My teaching career was generously supported by a five year fellowship from the Knowles Teacher Initiative.

As an undergraduate, I facilitated Structured Study Group Sessions (5 semesters) for Honors Organic Chemistry I and II. During graduate school, I served as a teaching assistant for General Chemistry (2 semesters) as well as Analytical Chemistry (lab) (2 semesters). 

Get to know me a little better as an instructor through my contributions to the chemistry teaching blog "ChemEdX," written when I taught high school general, honors, and AP chemistry.

I design courses to be rigorous, goal-oriented, and relevant for students to succeed in a rapidly changing world. I find that students invest more ownership in their success when they have authentic opportunities to make sense of the content for themselves with adequate support structures in place. This requires balancing multiple evidence-based pedagogical approaches (e.g., lecture – synchronous or flipped classroom style, guided inquiry approaches, such as process oriented guided inquiry learning, project-based learning) and providing opportunities to test ideas and learn from mistakes (e.g., problem sets, recitation sessions, office hours). I have executed a blend of the aforementioned techniques over the six years of my teaching career. This mixture of teaching strategies, along with fostering an inclusive environment, culminated in increased enrollment of Advanced Placement chemistry year over year (10 to 30), most notably in the proportion of women (9% to 33%). While the specific pedagogical approach must fit the context of the college classroom and specific course content, my stance towards instructional design will support students to engage in a meaningful classroom experience at the university level. 

My vision is to infuse the power of project-based learning into the post-secondary environment having seen the positive impacts on secondary students first hand. In this context, course content is motivated by a (relatively) open ended, authentic problem. This provides students the opportunity to not only experience the creative problem-solving researchers and professional scientists face daily, but to share their findings with community stakeholders. 

Executing these experiences requires mastery in not only in the project design but in content delivery and assessment. These writings helped me reflect my own practice and expand this pedagogy beyond my classroom.

I do my best incorporate practices in my classroom that "meets students where they are at" such that every student can grow and find success, no matter where they start. As an instructor, I personally gravitate towards active learning strategies - I already know a lot about chemistry - students generally should work harder than me to make sense of the content. 

Here are a few reflections on supporting student sense-making.

Iterative, rapid, and precise feedback is integral to student learning. In my courses, I provide multiple opportunities for students to practice and make connections at multiple levels of rigor. Facilitating guided inquiry provides rich “in the moment” opportunities to uncover student misconceptions in addition to exit tickets, in class clicker questions, and homework problem sets. Regarding summative assessment, a mixture of classical exams, written reports, and presentations provide a more holistic view for students to demonstrate mastery of course content. As much as this data is vital for students to reflect on their own learning, I use this data to learn common patterns in student thinking to improve my course design and delivery. 

Here, I reflect on a few assessment-related topics.