UW Biology Learning and Teaching Community
Stacy Alvares, Sailaja Arungundram, Rick Downs, Nicole Gregorio, Kristiina Hurme, Jon Herron, Eva Ma, Christina Morra, Rebecca M Price, Gwen Shlichta, Tavasi Silvas
In today’s conversation, we’re building from a podcast about Creativity in Science Teaching recorded by Becca Price, Nathalie Tasler, Linnea Soler, Sunita Iyer, and Smita Odedra in a collaboration between UWB and the University of Glasgow. We’ll take some time to do free writes on certain questions, and then we’ll discuss our answers.
To get us started, I (Becca) will share some of my thoughts. I think I’m most creative in my teaching when something doesn’t work well. I enter this intense, problem-solving stage, and somehow adopt an ability to look at a problem from the students’ perspectives. I can see where some of the miscommunications are, and how to fix them. For example, I had a think-pair-share around a graph that students weren’t understanding. I asked them “what are you seeing?” After years of the same mistake, I quickly realized that the students didn’t know how to read horizontal bars and asterisks that indicated treatments that were significantly different. Once we identified this barrier, we could practice reading graphs (and their captions). Along similar lines, what helps me be creative is engaging in that problem-solving process: collecting data about student learning and revising my approach as necessary. In the course I’m teaching now, students have the opportunity to be creative when they’re coming up with research hypotheses. It’s an intriguing balance between opening up their research questions to anything to do with the fossil record, to narrowing it to four different data sets that I’ve selected about fossils, to questions that can actually be tested with the stats we’re learning. It’s an interplay between structure and freedom.
Gwen Shlichta
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
The first thing that comes to mind is a recent class when we used a variety of gummy animals to construct a phylogeny. Gummy animals don’t have a lot of discernable characters and of course I threw in some weird ones. After they made their trees we talked about how difficult it is to choose characters that are relevant or important from an evolutionary perspective. About the challenges of reconstructing phylogenies. It was also fun and helped ease the tension in the class when stress levels are high.
When you teach field classes one has to be creative because nature does not always cooperate. You can go out with the intention of teaching about fungi, but it’s been a dry fall and there are no exciting mushrooms so you have to be creative and pivot and figure out another way to learn. I have used jelly belly candy dichotomous keys to teach keying or made my own tracks through mud to talk about animal behaviors and how movement can tell one a lot about what the animal was doing, when, and potentially why.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
• Structure: Structure creates space for creativity – it helps provide scaffolding to focus on something and think about it deeply and be creative about how you approach/teach/learn about it. For example, we work on a model system of the cabbage white butterfly. It’s easier for the students to think of creative questions when their scope is limited to questions about the butterfly (or caterpillar). They can learn about a body of literature around that model system and then creatively think about what has already been done and where the gaps are or creative ways to test questions.
• Colleague Support: I have a great community in my department, and they all celebrate being creative and resourceful about teaching and learning. I have a lab manager that is always willing to run with my crazy ideas.
• Enthusiastic Students/Student Buy-in: I work with such an amazing group of students that bring so many cultural perspectives and ideas to the class and they inspire me every day.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
My students find opportunities to be creative in the lab with their questions and experimental design. We have to be creative to test some of the things that they would like to investigate. I call it (and have heard it called) “Home Depot Science” or the “JoAnn Fabrics’ School of Experimental Design.” My students often comment that when we are working on experimental design or running experiments that they feel like they are in an Art class rather than a Science class!
I teach a lot of field classes and that is the place where I feel the most creative and comfortable because all the constructs of a traditional classroom are gone. No whiteboard or computer projecting slides, no desks, no chairs. It feels like returning to the original way that things were taught: showing students things, telling stories, and trying to inspire passion in others.
Eva Ma
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
Designing course materials/assignments – especially when teaching the course for the first time (though I am constantly adding/revising my courses). Courses where I can be more creative are those where there is more leeway on the learning goals, activities, assignments, etc. – such as either nonmajor courses or upper-division seminar courses. (I haven’t had a chance to teach any upper-level seminar courses yet, though the postdocs that I mentor for STEP-WISE have been super creative in designing their own courses, learning goals, and final projects!)
Also during COVID when we had to move everything online. Labs were especially difficult to “replicate” online and required lots of creativity! “Necessity is the mother of invention”, right?
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
For putting together class/lecture materials, I think about how I learned the topics in the first place, and then try to replicate the flow of ideas/questions to ask students. I also think about misconceptions, pitfalls, and places where I found confusing – or my students have found confusing – and try to troubleshoot or problem-solve (e.g., what is causing the confusion? Is there a better analogy I can come up with? etc.) I think it’s super helpful to think like a student who is just learning the materials for the first time and write questions to walk them through the process of them discovering the concepts for themselves.
For labs during COVID, I did a lot of web searches for online resources to generate ideas as to what I could do for my molecular biology lab. I found a computer-based program that had open-ended simulations of different molecular biology techniques, and used it as a starting point for creating a multi-week computer-based “cloning” project that students could choose their own organism and gene (from a long list) that they can clone. I also wanted something hands-on for my students and found some DNA/RNA foam modeling kits that students could order, and for which I wrote several worksheet activities for students to do in their homes that simulated molecular processes.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
In my multiple-majors lower division class on Aging and Biology, students have a final project where they create a zine (mini-magazine) based on a popular science article. Outside of several required components, they are asked to be creative with their design and art/images to make it fun to read and understandable to a general audience.
I would love to add more creativity into my upper-level core biology classes, though there are less opportunities since I am more constrained in my learning outcomes, assignments, activities, etc. that I am expected to cover and/or implement. One idea would be to incorporate more experimental design and/or student presentations/projects into my courses – something that I’ve been thinking about doing in future iterations.
Nicole Gregorio
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
In the last course I was teaching, there was low student attendance and students were very quiet in class (spring quarter, mostly graduating seniors). Every week, my co-instructor and I were trying new ways to encourage students to come to class, to get students involved during the class through group activities, and to get students to talk to us. It was a long term effort on our part to continue to find creative ways to encourage our students to be engaged.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
I find it is really helpful to look at the learning goals I have for my students. This helps me focus on what I want them to take away from the class, and I can use this as a jumping off point to determine what to do to get them there. This sort of backwards design has helped me to think about what kind of assignments are actually useful for students to build the skills and understanding I want from them, and it gives me enough structure to work within while still leaving a lot of room for creative ideas for assignments and activities in my class.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
I really value opportunities for my students to build their communication skills. So I often include assignments that ask students to communicate about a scientific topic to a more general audience or I include class activities where they have to work with their peers or explain information to their peers. The way we choose to communicate information requires us to be creative; we have to identify our audience, consider what the most effective method of communicating with them would be, and ideally adapt to their responses along the way.
Tavasi Silvas
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
I was in Mexico teaching a cultivation class with none of my normal resources (substrates grow chambers, sterilizers, etc). So I had to adapt all the materials and protocols to accommodate the resources in the town. It was a fun challenge, and I learned a new way of growing oyster mushrooms and lion’s mane that was way more low tech, and sustainable (using recycled products), and more cost effective for the students.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
When teaching in community, knowing a little about the folx background, interests, other talents etc and using that as a reference point or for metaphor. Working with a group of artists, versus herbalists, versus elders, etc. allows me to create a different container and approach to how I contextualize concepts and decide the flow of information.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
I like my students (in the context of growing mushrooms) of thinking about different substrates, resources, techniques, etc based on their ancestry/cultural practices, local availability, personal habits/interests, to design a new way of growing and then we walk through the benefits and considerations of their new approaches. Also a way to bring in more concepts and scientific explanation on why it would be a worthwhile approach.
Jon Herron
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
Today, when a student said “I’m not really getting this,” and I had to come up with an illustration on the fly to aid my verbal explanation.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
Good and/or unexpected questions from students.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
When I ask them to design their own experiments.
Christina Morra
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
I was designing a course entitled “The Research on how you can be successful in college”. It was an honors freshman seminar course so there was a lot of space to be creative. I focused on being creative with assignment types.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
Time to plan and think through something fully. Since I’ve found students mostly want/expect lectures, if I’m going to give them something else, they want/need a lot of clarity about exactly what will happen and what is expected.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
In that course, they designed a resource for incoming students to convey something that the research we looked at identified as evidence-based and success-promoting. The students could create this resource in any form.
Stacy Alvares
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
Always?? 🙂 Student populations are dynamic from quarter to quarter and throughout the different courses I teach. So while one cohort may have gotten Concept A and I breeze right through it, the next cohort may not and so I realize I can’t be stuck into one mode of thinking about a concept. I have to try to integrate my guidance into their learning process, and sometimes one has to be creative to find where the gap in understanding actually is.
On a practical point, lots of things outside of a student’s control can happen during a quarter and being creative trying to help the student stay successful while also continuing to progress everyone to achieve course outcomes can definitely take some “creative planning”.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
Cool discoveries and/or the application of science with relevance to current events or situations. Current events provide something more tangible. Sometimes it can allow for students to reflect on their personal experience to ask more nuanced questions
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
In certain presentations, students have a broad topic but then explore based on their interests. I also have a fun project with communicating science through Zines in my research class. That is absolutely focused on me saying students should be as creative or as non creative as they want–as long as the science that they are communicating is credible. I’m also hoping nanopore sequencing technology at Bellevue will allow for some creative research questions! fingers crossed.
Sailaja Arungundram
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
When I had to teach ionic compound nomenclature, I purchased a go fish card game to play in the class. When I used skittles to teach bonding and lewis dot structures. When I used a “no-grade” quiz based on metacognition.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
Reading about other people’s work and talking to other people.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
In lab when I have given a bare bones procedure in a powerpoint, and I had them make their own detailed steps for their lab notebook. In biochemistry, I have assigned students a protein and had them pick two topics from the core concepts of biology education as outlined in the Vision and Change document.
Rick Downs (math)
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
Last quarter one section on vectors did not go very well–not very interesting for students. I came up with some problems that students could work on after being given some basic information.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
When I try to improve a lesson, it gives me the motivation to think of different ways to have students work with the material.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
I don’t tell students the steps they need to use to solve the problems. They have enough background knowledge, but they are using it in different ways than they have in the past. In some classes students are able to choose the final project they want to work on.
Kristiina Hurme
Can you share a time when you had to be creative in your teaching?
I recently had to try to engage Vertebrate Biology students to notice and appreciate the natural world, as it was apparent to me they didn’t all do that on their own. So I quickly swapped an optional exam reflection with optional animal observations for extra credit. I gave students opportunities to join me on campus nature walks and helped them identify species they found. This turned out to be very impactful and many became enthusiastic naturalists during the short 10 weeks. I was fortunate that I could add in something meaningful after the syllabus had already been set.
What helps you be creative in your teaching? Why is this helpful?
Having space in a syllabus to take advantage of new opportunities would be ideal, but I don’t always account for this in advance. Using extra credit for exams has given me some space for being spontaneous and creative. It’s helpful to be able to take advantage of something new quickly, and use it to engage with the students.
When do your students have the opportunity to be creative?
My students can be creative in their reflections, in their opportunities to teach each other, in their selection of presentation topics, in the choice of extra credit opportunities.