Reflections of an Animal Science Instructor

Welcome! I am excited to take you through my journey as a higher education instructor in Animal Science. Through this blog, I hope to share my experiences in and around the classroom at a Land-Grant Institution. Along the way, I hope we can have discussions about teaching innovations, best practices, pedagogy or anything else.

Through my B.S. in Animal Science, Ph.D. in Animal Biology and a postdoctoral scholar position, I gained tremendous experience in the scientific process, cell and molecular biology techniques, histology and immunohistology, data collection and analysis. My research experiences all utilized mammalian species (rats, cows, pigs) or in-vitro cell culture models to study mammary gland development and function in normal and diseased-states. Throughout my education, I also completed a number of courses related to Animal Science. None of my coursework or training had focusd on education as a discipline. Yet my passion for Animal Science and mentoring students led me to pursue a career in Animal Science Higher Education.

In the fall of 2016, I stepped into my first classroom as an instructor of record. My lack of true education experience greatly impacted my first foray into teaching. I searched out syllabi examples, leaned heavily on how my previous courses had been structured and taught and jumped into the deep end. The semester was moving along okay but by the halfway point, I was not terribly satisfied with my students’ level of engagement and my students were feeling lost from all the content in the lectures. They were not yet prepared to make all the connections between ideas on their own. This experience drove me to dive into pedagogy and course design. 9 years later, after having developed, refined or redesigned 12 different courses, I can say there are definitely better approaches for today’s students then those that I was first employing.

This fall, I will be launching my 13th reinvisioned course, so I’ll take you along the journey of planning and implementation. I’ll also share lessons and topics from my other courses, facilitating our faculty teaching community and my own exploration.