Through its Undergraduate Science Education Program, HHMI seeks to strengthen the quality of bioscience education for all undergraduate students, including non-science majors, and better prepare students for careers in biomedical research, medicine, and science teaching. Another important goal of the program is to broaden access to science for all students, including underrepresented minorities and others for whom such opportunities are often limited. CNDLS worked with Georgetown’s Biology department to receive a grant that helps meet the science education needs of our University community.

As co-writer of one piece of the successful HHMI grant awarded to the Biology Department, CNDLS has been given the opportunity to help train graduate students as science faculty through a required first course on teaching and an optional, more advanced course on the scholarship of teaching. In addition, the grant provides money to develop a digital archive on best science teaching practices that could be shared with other institutions. The required course, “Teaching Biology: Pedagogy and Practice,” has three main assignments: an intensive class observation, a polished teaching philosophy statement, and a microteaching presentation. (View the syllabus).

The second, optional course, "Advanced Teaching and Learning Seminar in Biology," involves close mentoring by a CNDLS representative and Biology faculty member to complete authentic scholarship of teaching tasks. One of the participating Biology graduate students, Doug Blackiston, has created a step-by-step guide to creating a lesson plan, a project that evolved out of his work in the biology pedagogy courses and as a Graduate Associate with CNDLS.

In the most recent iteration of the required course, graduate students from Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience joined the class and contributed an additional perspective to the subject of science teaching. The grant continues to help promote creative ways of integrating teaching and research in a science graduate student’s professional development, as well as make possible the conception of enhanced relationships between science graduate students and their faculty, department’s undergraduate majors, and the surrounding community.