Teaching & Lesson Design

I love to teach! There’s something about crafting a lesson or unit to break down complex topics for others that excites me, and as a bonus, it helps me understand the topic more thoroughly.

My background in teaching

In my former career, I taught K-12 middle school science in a public school in Massachusetts for 8 years. There I taught all domains of science including physics, biology, health science, chemistry, and geology - all of course at introductory levels. But what was exciting to me was, I had to re-learn so much of this information, and more importantly, many different ways to communicate it.

When I entered graduate school in a change of careers, I began to TA undergraduates in laboratory and lecture courses in biology. Five years now into my academic research career, I have learned several different approaches and techniques for teaching in higher education. Luckily though, many of the same facets of teaching (similar aspects of pedagogy) reflect my previous philosophy in the classroom.

My approach and teaching philosophy

Always, always, always at the heart of teaching science for me is: Learning science = Doing science

That is, science is the best because it is hands-on. We learn by physically manipulating things, sharing ideas and problem solving with other people, going outside, and trying new things (wearing safety gear always spices things up). So nearly all of my lessons and unit plans - whether they are for middle schoolers or college sophomores - include laboratory exercises, interactive group work, and active participation (even during parts of lectures).

Okay, that certainly sounds fun and entertaining, but, how do we actually structure the way we teach so that students are learning what we expect?

This starts with a well-established feature of teaching and pedagogy in general: Begin with end. I lay out the goals for each major unit of teaching (broad sections of topic area or curriculum) and what I expect students to be able to do by the end of the unit. I can apply the same technique to weekly plans or individual lessons and activities. Then each of these smaller pieces becomes part of a scaffold to reach the major goal. This is sometimes called the Understanding by Design (UBD) model.

Although UBD is seemingly intuitive, I’ve found that across classrooms and age groups, it is applied with widespread variation or in some cases haphazardly, or sometimes not at all. UBD for now (until research in pedagogy finds a stronger evidenced-based methodology) will continue to be a driving force with how I plan and structure my teaching.

One last feature that is also somewhat of a classic that I adopt for my teaching philosophy is considering assessment and demonstration of knowledge through various means (i.e., Bloom’s Taxonomy). That is, we need to have students show they actually learned what we expected them to. Assessment is the way to do this, but a classic midterm or unit exam is only one way for students to demonstrate their knowledge. I utilize many assessment types - whether it is short check for understanding Q & A (as in an iClicker question), written assignments in groups, individual lab write-ups, alternative media presentations, or something different altogether. I will scaffold these various assessment types such that the more advanced forms of understanding (e.g., creatively applying knowledge) will be towards the end of the unit while earlier steps of understanding (rote memorization) come earlier.

Unit and Lesson Design

Below are basic templates for how I’ve constructed unit plans in the past. They include (as described above) the stated major goals of the unit