Week 3

STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Hilary Graham, MA

As an educator, my goal is to stimulate interest and prepare students to meet the demands of their future careers by fostering critical thinking and equipping them with the knowledge and the skills needed to successfully address the unique challenges associated with STEM careers.  To achieve this goal, I have developed a teaching philosophy that is summarized below. 

First, I believe that a relationship of mutual respect should be built between student and teacher, which will  promote mutual growth.  Some of the teachers who have made the greatest impact on my education as a scientist and, more generally as a person, are people who pushed me beyond what I believed were my intellectual limits. In my experience, being challenged is a part of growth and development. I would hold students to high standards, and I would adopt an open door policy to insure that any student who wanted to learn found the support necessary to master the topic at hand. 

Another of my core beliefs about teaching is that it is my responsibility to present material in a way that makes it pertinent to my students’ interests and goals.   While, I believe that mastery of the principles and ‘vocabulary’ are important, I know that students are far more likely to be motivated to lay this groundwork if the subject matter is presented in a manner that lends relevance to their futures. One way I intend to approach the challenge of relevancy is to center my lectures on topical issues. It is my belief that the most satisfying learning in science and science writing begins when a real-world problem piques the student’s curiosity, and their own interest drives them to press the bounds of their knowledge.

It is my hope is that I could implement teaching strategies that caused my students to think critically. Interaction with students in classroom and laboratory students has taught me  that one learns best from independent effort and from one’s mistakes.  However well-intentioned, trying to ‘do it for them’ or protect them from mistakes is counterproductive to learning and does not represent real-world experiences.  They must think independently.  I have heard and observed that students learn what we ask them to learn.  If we ask them to fill in the blank, they learn to fill in a fact.  If we ask them to solve a problem, they learn to solve a problem

My development as an educator is a work in progress.  I have identified several goals for the coming years, including identifying a teaching mentor with whom to discuss my ideas and challenges. Furthermore, I intend to develop a short and informal inventory for assessing the abilities of my students at the beginning of the semester.  I think this will be especially useful in introductory courses for gauging the level of preparation that high school education currently confers.  To determine my own strengths and weakness as an educator, I plan to employ an informal, mid-semester survey of my students’ opinions of the lecture format and materials. Finally, I would like to experiment with a 5-minute writing exercise at the conclusion of each week of lectures.  My idea is to have the students quickly describe the “What? So What? and Now What?” of the material of day.  These questions will allow me to assess whether the students comprehended the basic vocabulary of the lesson, how the vocabulary connects to a biological theme, and in what ways the theme is related to current biological problems.  It will also give the students regular practice in communicating scientific information.

I believe that my recent experiences at the cutting edge of cancer research and the time I have been able to devote to one-on-one mentoring of student researchers, will serve me well as an educator.