GRAD704 at UNR has really emphasized the importance of good teaching at all levels of learning, from Pre-K to PhD, and beyond. This class has been interesting to think about from a dual perspective. As a lab TA, I have the opportunity to incorporate what I have learned this semester into my teaching for the remainder of my tenure as a PhD student at UNR; as a PhD student, I have taken a more critical look at the courses I’ve taken and the presentations I’ve seen for those educators’ teaching strengths and weaknesses and how they utilized technology, whether for better or for worse.

While I have always been aware of the abundance of peer-reviewed literature about education, the journal reviews at the beginning of the course really opened my eyes to the value of this research to educators like myself. I have so much to learn from the wealth of published knowledge on teaching—what works, what doesn’t, and everything in between. This class has also given me countless tools as I move forward in my learning and teaching journeys (they are separate, but also one and the same).

Since the start of this course, I have been prioritizing creating descriptive diagrams that can talk for me when I cannot—for whatever reason—give the same level of attention to every student. Below is one example I made of a diagram of the expected results for half of the plates from the transformation experiment I talked so much about in my technology implementation ideas. Not only does it show the students what they were supposed to get, but it tells them how to describe the observations they see.

I plan on adding descriptive schematics to every lab to aid the TAs in explaining complex concepts to the students in multiple formats.