Biology 535 is a graduate course offered through the Biology Department with the assistance of Skylight at the University of British Columbia; this course provides an introduction to basic pedagogical concepts and skills required by future life science teaching professionals for effective teaching at the university and college level. Biol 535 has the goal of educating graduate students in theories of constructivism, active learning techniques, critical thinking and the practice of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). Following are my final reflections from this course- what I learned, how my philosophy of teaching developed, and how my views and practices with respect to teaching and learning transformed over the period of the course.
To begin reflecting on the intellectual journey I have taken throughout the course of the last four months in Biology 535, I will describe briefly some of the notions I held about teaching, learning, and education prior to entering the course.
I believed myself to be a fairly effective teacher already, as a result of positive feedback I had received from students whom I tutored, students I TA’d during my undergraduate years, from friends with whom I studied and was always willing to help out, and also from athletes I have coached over the years in a variety of sports. Their positive feedback was generally accompanied by success in their endeavors and increased curiosity in the subject, which I took to be evidence of my abilities to help people learn and understand, to be motivated to do the work required to learn at a deeper level, and to become interested and curious about the subject or skill they were attempting to learn.
With respect to higher education, I believed that the largest problem plaguing our educational system was the lack of interest and personal accountability of a large majority of professors in developing their understanding of teaching and learning, and using this knowledge to implement effective methods in the classroom. I felt it was a disgrace that professors are not required by their institutions to have any training in the skills of teaching and learning whatsoever, especially when students are paying so much money and often incurring huge student debts in order to obtain an education- from professors who may not know the slightest thing about how to educate effectively. In my personal experience, many professors seemed to view their teaching appointments as a punishment from the institution- a distraction from their research, a nuisance that they didn’t want to bother with but had to in order to maintain their positions. This lack of interest in student development and well-being translated into incredibly frustrating experiences as a student in such classrooms. I believed that the first step to rectifying this situation would be to require professors to complete some basic training in teaching and learning (and hopefully to inspire more professors to care about student development and want to invest themselves in this process), and for the paradigm of universities overall to begin shifting towards valuing professors for their abilities in teaching as much as they are valued for their abilities to generate world-class research.
Before starting this class, I knew that I wanted to be a part of the movement towards creating such a paradigm shift in the academic world, but I didn’t really know where to start. Likewise, I was aware that I personally had limited concrete knowledge about teaching and learning (outside of anecdotal personal experience) and realized that if I want to inspire other academics to care about developing themselves in these areas, I must start with myself. And thus, I registered myself into Biology 535.
In reflecting on the evolution of my thinking about teaching and learning throughout the course, both through comparison of my general views on these topics before and after the course, as well as through reviewing the reflections I recorded during the course, several key concepts which I feel have greatly affected my development are worthy of mention:
Constructivist theory of learning
The constructivist theory of learning makes so much sense, I actually could not believe that, being someone who’s main job for the past 16 years has been LEARNING, I had not heard of it before this class. I sincerely hope that this model becomes an integral part of high-school or at worst first year university curriculum, as it seems to me that this explicit way of talking about the learning process would hugely benefit student development and it would ideal to get children and young people thinking about learning from a constructivist perspective as early as they are cognitively prepared to. I feel confident in saying that I now approach teaching from a constructivist perspective (in that I take into account that each student will have pre-conceived notions and ideas that will affect how they interpret new information), and that I use constructivist methods in the classroom, for example, by helping students develop metacognitive skills to be able to identify where specifically they are experiencing conflict in integrating new information or identifying areas of their mental scaffolds that need to be further developed or “filled in” in order to facilitate integration of new information. I feel that as a constructivist teacher, I will advocate strongly that learning is a skill that everyone can develop, as opposed to something you are either “born” good at or not, and I hope to help all of my students build confidence in their learning abilities and develop clarity in regard to the process of their own learning.
BOPPPS model of a lesson
(Bridge – Pre-test – Participatory Learning – Post-test- Summary)
Prior to taking this course, I definitely used some sort of structure in teaching lessons (i.e. Intro, Main lesson, Summary), but it surely wasn’t as consistent and applicable to all types of lessons as the BOPPPS model seems to be. Through practicing using the BOPPPS model in our mini-lessons and in the Instructional Skills Workshop at UBC I experienced first-hand that BOPPPS is a superbly effective model for lesson creation and implementation, particularly because it can be applied to any material you wish to teach. One of the greatest strengths of BOPPPS is how useful and powerful it can be as a tool for lesson planning- for example, if you follow the B-O-P-P-P-S order in your planning, you will first think about how or why this information is interesting and relevant to the audience and how it connects to the audiences experiences and lives. Following this, you will create the learning objectives. I have found that generating the learning objectives before thinking about what material to include in the lesson, which participatory activities to include, etc. makes planning the rest of the lesson significantly easier and more effective because you can relate back to your objectives and ask which material and activities would be most appropriate, given your particular set of objectives. I am convinced that creating and providing learning objectives for students is brilliantly useful for both students and teachers alike; for students it offers a list of very specific skills they should obtain from a given lesson (in terms of actions or verbs adopted from Bloom’s taxonomy), and it also allows the teacher to structure a lesson in a focused and concise way that will have students develop these specific skills as a result. I will definitely continue to use the BOPPPS model in my future lessons, and will also seek out other models that have been described and tested in the pedagogical literature to try on.
Active learning
One of the main reasons I was interested in taking Biol 535 was to develop my “toolbox” of participatory activities and active learning techniques to use in the classroom. Having grown up primarily in traditional classrooms which made little to no use of interactive learning techniques, I felt that my toolbox was pretty empty and wanted to learn new activities and try them out in a safe environment of my peers before taking them into the real classroom. Now, I feel like my toolbox is overflowing and I have so many ideas for activities that I often spend extra time just trying to decide which ones I want to use! My favorite aspect of Biol 535 was that each time we learned about a new topic, we were actually doing what we were learning (for example, we learned participatory activities by doing them, we learned about cooperative learning by cooperating in groups, we learned about the constructivist model as we struggled to find a place in each of our own mental scaffolds for the model to fit, etc.) This was especially valuable in learning participatory activities because we were able to experience the activities first-hand and then decide how we felt about them personally and whether or not we’d like to implement them in our mini-lessons, or how they could be altered to be more effective or appropriate in different contexts. My favorite activities overall include debate, any kind of post-it note/sticky activities, and using the rotational philosophers cafe. I am incredibly excited to have such a plethora of activities to choose from now and am looking forward to trying them out in larger classroom settings to get a feel for how they can be best applied in typical university classrooms.
Assessment and evaluation
Realizing my previous understanding of the meaning of the terms “assessment” and “evaluation” was probably one of the most shocking experiences I had during this course- I thought they meant the same thing. I had also never really considered why we evaluate students, and how much the way in which we evaluate students affects the results of the evaluation, as well as the students’ approaches to learning and the degree to which they pursue learning (surface learning or deep-structured learning). I am completely sold on the value of using formative assessment to give students feedback on their progress in learning, as well as to give the teacher feedback on the effectiveness of his or her teaching and I will investigate ways to implement more formative assessment in the classes I will teach. I also feel strongly about helping students overcome anxiety and stress related to being evaluated, and I hope that the use of formative assessment will aid in their learning and development as well as to help them relax and get used to testing their learning in a safe environment where their results are not associated with negative consequences (i.e. getting a poor grade or “failing” a course). I am particularly interested in investigating how to create assessments and evaluations for a course curriculum that will encourage deep-structure learning and will enable students to create relevant connections between the course material and the world around them.
The Teaching of Process
Our ongoing discussions on the value of teaching “process” occupied my mind a great deal during this course, and it occurs to me that this concept is perhaps the most specifically relevant to the teaching of science of all the concepts we covered. When Tony first brought up the value of teaching process early in the year, a light really went on for me. During the first year of my graduate studies (the past 12 months), I struggled immensely with trying to adapt to the experience of the scientific process. As an undergraduate, I feel that I was trained in how to master content, and not in how to follow and comprehend the process of science, for example in addressing how we come up with questions, how we test these questions, how people know what we know, what results did people use to draw conclusions about what we now accept to be true, and so on. Trying to apply the methods of mastering content I became skilled at in my undergraduate years didn’t seem to have any impact on my ability to actually perform science, and I am certain that this is a very common experience for new graduate students in our current educational system. As our classroom conversations on teaching and learning the scientific process progressed, I observed that my ability to perform science and produce in my thesis work also improved. I began to care less about the volume of information I was inhaling each day and more about asking myself questions about what experiments I was doing, how I was designing and performing them, and most importantly, why?. This development of my fundamental understanding of science and in my abilities to actually do science has been absolutely phenomenal for me and I can’t imagine any reason why we should be holding back such a rewarding and meaningful experience from our undergraduate students, who may or may not choose to continue on in academic science and have such an experience in graduate school. One of my main foci as an academic teacher will be to advocate for a focus on teaching the process of science and of the relevance and implications of the history of science in university classrooms. I feel that this one change in the structure and content of our science courses would make massive gains in the science literacy of the average university student, and in their ability to apply scientific thinking to their daily choices- choices which may affect the future of our planet and all of its inhabitants.
Final reflections on Biol 535
One of the most interesting experiences I had often throughout this course was a feeling of “déjà-vu” that I could relate to what we were discussing in the way that I had thought of similar ideas before, but in my mind they were all mushed together and I wasn’t able to articulate them clearly prior to this course. For example, in my teaching before Biol 535, I definitely operated from the assumption of the constructivist model that students come to a learning experience with a prior scaffold of understanding, and new information must be built into this previously existing scaffold, often with some deconstructing and reconstructing of the scaffold necessary to accommodate the new information. I would address this assumption by making frequent use of analogies in teaching to help students relate something they already knew to a new piece of information, and by trying to get an idea of what their current level of understanding was about a topic so that I could help them address any holes or conflicts in their scaffold to accommodate the new information. I had no idea at this time that I was applying a “constructivist model of learning”, I was just doing what made sense to me from personal experience. I have had this “déjà-vu” experience numerous times throughout the course and it is exciting to see that I was on the right track in many ways in terms of my teaching skills and in my thoughts about teaching prior to taking this course. It is even more exciting to now have a vocabulary with which to articulate these ideas, and with this vocabulary to have access to literature that can explain and advocate for theories and methods I would like to implement. It is spectacular to know that I am making conscious and educated choices about how to teach and learn, as opposed to just doing what I thought “felt right” before.
To conclude, I will refer back to some of the notions I had about teaching and learning before the course as mentioned above, and how they have developed or changed throughout the course.
I still feel that a large challenge for the evolution of teaching and learning at universities will be getting more professors onboard and involved in developing their pedagogical knowledge and skills and in caring about student well-being, although I now have a much deeper appreciation for the challenges associated with changing what students expect from their courses in terms of volume of content, as well as what they expect in terms of how the class will be taught. I recognize that student expectations act in a feedback loop with the way teachers approach their courses (for example, if a teacher tries out interactive learning techniques and receives a negative response from the students, they may go back to traditional teaching methods even though these methods may be less effective), and as such, it is crucial to be explicit with students about why and how we will be implementing new methods in the classroom, and how this will benefit them in their learning and in their lives.
After taking this course, I am much better equipped as a teacher with tools to use in the development and implementation of effective lessons in the classroom, but perhaps more importantly, I am grounded in the context of what teaching and learning means to me and why I think it is of value. (These topics are discussed further in my statement of teaching philosophy). There were times when I felt very overwhelmed with what it will take of me to become a truly exceptional teacher, and what it will take to change the educational system we have today to one that is more successful in achieving deep-structure learning and in producing students who are able to really apply what they learned in university to the process of their lives. When I feel overwhelmed however, I remind myself of an inspiring quote I read in the book “What the best college teacher’s do” by Ken Bain: “excellent teachers develop their abilities through constant self-evaluation, reflection, and the willingness to change”. This quote reminds me that I don’t need to change myself or change in the world overnight, and that if I keep reflecting, evaluating my progress and being willing to change, I am certain to succeed in enriching the learning experiences of my students and in making a positive and meaningful contribution to their lives.
To view my individual reflections from each session of Biology 535, click here.
To view my reflections our textbook (What the Best College Teacher’s Do, By: Ken Bain), click here.
To view my reflections on the lessons I taught in Biology 535, click here.
To view additional class readings and my reflections on these readings, click here.
