Teaching Experience
Since 2015, I have been a graduate teaching assistant for AST 101 (The Sun and Its Neighbours) and AST 202 (Stars and Galaxies). These are two introductory astronomy courses for students with majors not in science. For the 2016-2017 academic year, I was co-head teaching assistant for the tutorials given in these courses. As part of this work, I developed multiple choice questions to review the previous tutorial's material, discussion questions to facilitate deeper understanding of the current week's material, and multiple choice questions to gauge student's knowledge of the primary concepts covered.
In 2017, I developed a new tutorial for AST 201. For this course, students complete a project describing an important astronomical discovery or controversy. In this activity, students practiced reading and paraphrasing press releases and popular science articles about the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015.
Teaching Training
In 2016, I participated in the University of California Santa Cruz Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators Professional Development Program. This programme provides training for early-career scientists and engineers in inquiry-based learning at the undergraduate level, with a targeted focus on developing teaching activities that promote equity and inclusivity. I worked with a team led by Dr. Etsuko Mieda to develop the Optical Design Lab for the 2016 Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics Astronomical Instrumentation Summer School. For this activity, students worked in small teams to design schematics for an optical imaging instrument. Each team chose one of four targets and determined a minimum field of view and resolution to answer a question about their target. Using optics software, the students designed an instrument to work with the Keck telescope and meet their science criteria.