Teaching Philosophy 
 

General

Good teaching is helping students to learn how to learn.  The responsibility of teachers is to set the agenda and decide what knowledge should be considered.  The responsibility of students is to choose to learn.  The expert teacher promotes student learning by encouraging the discovery and construction of new knowledge.

Is teaching an art or a science? I believe that it is both. I base my teaching on the learning theory of David Ausubel¹.  His and other research in cognitive psychology has laid a sound theoretical foundation on which the craft of teaching can be practiced.  Meaningful learning is the primary concept in Ausubel's theory. To learn meaningfully, individuals must focus on relations among ideas and link newly acquired knowledge to their previous knowledge.  Meaningful learning can be promoted by the use of a variety of educational strategies and tools.

Human beings are beautifully various and inventive.  In the classroom each individual needs to be reached in his/her learning style.  Incorporating different teaching modalities in every lesson is one of the many challenges that makes teaching such a fun and rewarding experience.

Education changes the human experiences of individuals and opens up avenues that otherwise never could be explored.  This is why the opportunity to facilitate and take part in education is an exhilarating life-long vocation.

Science

Science education misses the mark if our pedagogy lacks the “doing of science.”  We need hands-on activities that excite and actively engage students in constructing their own understanding of the process of scientific inquiry.  These activities have to be built into all courses (starting at the freshman level) as well as into independent research activities outside of the classroom.  Engaging undergraduates in research not only serves the purpose of creating new biological/environmental science knowledge, but also serves the purpose of using research experiences to teach the process of scientific inquiry.  Faculty-mentored research experiences such as multi-week laboratory activities in the laboratory portion of a course, single-semester independent projects in a lab course and multi-semester student-directed independent study research programs, are the principal means to be used to teach science.

1 David Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968)