Fourth-Year Reflection

Every position comes with defined expectations: a job description, and the guidance of colleagues who have been doing this work far longer than I have. Meeting those expectations well was my first priority this year, and I worked hard at it. But I also found work that no one had assigned, work I saw a need for and knew I could do. I took it from an idea to something others now use, and I grew more through that process than through anything else this year. This reflection follows the same four sections as last year's, with both kinds of work in view.

Teaching Philosophy

Last year I ended this section with a goal: "to find the balance between stability and curiosity—between comfort and challenge." Three years of observation reports gave me specific things to work on, and I prepared this fall's first observed lab around them. The slides said where each value should be recorded, students had a checklist to mark at the bench, and twice during the lab they explained a step to a neighbor.

The procedure for that experiment had changed from a volumetric pipet to a graduated cylinder. In earlier terms I announced changes like this aloud, and students missed them. This time I had students open the manual with me, find the step, and write the change in.

I also rewrote my teaching philosophy this year. It describes teaching as setting the conditions that make learning more likely across a whole section. The full statement is on the Teaching Philosophy page.

Technology Integration

Last year I wrote that I planned "to experiment with MyOpenMath, Plickers, and Playlab." I tried all three. I ran the CHEM V120B pre-labs on MyOpenMath for a summer term and did not continue with it afterward. I watched Plickers work well in a colleague's class and have not used it in mine so far. I built a project guide in PlayLab for a CHEM V120B final project, and it remains a prototype. Each is described on the Tools I Tried page.

The larger change this year was in how I use AI. Once I moved from asking questions in a chat window to having an agent work inside my own files, I could build things I had only been able to describe before. I learned SQL and retrieval-augmented generation because the work called for them. The database of my teaching materials and the thirty-five interactive simulations for CHEM V101 came out of that work. These are on the AI Integration and CHEM V101 Interactive Simulations pages.

Teaching Methodology

The work I started on my own reached the classroom in several places. The lab quizzes ask about the work done at the bench. For Experiment 2, students marked a one-page checklist while they worked, and every question on the next week's quiz corresponded to at least one box on it. In lecture, students now explain a step aloud to a partner while working a problem. I planned this for the middle of an explanation, and in practice it has settled at the moment a practice block opens.

Other changes came from feedback. After a colleague suggested demonstrations in lecture, I ran one on limiting reactants and then moved that idea into a simulation. Another colleague suggested sharing student work on the document camera. I tried it in lecture. The observer that day recorded the comparison as a strength, and my own experience of it was different. When the solution on the screen is correct, there is little for me to add beyond praise, so the method gives me something to teach only when a student's solution is wrong, and that student then has the error shown to the whole room. I was uneasy about that. It also broke up the way I run lecture. I teach from an iPad, and each time I had to switch to the overhead camera and back and have a student's paper passed up to me across a small classroom. I stopped showing individual students' work. I also noticed that when I zoom into part of a slide, students can lose their place, so I am changing my slides to show the whole page first and zoom afterward.

Reflective Analysis

When I follow AI, I mostly read developer sources: new features in the frontier models, projects on GitHub and Hugging Face, material written by and for developers and companies. That field moves quickly, and keeping up with it for its own sake could carry me away into the technology. So I keep two rules. What I build should be easy to share, and when I work with colleagues I follow the schedule we all keep. In nearly every project I wrote to my colleagues first, laid out how I planned to proceed, and reported as I went. When I volunteered to reorganize the chemistry department's shared Canvas course, each bulk change was shown as a table before anything moved, nothing was deleted, and a page generated from the change log lets colleagues find where their files went.

Reading three years of observation reports side by side, I see that organization and clarity were named as strengths in my first year and have stayed, and that each year's feedback pushed toward a room with more student participation.

All three years of evaluations have recommended that I move around the room more, and I have thought carefully about how to respond. I teach lecture from an iPad at the front, which I consider one of my strengths, and the room is laid out like a small theater, with little space to walk between rows. I also believe students need time to work through problems on their own, without someone hovering over them. So I treat the two parts of class differently: during lecture I stay at the front, where the iPad lets me teach most effectively, and during practice time I circulate through the room to check in with students and answer questions.

This year I learned the tools and began applying them to my teaching. From here I want to keep bringing ideas of my own and building them, in ways that help my students and my colleagues.