Students don’t always know what they’re in for when they enroll in my courses. Lectures are almost never about acquiring information; information can be acquired from books, the internet, and all sorts of sources. But what do you do with that information? That is what my courses are about. To varying degrees, all of them include free-form discussion, open questions, collaborative activities, student presentations, applied math, substantive writing, and the occasional vampire. Students may find that they are asked to solve problems they’ve never seen before in small groups, and then report their path toward the solution, but not the solution itself. Dry-erase markers might be silently placed on the desks of haphazardly (not randomly) selected students, who then will have to draw a graph on the board — probably one they've never seen before. And as much as I like keeping students on their toes, no one should have any fear about being wrong, because identifying where you are wrong is the only way to get any better. And thus, in class (but not on exams) it is perfectly fine to be wrong.

Science education should be organized around the process of discovery, illustrating the interplay between creativity and logic that yields scientific understanding. My main goal in teaching a course is to guide undergraduate students toward the point where they can expand their understanding on their own. In many respects, my philosophy of how to do that can be summed up as “less content, stronger connections.” Most of my courses are built on interactive lectures with varying degrees and types of student participation.

In practice, I try to combine innovative approaches with the tried-and-true, because the real goal is for teaching to be effective. Too often, people tout innovation and technology in education as if innovation and technology are themselves the end goals. Technology is not a panacea for education, and I reject technological approaches that merely simplify things for the instructor, but have not been shown to improve student outcomes— especially when the costs are borne by the students.

In my Ecology and Evolution class (for biology majors, usually 80-125 students) no class period is occupied by a strait lecture format. The greatest departure occurs when we turn to The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about research on finches in the Galàpagos Islands. The book is a popular science book, rather than a standard textbook, and offers a look at science through a storyteller’s lens. My approach involves several features that are not commonly a part of large science lecture classes.

In my Genomics class, I end up doing very little lecturing. Much of the course involves student presentations because the actual objective of the course is to improve students' ability to communicate scientific information. This involves several oral presentations, graphical assignments, and some written work. In many ways, students primarily learn from each other in this course, and those who expect me to just tell them everything they always wanted to know about genomics but were afraid to ask will find themselves frustrated.