My overarching goal as an educator is to facilitate students’ development of a scientific identity and provide them with the skills and confidence to persevere in their scientific pursuits. I do this by engaging my students in authentic scientific experiences and providing opportunities for them to critically evaluate scientific claims and explore the world around them.
Principles of Ecology Lecture: EBIO2040
This courses focuses on broad principles and practices within ecology. Students investigate topics such as population and community dynamics, interspecies interactions, community composition, and landscape ecology in an active learning environment. This course is unique in that we use active lecture integrated with in-depth case studies.
Students engage in learning via short activities supplemented with explanations. This class involves the use of undergraduate learning assistants to supplement instruction and assist students in active learning. Graduate students design and teach the case studies, using real data often related to their own studies within the department.
Introduction to Quantitative Thinking in Biology: EBIO1010
This course provides students with a solid foundation in quantitative thinking and statistical analyses that they will be able to draw upon for their undergraduate career and beyond. In this course we make and support claims through data analysis and visualization.
We emphasize using R to perform analyses and construct visualizations, and we use examples from ecology, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences to explain course concepts. Students leave this course with the ability to view the world through a quantitative lens and critically evaluate quantitative information to make and justify claims.
Graduate Seminar in Curriculum Design: EBIO 5460
This course will help students develop the basic skills needed to design a course, start to finish. Students will learn about a variety of active learning strategies, how to choose and articulate learning outcomes and objectives, the “5E model” - engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate for lesson planning, and how to construct a syllabus and complete schedule for a course. They will write a teaching philosophy and discover their own personal active teaching style.