I am not a teacher by training. I am a teacher by “happy accident” – I started out as a lab TA in graduate school, really enjoyed the experience, and have been teaching undergraduate students ever since.
When I started teaching, I entered the profession with a relatively good level of knowledge of my subject matter, but with very little knowledge of teaching theory – my undergraduate degree is in Cell and Molecular Biology.
Like most of my fellow instructors in the department, I picked up a few things about “proper teaching” in periodic, short professional development sessions, but these mostly seemed to focus on very practical things like ‘designing test questions’, or on ‘writing good learning objectives’. There was very little discussion of actual learning theory.
As a result, when I became frustrated with the existing teaching tools and decided to use some of my preexisting computer skills – I was a ‘computer enthusiast’ – my first online tutorial wasn’t really based on any specific framework or best practices.
Looking back on it, it wasn’t even really that much different from the existing teaching tools.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I had two of the three things I needed to be a more effective teacher – I had Content Knowledge and a good grasp of Technology, but I had minimal Pedagogical Knowledge and needed to learn how to make all of these components work together.
This is where I felt the MET program at UBC would help me the most.
