I pride myself on being a good teacher.  Generally, students think I am.  I am vigilant and watch over my teaching style and commitment to it.  I know I am an accurate evaluator of the student's performance.  When I encounter my students years after graduation, I highly respect their critique of my teaching because passing of time enhances perspective. Students then are likely more reflective and less biased.  My teaching effectiveness has been validated by these encounters.  This is not to say that I don't receive evaluations from disgruntled students.  It's the bad ones that I really struggle over.  I learn from each one, though.
     If you go farther and peruse my web pages on teaching you'll learn a good bit about my style, my philosophy and my commitment.  The web pages at this link are divided into those about specific courses I have taught/developed and secondly, about my philosophy associated with testing.
    The concept of teaching through experience is something that is always evolving so that I can become an ever more effective educator.  I now completely embrace experiencial teaching as a worthy pedagogy beyond simply "a fun time" (see below).  When I first began teaching, I primarily lectured and students took notes, memorized (hopefully) the material presented, and showed me they had learned on test day. Today, during some lecture times, I bring demontration and/or "show and tell" aids.  In more and more of my labs, students learn by touching, doing, seeing and speaking.  Most importantly, I teach through field experiences.  It's simply amazing how engaged students can be while in the field, particularly after they get past the sensory overloads.  The field is my classroom.  To learn more about the kinds of labs I do, and some of the unique excercises I do during some class periods, visit my web pages associated with several courses.  Finally, feel free to send to me comments on my teaching; what you see that works, how it works and any pertinent literature on new styles and techniques in teaching that might improve my effectiveness.  I have a link below to comments received from past students at course evaluation time.
 

EXPERIENCES IN MY TEACHING

    I feel that it's important that I address the experiencial side to my teaching.  After all, this is particularly important at Loyola University because of our mission; simply put, to be a place of exceptional teaching first and foremost.  Because of the teaching discipline I am in - Biological Sciences - a large vocabulary is required by all students in order to communicate effectively.  Also, an understanding of biological concepts is essential.  The experiences I offer in both lab and lecture setting more easily address concepts than they do vocabulary.  In my view, 'old-fashioned' lecturing is still something very much required of the biology teacher.  However, teaching of concepts often can be considerably facilitated by doing, rather than through student listening.
    I 'do' this in several ways.  First, I strongly believe in taking students to the field; the out-of-doors.  I go far beyond the norm in this regard.  University students so very much need contact with the natural world.  I require students to go on lecture and lab-course sponsored trips to local (Audubon Park), regional (Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, Bayous Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, Pearl River basin, Manchac Swamp), and national (Big Bend National Park) places.  Some of the trips are simply guided tours with plenty of opportunities for socratic discussion and others are venues for a particular controlled activity (role playing, field collecting, quantitative sampling).  (See my links to individual courses and the photos on this page for some examples).
    Secondly, I try to organize labs that have students undertake an assignment as a group activity.  The most successful of such labs, are designed to build upon previous work in earlier labs.  One such activity, is a lab sequence I developed in my Ecology course where students first collect stream fish, secondly sort and identify the fish using dichtomous keys, and thirdly work to statistically analyze the information to a final illustration on fish habitat (an 'ordination').  The three-part effort requires 2 - 3 labs and then a final writeup.
    Thirdly, for lecture-only courses, I have created several in-class demonstrations that incorporate classical show-and-tell pedagogy.  One example of this is my lecture-time sequence on niche concepts in fish, using local preserved collections of stream fishes to introduce basic limnology and then to talk about the impact of dam construction.  Another example is my demonstration of species concepts, again using preserved fish as the example, where students get to see the ambiguity in the concept.  This is a powerful learning process dealing with conservation issues.  Finally, I use models in the classroom as much as possible.   One such endeavor is to show evolution of human form through the use of skull models.  My Department owns an exceptional set of them.
    Fourthly, for lecture-only courses, I have a number of out-of-class assignments that are experiencial.  (These are beyond the writing assignments that I require of my students.)  Three such exercises are illustrative: (a) in two lecture courses, I require students to use the web to calculate their own "ecological footprint", an index to the amount of ecological damage they are responsible for, (b) in another lecture course, some semesters I have the students attend a local annual conference and writeup a short description of their experience, and (c) in yet another lecture course, I have students critique an issue of a journal published by one of several scientific societies.
     All of this effort is for the purpose of educating the Loyola student in the best way I know, given the time and resources I have available.