Original content last updated May 18, 2016

This is the academic portfolio of Aaron E. Chiou, Ph.D. I have created this website to provide an overview of my teaching, research, and outreach, and to track my professional development over time. The contents of this portfolio will evolve as I continue to clarify and pursue my career goals.

To document and monitor my teaching development over time, I have organized my teaching portfolio into four skill-based sub-sections below.

Teaching Philosophy

At its core, biomedical engineering aims to improve human health. Given the breadth of the field, I have taken coursework in subjects ranging from traditional engineering to the life sciences. My goal in teaching is to help students develop frameworks of thinking that allow them to integrate material from across disciplines into the bigger picture, and apply that knowledge to solve the problems that face the field today.

Read a statement of my teaching philosophy here.

Course Design

Preparing to teach means carefully considering overall course objectives as well as learning objectives for each individual class session, and the teaching and learning methods that will be employed to achieve them.

As a GAANN Fellow in Spring 2016, I developed and taught a musculoskeletal system module for a sophomore-level physiology course for biomedical engineers (Physiology of Human Health and Disease, BME 2010). Selected examples from my course design process include the teaching plan and actual slide handouts used for the first lecture of the module. Student evaluation and observer feedback will soon be available here.

As an exercise in course design, I have also created a reimagined syllabus for this course.

Classroom Effectiveness

Teaching and Learning Strategies

In my teaching, I work to address the all too common issue of overwhelming students with material without presenting its broader context or real-world applications. To design more effective learning experiences, I avoid overwhelming students with material by setting realistic goals (e.g. selecting just a few learning outcomes for each class session, and planning that session around those goals). I decide ahead of time which material within each class section could be skipped over in case there isn’t enough time, and conversely, prepare extra material in case things are moving more quickly than anticipated. I plan to take a few pauses during each class to assess student understanding before moving on (be it through peer instruction or other interactive activities). I employ this approach to give students the opportunity to integrate new material with their existing knowledge, and to allow me to quickly assess their level of understanding.

To keep students engaged throughout a class session, I plan to start my lectures with real world applications (e.g., introduce the impact of a disease relating to the organ system we are focusing on) that drive questions to be answered during that class (e.g., what is the pathophysiology? what is the normal physiology? how do specific molecular-, cell-, or tissue-scale changes lead to dysfunction in the diseased state? how might the disease be treated by targeting these alterations?). By repeatedly tying the theoretical material back to its broadly relevant biomedical applications, I aim to motivate my students to engage deeply with the course material. I also take steps to vary the stimulus, by writing on the board, using Powerpoint primarily for visuals, and interspersing interactive discussion. I have considered and implemented many of these strategies in my course design.

Feedback from Students and Observers

In order to ensure that my teaching methods are as effective in practice as in theory, soliciting feedback from students and observers is essential. Below is an annotated summary of student evaluations from my first TA experience. As I gain experience in teaching future courses, I aim to dedicate class time to ensure that I receive anonymous feedback from a majority of students, both in the middle and at the end of the term. This feedback will enable me to more accurately assess how students feel about my teaching, and allow me to make appropriate adjustments to my approach. Future feedback will include positive comments, as well as those that guide any change. I will also discuss how I implement that change, and based on the end of the semester feedback, discuss how effective it turns out to be.

• Student evaluations (BME 4010, Fall 2014)
• Coming soon: Student evaluations (BME 2010, Spring 2016)
• Coming soon: Observer report (BME 2010, Spring 2016)

Learning Assessment

To verify that students are reaching the learning objectives that I have outlined in my course planning, I implement a range of assessments as opportunity to not demonstrate their learning to me but also to one another. I hope to motivate my students to learn and perform at their best by incorporating self- and peer-assessment in grading. When appropriate, I include authentic assessment assignments designed to reflect the nature of the work that biomedical engineers commonly encounter. To establish expectations and provide feedback for assessments, I plan to use grading rubrics that students have helped create. For example, I am partial to using concept mapping to assess student learning, and plan to guide students to complete these assessments by providing a concept map rubric and modeling the process ahead of time.

Professional Development

Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Fellowship

As a GAANN Fellow, I am focusing on developing my teaching skills through coursework in pedagogy and education research, partnership with current faculty to develop and teach a module within a course, and continued engagement in outreach.

Workshops and Courses

I have engaged in several opportunities to continually develop the way I think about and approach teaching:

Engineering Teaching Assistant Development Program (College of Engineering, Fall 2014)

As a prerequisite to holding a TA position, the sessions in this program addressed issues such as grading, effective presentation skills, and facilitating learning. In addition, a session on microteaching provided opportunity for small-group discussion, feedback, and reflection on a short 5 minute lesson taught by each participant.

Science Communication Workshop (COMM 5660, Fall 2015)

This two-day workshop introduced the many forms of public communication of science to nonscientists (politicians, the media, the general public). Activities included panel discussions, mini-lectures, press release writing, and mock media interviews, which shed light on how to approach communicating key scientific ideas to audiences with varying range of scientific background. I have found the concepts introduced in this course to be applicable not only in designing my own outreach materials, but also in thinking about the way I present information when I teach.

The Practice of Teaching in Higher Education (ALS 6015, Spring 2016)

Offered through the Center for Teaching Excellence, this semester-long course has helped me reflect on my own learning experiences, and how they inform my approach to teaching. Along with a greater awareness of my own identity with respect to my teaching, this course has provided essential background in pedagogical theory, teaching methods, and various aspects of course design and assessment that I have applied to developing my own teaching materials.

Mentorship

I believe that mentorship fosters the development of community through sharing experiences, advice, and expertise. As an undergraduate, graduate mentors served as research role models, and I aim to similarly motivate and inspire my own undergraduate mentees in the lab. In terms of teaching, I have encountered several effective educators and aspire to reach their level of success. To achieve such goals, I have engaged in conversation with faculty dedicated to their own teaching efforts, in order to gain perspective on how they approach their own roles the world of academia. In the coming years, I intend to seek out additional mentoring experiences to further my professional development, and as a newly hired professor, I plan to seek mentorship from a more established faculty member. Further down the road, I hope to contribute my own experiences by mentoring future and newly hired faculty as well.

Future Plans

As I continue my graduate education and prepare for a future career in academia, I plan to further develop my skills through the following means:

• An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching (CIRTL MOOC, Fall 2016)
• Teaching As Research in Higher Education (ALS 6016, Spring 2017)
• Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) GET SET Workshops & Discussions