Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
In my teaching, I value student learning and engagement through skills-based learning. I center the student experience in development of my courses and focus my activities on the skills they need to be most successful in the area we are learning about. I value student autonomy over their learning experience and goals by dedicating the first day of any course to building a community in the classroom and co-developing the syllabus and course schedule for the semester. I always offer differing completion options, and I account for the student’s interests in developing course content and assignments for the semester. I value evaluation of my teaching, as well as providing formative, learner-centered feedback to my students in order to tailor the course, and the student experiences to better serve my students.
Explore some of my teaching artifacts below!
Observation Letter from my Colleague, Lindsay Hansen This letter discusses my effectiveness after teaching about relational database designs to a cohort of graduate students.
In this paper published in Pedagogy in Health Promotion we highlight the importance of experiential exercises in public health courses and provide resources for conducting this exercise in your own classroom. I enjoy being a reviewer for this journal to keep apprised on new teaching methodologies.
As a student, I always enjoyed discussions where we could work together to create something while we talked. Now as a teacher, I implement this practice in my teaching often through various techniques. In this Google JamBoard activity students begin to think about how climate change impacts human health and possible exposure pathways.
I enjoy receiving student feedback to help improve and support my teaching practice. After teaching a table-top outbreak activity, I had students share their experiences to help evaluate and improve the activity for next time.
Continuous Learning
There is always something new to learn! I seek out professional development activities to make my science, and my teaching better. I focus my learning on data science skills to support public health and graduate students in better public health data governance.
In 2022 I was a Roots for Resilience research fellow. This program is led by the Arizona Institute for Resilience (AIR)Cyverse, and the Data Science Institute at the University of Arizona. This program trains select graduate students in the use of open science and computational infrastructure to apply data science tools to their dissertation research.
In 2021, I completed the CSTE Data Science Team Training along with colleagues at the Pima County Health Department. We worked together on strengthening data sharing capacity with our academic health department.