Tracy S. Feldman: Teaching Statement

I am passionate about biology—when studying connections among organisms in nature, I feel more connected to the world around me. Teaching is a way for me to share this passion by conveying the exciting concepts, questions and issues that overlay any detailed studies of particular systems or organisms. I feel that many students shy away from biology classes when teachers present details without stressing the conceptual framework in which those details are important. Passion for me involves discovery, knowledge, understanding alternative views, and awareness of a broader context on which to frame a set of ideas. A passionate drive to test ideas with experiments and observations contributes to the scientific process.

I believe that a teacher helps students to realize their full potential—their ability to be thoughtful, informed, and productive members of society. A teacher provides people with important tools for understanding the world, and encourages them to think critically about the material. Students who think critically understand how to build on what they already know and apply this knowledge to new situations. In addition, they can develop informed opinions about aspects of the material where there are no clear answers. In the case of a scientific idea, such opinions may be presented as hypotheses, and I encourage students to think about ways to test these hypotheses. However, many ideas in science also touch on moral, social, or political issues. I encourage students to consider these issues, and offer them tools to cultivate informed opinions. Once students have developed a broad knowledge base and critical thinking skills, they will be better equipped to realize their full potential as world citizens. I believe biology and the scientific method in general can offer a great template for helping people to achieve these skills.

My approach when I teach is to share my enthusiasm through experiential learning, with hands-on demonstrations in classes and labs, field trips, group field research projects, case studies, and individual research projects. I have had several opportunities to put this into practice, either when implementing curricula as a teaching assistant, or when developing my own curricula for lab exercises, case studies, individual lectures and an entire botany course. I have also extended this approach to mentoring whenever I have supervised students involved in my research or in independent research projects (for more advanced undergraduate students). In the classroom setting, sharing passion entails elucidating the most important concepts in the material and stressing their relevance to everyday life, so that students can put ideas into context and understand why people care about different aspects of biology. In all of these activities, I try to stress how smaller concepts fit together into a bigger picture. For instance, throughout the botany course I taught, I related plant phylogeny to structures in plants that allowed them to survive during major transitions in the evolution of plants (e.g. adaptations to land, and the evolution of secondary growth), and stressed why plants are essential to humans and other organisms.

I try to help students develop both knowledge and critical thinking skills by challenging them in different ways. First, I intersperse my lectures and laboratory exercises with questions. This encourages students to process the information that has been presented up to that point in order to form their own ideas about a possible answer. Prior to discussing concepts from text books and other literature, I pose the questions that those sources address, encouraging students to first discuss potential answers in small groups. I believe this process helps them to develop creative thoughts from a confluence of different perspectives. Further, this method of generating alternative hypotheses parallels the scientific method. On quizzes and exams I incorporate multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions, questions using pictures or graphs, and questions that are also read aloud, in order to reach students who learn in diverse ways. In addition, I will use these and other means of assessment to collect data about which concepts are most difficult for students and whether current curricula are effective at teaching those concepts. These data will drive modifications of my curricula in the future.

I believe that teaching can help awaken in students an appreciation for life on earth at all levels of complexity, including physiological/molecular processes, behavior, species interactions, populations, communities, and ecosystem processes. I aim to help students appreciate why these topics are important or interesting, whether or not they ultimately decide to pursue a career in biology. This will in turn help people to realize their potential, either as future scientists, or (just as importantly) as future citizens of this world.