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Gary L. FirestonePROFESSOR, MOLECULAR AND CELL BIOLOGY
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Statement of Teaching Philosophy
One of the key challenges of communicating topics in the biological sciences to a class of students is the constant evolution of new scientific concepts. I strongly feel that it is not enough to present a series of facts and related information. One must provide a scientific perspective to the class, which teaches students to critically evaluate the presented topics. Within each lecture, I provide the students with enough foundational information to creatively think about a given topic, to critically evaluate and interpret the presented facts and to learn how to design rigorous experimental strategies for testing a particular hypothesis. I have found that placing certain topics in a historical context can be particularly useful when succeeding concepts on the same topic have been developed and altered based on new experimentation in the field.
Most exhilarating for me are the times when students construct better experiments in class than those previously published in the field.
I feel that it is important for the students to understand that a concept written in a textbook or a research paper is not necessarily correct, but that its existence merely reflects investigative thought at the time. In this way, the research literature is "demystified" for the students. For my Molecular Endocrinology course, I designed a course manual! workbook consisting of crucial lecture information and research data. 'The information in the course manual is then embellished by the students during discussions in each lecture. Since this course manual defines the scientific terminology and key concepts to be presented in class, I update it every year to reflect the major changes in the field.
I also believe that the memorization of facts without an in-depth understanding of the scientific context is virtually useless. Therefore, to complement the interactive style of my lectures and to stimulate creative thinking, I use a series of experimental problem solving exercises in my exams. Typically, the students are presented with some data and are asked to develop a biological model based on the data, and then to design an experimental strategy that tests the key features of their proposed model. For their out-of-class papers, the students must critically evaluate the conclusions from several recent research studies and focus on discussing weak and strong points of experimental design.
Finally, the interactive participation of undergraduate students in my classes is important to my teaching approach since many times the discussions take crucial tangents brought on by students' inquiries and imagination. In addition to obtaining an immediate feel of how the students are thinking, these discussions have many times led me to think about the topics I present from a new and different viewpoint. I find my interactions with students to be scientifically interesting, intellectually challenging and generally fun, and as such they continue to be particularly rewarding experiences for-me.