Another form of teaching I participate in is the one-on-one training that occurs in the laboratory with both graduate students and undergraduates.
In this type of teaching, I retain my belief that it is important to stimulate critical thinking and to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of students by providing them with an interactive inquiry-based learning environment. Since my research relies heavily on enzyme kinetics as well as protein chemistry and neither of these subjects is taught in the Chemistry Department, it is imperative that I teach my students personally in the lab.
Very early on, my students learn to include the proper controls in their experimental designs and the importance of reproducing data. As such, I typically work with my students closely during their first two years to ensure they are properly trained. After I have ascertained that my students' lab techniques have met my expectation, I will gradually reduce my supervision and let them design their own experiments. My guidance at this stage is to help them set the specific goals in their research and establish an outline for their thesis.
Another important component is to help my students learn how their specific experiments or projects fit into the overall goal of our research and to teach them oral communication skills. To accomplish this goal, I conduct weekly group meetings and have my students present either their work or a current research article. I believe that these oral presentation exercises provide my students the opportunities to communicate in public and encourage them to stay current with relevant literature.
To reinforce my graduate students' public communication skills, I make sure that each of my graduate students attend at least one major scientific meeting and present a poster. To ensure the quality of my graduate students, I have set up a culture in my lab that all my graduate students publish their first paper by the beginning of their third year.
