I live for that “lightbulb” moment.
My Teaching Style
I teach at the university level. My style of teaching pedagogy is a mix of what I learned from my professors at Chico State and what I’ve learned teaching at Arizona State University (ASU) and Grand Canyon University (GCU): a learner-centered approach. I adapt to the classroom and the students I am working with; where I can, I combine lecture with inquiry, hands-on, and discussion. I have taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in online, in-person, and hybrid formats for both lecture and lab and have received high Student Evaluations (SE) with students emphasizing on my ability to explain concepts in multiple ways.
Each student has a way of learning and cementing concepts in their brain that may be different from just one way of teaching, I strive to use many different teaching methods to reach my students. A common example I have used in my calc-based physics electricity & magnetism lab at GCU was the analogy of electric current acting like water, capacitors acting as a hole dug in the stream, and the water rushing in to fill the capacitor, then flowing over it after filling the hole. This was to help several students understand the exponential behavior they were seeing in their lab data for a capacitor charging up (current vs. time, area under the curve is then total charge). I did not come up with this analogy, I searched online for ways to get these points across to my students and then shared the same information with them as well as the source of the information (many of my students have been grateful to Georgia State’s Hyper-Physics website over the years, a resource I learned about from my previous professors). I strive to keep up-to-date on effective methods of teaching for all levels and abilities.