My teaching philosophy is centered on student-directed learning and engaging students as proactive learners. I love what I do, and part of my job is to convey that enthusiasm for mechanistic understanding of ecological systems. At the same time, my mission as an educator is to provide the framework within which students can discover and explore the topics that excite them. As students learn and dedicate themselves to specific topics, they inevitably develop their own questions and interests; they should have the ability to cultivate those interests. I strive to provide an environment that universally promotes enthusiasm as each student sets goals for their own advancement. A central aspect of student-directed learning is mastery of critical thinking skills; there is no substitute for critical thinking. We learn by evaluating ideas, challenging paradigms, and designing alternatives. My strategy for teaching is a hybrid of modern educational pedogogy and socratic principles, and is built around what I call “active reading”. Students develop questions from their reading and other sources (e.g., online learning tools), and I build classroom “lectures” to address these questions by leveraging my expertise in concert with group problem solving. Time in the classroom is therefore dedicated to what I call “population-level learning”.

There are a number of modern pedagogical approaches to education that challenge the traditional “lecture” format (e.g., think-pair-share, flipped classroom). The central idea is engaging students as active learners, and as active participants in their own education. Even lecture format can be designed to be an active learning format