goal of these activities is to reinforce learning, as detailed in my full teaching philosophy statement. In practice, I have noticed that these activities also effectively reveal when the class is confused about a specific topic, much more so than simply asking ‘Any questions?’ This partially hedges against lecturing too quickly.
Longer Interactive Activities
Phyloseq Workshop
As part of my data visualization lecturing, I have developed an interactive Jupyter notebook allowing students to receive immediate feedback as they attempt to perform basic metagenomic data analysis and visualization using the R phyloseq library.
In any computer work, I’ve noticed that some topics just do not ‘click’ until the student works with them directly. In this specific case, most students do not really understand how to explore the data in a metagenomic dataset until challenged with the tasks in the activity. As a benefit, I have heard them on more than one occasion make statements similar to ‘Oh, cool!’ or ‘Yes!’ when they enter the correct command and get immediate feedback, which I interpret as engagement and even enthusiasm.
Anaerobic/aerobic floc formation for diverse learning styles
The teaching and communication workshops I have attended are often structured as two sessions. In the first session, we learn about a specific pedagogical technique and are then given about a week to implement course content using that technique. As part of the workshop on diverse learning styles, I developed a pen-and-paper graphical simulation of how different wastewater particles grow.
At the end of the simulation, participants had a physical slide which showed both the loose-fluffy flocs caused by simultaneous aeration and BOD supply and the denser flocs formed by adding an anaerobic feast-famine strategy.
It was particularly gratifying to see how this captured the attention of non-majors and how pleased they were to be able to answer some simple design questions about a simplified wastewater reactor.
Middle schoolers engineering a landfill liner
Perhaps the most fun (and certainly messiest) activity I’ve developed was for our annual Boy Scouts of America engineering day. In this activity, scouts must design, build, and test a landfill liner system which can contain colored ‘leachate’ inside a perforated 2 liter soda bottle. The response to this was such that I ended up writing it up as a lesson plan which I attempted to align with North Carolina educational standards.
Complete List of Pedagogical Training Attended
- (2017) Introduction to teaching.
- (2017) Responding to student writing.
- (2017) Teaching Portfolio.
- (2017) Avoiding Death By Powerpoint.
- (2017) How to Engage with Diverse learning styles.
- (2017) Managing conflict in the classroom.
- (2017) Teaching Assistant Orientation Symposium.
- (2017) Moodle Essentials, DELTA workshop.
- (2017) Strategies, tools, and tips for teaching in environmental engineering and sciences.
- (2015) Case Studies in project based learning.