Students come to college both for “training” (learning to do) and for “education” (learning to become).  They deserve an inspiring, rigorous, and fulfilling learning experience to become enthusiastic and self-sufficient, life-long learners.  My passion and commitment to provide every student with such an enriching opportunity, cultivated my interest in scholarship of teaching and learning and guided my gradual transition from bench research to undergraduate education research over the past 15 years.   

          I believe in teaching students and not topics.  In my classes, I strive to find a voice for each of my uniquely amazing students to promote equity and inclusivity.  Together we work to build strong learning communities where learning becomes a joyful and transformative experience.  I like challenging my students in a safe and brave learning space that supports intellectual inquiry, risk taking, and independent learning.  I re-designed or developed my courses to meet the needs of all learners by incorporating flexibility and choice, the guiding principles of Universal Design for Learning.  I adopt an eclectic teaching style, so that every student finds some alignment between their own learning and my teaching.  I use theme-based projects, students choose from, to stimulate motivation, sustain enthusiasm, and provide various ways of engaging with the material.  These projects ranged from blog posts to case-studies, timed, image-based presentations, such as Pecha Kucha, to digital media products, such as Adobe Spark reflection journals.  They focus on oral and visual literacy skills to complement the traditional written assessments.

          I am a guide and a mentor in my students’ own learning journey.  I believe in focusing on my students’ slope of learning as the true measure of success.  I consult literature and participate in national faculty networks to bring validated teaching practices and effective instructional technologies into my classroom and contribute my own education research. In my pursuit to de-emphasize grades in favor of skill mastery, I continuously experiment with non-traditional approaches that focus on formative feedback and competency-based assessments.  Recently, I received a mini-assessment grant from the Provost’s office to expand this idea beyond a course and mentored three chemistry majors to develop mastery portfolio templates showcasing student accomplishments across the undergraduate curriculum using digital artifacts.

          Meaningful social connections have a powerful impact on student learning gains.   Despite the high enrollment numbers, typical in a big research institution, I strive to offer my students, a level of direct, interpersonal connection, characteristic of a small liberal arts setting. To enhance a strong sense of community and encourage group study, I created a “peer course facilitator” role in 2018, and mentored former students to guide current students during student-centered classroom activities.  I started offering “community study sessions” in addition to office hours, where peer facilitators guided discussion on additional study materials.  During the LfA mode of instruction, I successfully transitioned these optional sessions to the “zoom” platform where more than one-third of my students were regular attendees.  Many students commented that these community-based learning practices had a positive impact on their learning and boosted their self-confidence.  In F20, two of my CH421-F19 students expanded this idea to integrate former student voices into de-densified biochemistry laboratory through student created video tutorials. Their work was selected for poster presentation in the American Chemical Society’s Spring 2021 National meeting and was recently published in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. 

          I believe in authentic experiences in the classroom that provide intrinsic motivation for my students.  Over the last five years, I created numerous self-guided activities derived from primary literature to demonstrate the applications of covered biochemistry content.  In January 2020, I expanded my long term collaboration with the Protein DataBank to take a leading role in the national Molecular CaseNet initiative, where I developed and published new cases and adopted others for large classroom and blended learning implementations. 

          As a bench-side trained biophysical chemist, I particularly enjoyed developing laboratory courses that utilized my research background.  I designed and implemented authentic hands-on experiences and novel assessments with undergraduate students as a part of my educational research program.  I wrote interactive online lab manuals with embedded questions that allowed students to better engage with the laboratory material through guided self-learning before joining the pre-lab lectures.  I kept transferable skills such as critical thinking, experimental design and optimization, data handling, and troubleshooting in the forefront of my course design, along with a bioanalytical perspective. For CH421, I transitioned to electronic laboratory notebooks to prepare students for professional setting and introduced competency-based skill assessments tracked via digital badging to evaluate laboratory performance.  I used authentic scientific reports submitted in a journal paper and conference poster format to assess scientific communication skills. One of these papers received the Francis Bacon Award for Writing Excellence in the Natural Sciences.  I added a student-designed and inquiry-driven module culminating in an oral presentation to engage students in authentic research using advanced instrumentation and field specific professional tools.   At the introductory level, I added reflective video assignments to complement traditional laboratory exercises.

          I strive to combine knowledge, skill, passion, and compassion in my teaching.  Every day, I enter my classroom with the excitement and curiosity of not knowing what I will learn from my students.  I hope my students leave my courses stronger because I am able to model how to learn with grit and give them the space and opportunities to practice this skill.  I strive to earn my students’ respect in the long term rather than to always have their fond regard in the short term.

         As I move forward in my career, I hope to deepen my ties with the pedagogical community and engaging in more educational research.  I want to continue designing and teaching multidisciplinary courses that incorporate experimental elements into conceptual knowledge, blurring boundaries between lecture and laboratory.  With the goal of promoting equity and inclusivity, I want to continue fostering small learning communities where students can showcase their intellectual and skill growth through competency mastery.  I see linguistic, numerical, and visual literacy becoming equally important within the life sciences field, so would like to expand my work on incorporating Molecular Case studies into biochemistry curricula.  Finally, I wish to engage in more collaborative teaching initiatives with colleagues across departments and expand STEM course offerings to non-majors.