HOUSTON — Teaching during a pandemic has been quite a challenge for all teachers. However, Lisa Farmer and Tai-Yen Chen managed to adapt and succeed in educating students despite the current circumstances.
Both Farmer and Chen are two junior faculty members at the University of Houston. They both have received the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics John C. Butler Excellence in Teaching Award for their excellent contributions to the success of the college’s educational programs.
Lisa Farmer, instructional assistant professor of biology and biochemistry, received the award in the non-tenure-track faculty category. While Chen, assistant professor of chemistry, received the award in the tenured and tenure-track faculty category.
Besides the non-tenure-track faculty category, Lisa Farmer also received the 2021 University of Houston Teaching Excellence – Provost Core Award for teaching core classes. On the other hand, Chen earned some of the highest instructor ratings from students for the past few years.
Farmer’s teaching includes an emphasis on active learning. In lower-level classes, she puts students in small groups with one strong learner in each group. This method enables students to help others while supporting their understanding of the material. This way, students can also work together on critical thinking problems.
In the upper-level class, she puts students into “expert” groups to dissect information about diseases. The students are then scrambled into different groups. In these new groups, they must teach each other what they previously learn in their expert group.
To increase student professional development and equity during online learning, she created pre-recorded mini-lectures called SHARP, which stands for ‘Success Has a Recipe, People!’
The mini-lectures aim to teach students to learn about “real-life” lessons, including how to get started in a new course, maintain a work-life balance, develop emotional intelligence, choose alternative career paths, learn from failure, and recognize grit.
“Her work in the classroom is impacting how others teach biology in secondary education which ultimately impacts the quality of student matriculating into college. Lisa is positively impacting science education at almost every level,” biology and biochemistry instructional professor Chad Wayne wrote in his recommending paperwork that Farmer has presented at symposia for secondary educators and for higher education groups.
Meanwhile, in Chen’s classes, he tries to engage the students by creating surveys that ask students what is helpful to them in class and what areas they can improve on in his teaching. His students are also encouraged to work together to complete assignments as sometimes particular topics can be too abstract.
“I want them to improve their personal capability. If you learn to work collectively very young and be responsible, I think that’s a good lesson to learn from my class. However, groups can’t be too large because people can get lazy. Three to four students is the best size for the group,” the professor said.
Students in Chen’s classes are provided with “skeleton” notes to download before each class. The professors ask his students to follow along with his lectures by filling in the notes.
After each class, students are asked to review the lecture, which is recorded using Microsoft teams, where students then chat with their classmates and him in the chatbox and share relevant materials or links.
“Due to his exceptional teaching and guidance, professor Chen interested me in becoming a professor and was a predominant influence on my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry,” a former undergraduate student wrote in his recommendation letter.