(📸: Emma Ancel)
I absolutely love teaching and I am excited by the opportunity to help students succeed—academically, professionally, and personally. I also enjoy learning about research in STEM education, with a focus on curriculum design, informatics/AI education, and universal design for learning. 🧠
Contents
In the classroom 👨🏼🏫
For all my classes, I like to use a somewhat comprehensive syllabus, such as this example. In the past, I have taught:
- MATSCI 122 - Visual communication in MSE: W25, [W26], public
- MATSCI 131 - Materials scientists in training: S25, [S26]
- MATSCI 143 - Structure and characterization: W24, A24, [A25], public
- MATSCI 156 - Materials for the energy solution: S24, S25, [S26], public
The indicated terms link to Canvas (for enrolled students) while the “public” link is for a public subset of those materials.
Also, there’s a lot of discussion out there on effective and inclusive pedagogy, but less discussion about structure/logistics that make for a good teaching and learning experience. This is interesting to me, because while the former is usually more involved and contentious (but impactful!), the latter is lower hanging fruit and equally important in creating a smooth experience for instructors and students. So I recorded some thoughts here (requires Stanford auth) about my workflow when setting up a new course.
Helpful software
Here are some great apps that were recently introduced to me:
- Notion for lesson planning.
- Padlet for in-class discussions and other brainstorming.
- Kahoot for in-class games.
- CATME for structuring team-based assignments.
- Stanford’s AI Playground for experimenting with generative AI models. Requires Stanford authentication.
You are also free to use my Stanford MSE-themed templates for documents, presentations, and LaTeX if you like them! Note these are unofficial, but I followed the identity guide.
Teaching assistants
If you’re interested in TA-ing for one of my courses, you’re welcome to reach out, but for the most part my TAs are pre-assigned in advance (and not by me 😔). Exceptions can be made for particularly strong fits, of course, and it is true that at Stanford (and most places) instructors get to pre-select their TAs. I always like to share some guidelines with my TAs so that we’re on the same page and so I can best support them!
Other
This is more relevant for job applications than teaching, but you can see some of my philosophy in my teaching statement that I submitted to Stanford. My corresponding teaching demo is representative of how I’d teach a lesson.