Teaching is really my job. It is my focus and number one priority. When I teach, I seek to challenge my students and not just teach them the course material, but how to think about science and to better understand how science works and interacts with our society. I hope all of my students leave my class with not just a better knowledge of the topic of the class, but truly a better understanding of the information that allows them to apply it to new situations in their future. I hope they are better critical thinkers that are better at challenging their biases.

I do tailor my approach to the class, but I do “flip” some of my classes. To my knowledge, most teachers flip a class based on a recording of a lecture. I have taken a different route and will use “handouts” or published papers for a basis of a flipped classroom. I use things that are heavily text based because, at least for now, technical information is still most heavily communicated based on text and images, not videos or by word of mouth. While some scientific journals have moved to having a video component, most of the information is still communicated based on text and images. Also, tests like the MCAT have passages that people must read, comprehend, and answer questions based on. Practicing the required reading comprehension skills for students to succeed in understanding technical information given as text is important.

Also, I find that having text is easier for the students. If I record a lecture, what do students do? They take notes on the lecture. They take the information given orally or by video and convert it into text. Most students still find a text-based record of something easier to study and learn from then a video.