Teaching allows me to fulfill what I believe to be a fundamental responsibility of biologists: to communicate information to the public so they can make informed decisions regarding the environment. There are basic biological principles that should be understood by college-educated citizens. Among these are the process of evolution and a basic understanding of genetics, the interdependence of biological systems, levels of organization in biology, basic human anatomy and physiology, and the basics of scientific decision making. I also want students to appreciate and value biological diversity and to leave my class with an increased sense of stewardship for the earth. I have several objectives as an educator in addition to teaching these basic …show more content…
To encourage excellent library skills, I developed an annotated bibliography exercise for an animal behavior class. This exercise gives students the opportunity to investigate a topic in which they are interested, teaches them how to locate and read primary journal articles, and challenges them to synthesize and evaluate the information they find. I also developed a laboratory exercise on human population growth for an ecology class that requires students to critically evaluate predictions of population growth models and to discuss the implications of their …show more content…
I have taken coursework in cooperative and active learning techniques and I incorporate these techniques into my teaching. For example, I have created a model of mitosis by having general biology students act as chromosomes and walk through the processes of DNA replication and cell division. I find students learn and retain the material more effectively with these activities. Comments from student evaluations support this view: I enjoyed the labs where the class participated in setting up the example, i.e. chromosome division. These models tend to really stick with me. The visual teaching, such as meiosis, mitosis, etc. were extremely helpful. It was made much more clear than in the lab manual. I have also taken the initiative to get students into the field in classes that do not include laboratory exercises; for example, by volunteering to meet with animal behavior students on weekends to observe animals and conduct short experiments. In part, my commitment to active learning comes from my experiences as an undergraduate at Earlham College. Biology professors taught investigatory rather than "cook-book" laboratory exercises and encouraged us to design our own research projects. The research skills I developed in those labs have been invaluable in my graduate studies and I will continue to emphasize them to my