Jamie Wagner

Teaching Goals
 

When I first started teaching biology and marine science courses at the undergraduate level, my main goal was to help the students to learn as much material as possible during the time I was with them; I hoped to be able to get them interested in the material as well, but my primary goal was absorbing material. However, after serving as a teaching assistant in my first class with a backward planning course design (Ecology of a Crowded Planet), reading several books on teaching, and discussing teaching with my peers, I realized a better goal was to have students come away with a few skills that would serve them throughout their studies or even life. My revised teaching goals for classes I teach include broader targets, like helping students learn how to read scientific articles or public press articles critically, and what big questions are still being investigated in the field I am teaching. This way, even if a student does not further pursue the topic the course analyzed, they still come away with something that will hopefully stick with them longer than memorizing a deep-sea food web.

 

 

Active Learning

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When teaching, students are more enthusiastic about learning when they are able to actively engage in the material. Through my teaching experiences at Duke University, the Duke University Marine Lab, and in Papua New Guinea (PNG), I have seen that students have a wide variety of learning styles and greatly varying background knowledge coming into a class, which can affect how well they can absorb the new material presented. For example, in PNG students rarely have the opportunity to present, so by having them work as a group, they are excited to share in a less intimidating situation. At Duke, cross comparisons of the parts of the respiratory system in crustaceans and annelid worms helps draw critical analysis of similarities and differences found across phyla.

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To accommodate these differences and to encourage active thinking, I incorporate a range of activities into my teaching. Assigning students to work in small groups, each group with a different topic to investigate further, such as the function of the nervous system in molluscs, to then present to the whole class serves several purposes. The collaboration within groups increases the comfort level of students, and encourages them to be more willing to speak out and ask questions during and after the activity. Having to look through resources to obtain the information and understand it well enough to teach their peers increases retention and confidence in the material. Additionally, listening to peers for learning rather than always the course instructor can introduce novelty to help keep students attentive. I also strongly support the chance to do field trips, and was able to provide this during an undergraduate course on Marine Megafauna, where students experienced live animals and preserved specimens during trips to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Duke University Marine Lab, rather than just reading.

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Peer Collaboration
 

Though I have not taught my own full-length course yet, I have had two opportunities to individually teach a one-week Marine Science course for ~30 undergraduates in PNG, led semester-long discussion and problem-solving sections for Ecology of a Crowded Planet and Animal Physiology at Duke with classes of ~45-60 undergraduates, and assisted with lab courses for Invertebrate Zoology and Marine Physiology at the Duke Marine Lab with classes of ~15-20 students. During these courses, I found that students tended to stay more focused when I encouraged them to direct their questions to each other, and I served as a mediator and secondary resource; in this way, they thought more deeply about the material, such as how to calculate the volume of air in a brontosaurus’s lungs at different water depths, to test the hypothesis that this dinosaur could have spent part time in the water to support its massive body weight. Students left each discussion section having either taught or heard from their peers, and had greater participation during the class than when I simply answered their questions.

 

Three of the courses I have been a Teaching Assistant (TA) for have included multiple TAs, and this has enabled me to become more proficient at complementing skills among my teaching peers in order to help the students learn in a balanced environment. For example, though for Animal Physiology, there were two TAs, and we each separately taught two discussion sections. However, we met weekly to make sure we would be presenting the same material equally among all the sections, and we held office hours together to field student questions. Our different backgrounds and skill sets enhanced the students learning during these office hours, because while the other TA was better able to dig into alternate mathematical ways to answer oxygen diffusion questions, I was better at reframing problems in a larger context that helped guide students to see that a problem was more related to diffusion rates than animal size. I recognize that between the two of us, we were able to deliver a stronger learning experience than I could have done on my own, and plan to continue speaking to peers within my new department to help gather improved strategies and effectively integrate my courses into the department as a whole. 

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Through the Duke Certificate in College Teaching program, I have conducted classroom observations of peers teaching vastly different topics, from French literary critiques to interpretations of English literature in modern media.  Watching others teach gave me ideas about how to improve my own teaching, as well as receiving feedback from peers observing my own teaching style.

 

Preparing for the Future
 

I have designed the syllabus for a Deep-Sea Biology course I could teach, and this process has helped me a lot in thinking about the best ways to assess student learning. Students learn from feedback on their learning efforts, rather than “judgment” of their efforts – this is a much more encouraging and productive method of assisting students in the learning process. Consequently, my assessment methods include a variety of means to encourage participation without assigning a numerical grade to their work: minute papers, to encourage thinking during class; feedback on drafts as they work toward a paper, and case-study debates with their classmates.

 

I incorporate critical reading of scientific articles, first working on helping students learn to understand articles style and content, then thinking critically about how to come up with different ways the experiments could have been carried out, or what future experiments could be designed next to delve into further questions. These elements can both improve students own writing, and encourage them to keep looking for gaps in scientifically knowledge, to realize that all of science is not yet understood, and to remain curious what still remains to be studied.