| FLOYD HAYES |
| TEACHING EXPERIENCE |
| TEACHING PHILOSOPHY Mission I enjoy teaching and interacting with students, and have taught a diversity of natural history courses at Caribbean Union College and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, and more recently here at Pacific Union College. I am committed to the beliefs and lifestyle of Christianity and Seventh-day Adventism and I enjoy the intellectual and natural environments of PUC. As a teacher and academic advisor in a Seventh-day Adventist liberal arts college, my mission is primarily to assist students in learning so that they can achieve their academic and career aspirations, and secondarily to provide a positive influence to students by being an exemplary role model as a Christian scientist. I am perplexed by the declining interest in nature among youth and, as a consequence, I feel that I have a special and challenging mission to foster a greater appreciation and understanding of the beauty and complexity of nature. Having traveled extensively with an insatiable thirst for adventure and knowledge, I have become personally acquainted with many of the planet�s biodiversity hotspots and believe I am well qualified for my special mission. In the classroom I strive to promote the harmonious development of physical, mental and spiritual aspects of character. I begin each lecture and lab exercise with a prayer and occasionally ask for a volunteer to pray. I try to be open and accessible to students so that they do not feel intimidated, and encourage them to freely ask questions. I try to never embarrass or criticize a student publicly. I welcome candid expression of alternative points of view. Whenever there are differences in the interpretations of data�such as those relevant to the debate between creation and evolution�I encourage students to be open-minded, to consider all sources of evidence and to make up their own minds. Although I often express my own personal views (which seldom are strongly held), I try not to be dogmatic. I often remind students that as Christians we should encourage academic freedom by tolerating alternative points of view. Outside of the classroom I enjoy encouraging, tutoring and counseling students to succeed in both their academic and professional goals, as well as in their personal interactions with others. I try to understand the individual needs of students and, when an excuse is credible, allow missed assignments to be made up. I appreciate feedback from students and once published a research paper analyzing student attitudes toward a course in ornithology. Most importantly, I aspire to be a friend to students. In the past my family and I often invited students home for a meal, for family worship or for an excursion out in nature, but now that we live so inconveniently far from the college we seldom do so. Lectures I prepare meticulously for each lecture and for each course I provide students with a set of detailed lecture notes (see example in Section 7) that is sold in the College Bookstore. The lecture notes succinctly summarize material gleaned from several textbooks (not just one) and provide students with all of the pertinent information required to study for quizzes and exams. Furthermore, the material covered for each exam is clearly identified within the lecture notes. Because I usually reorganize the material into lecture topics that I consider more applicable to a quarterly teaching schedule than the sequence of topics presented in textbooks (which invariably change with each new edition), for most courses I choose a textbook that is optional rather than required to be purchased by the students. I want the students to be able to follow my lecture by listening and not having to write notes throughout the lecture. However, the lecture notes include ample space for students to fill in definitions, questions, graphs and illustrations so that they can follow my lecture and not doze off to sleep. I try to revise the notes each year to discourage students from obtaining notes from the previous year. In some of my courses I include a Bible text at the beginning of each lecture, and I�m working on expanding this to all of my courses. All of my lectures are delivered as PowerPoint presentations, which I meticulously prepare and develop with artistic pride. I attempt to illustrate most of my points by providing graphic images to help students better grasp the material. I strive to simplify each slide by not including too much text or too many illustrations, which means I often delete or reword labels in graphics or insert arrows or circles pointing out crucial features of a graphic. I avoid fancy transitions. I also frequently make up my own graphics from scratch using the tools available in PowerPoint. To lighten up the classroom mood I often insert humorous cartoons. In my Environmental Science class (GSCI 345) I show a number of short videos and I also have a few invited guest lectures. The first day of lecture is the most important and I strive to make a positive impression. I begin with a slide, shown as students arrive, depicting the word �Welcome� created by the bubbles of fish as it swims repeatedly across the screen. The welcome slide also includes the code and title of the course, my name as the instructor, the number of quarter credits, and the time and days in which the class meets. Occasionally a student sees the slide and instantly realizes he or she is in the wrong classroom. I hand out the syllabus and a questionnaire in which I ask the students a variety of questions so that I can get to know them better, take attendance, and then go over the syllabus with a PowerPoint presentation. Afterward I have the students do a fun exercise, such as watching a short segment of a video or breaking up into smaller groups to discuss an Internet article, and I ask them some questions representative of the material to be covered during the course. Laboratory Assignments For the courses I teach with a lab component, the lab assignments are a mixture of field trips, examination of museum specimens, and a variety of indoor lab exercises (often including a video). Examples of my classroom and field lab exercises are given in Section 7. Each course includes one or two extended field trips that last an entire afternoon or a Sunday; although some students grumble about the long driving time or late time in which we return to the campus, I believe such field trips are vital to teach students about important ecosystems along the coast or in the Central Valley. Because most of the lab exercises in my classes are focused on the natural ecosystems unique to northern California, there are no commercially suitable lab manuals so I make up most of my labs from scratch; as a consequence, I often reassess and fine tune my lab exercises. I always begin with a laboratory assignment during the first week. Because the extended labs count as either two or three labs, students always have no lab exercise during the last week or two of the quarter, which gives them more free time to work on other assignments. When I taught in Trinidad and Tobago, students in my courses often participated in original research projects (some of which have been published and others will eventually be published) during the lab portions of my courses. Lamentably I have not been able to engage PUC students in original research projects during labs and for various reasons I do not foresee it happening any time soon. For each lab I provide a handout in which I attempt to clearly state what is required. In some labs that are quantitative by nature, I aim to teach students how the scientific method works by testing hypotheses quantitatively, using the appropriate statistical tests when necessary. Because I believe all biology students should be familiar with what real scientists do, for most courses I give a lab assignment in which each student is required to read and critically evaluate three original research articles in peer-reviewed research journals and to write a brief, one-page report (on a standard form) for each article. Additional Assignments I believe that undergraduate college students should be engaged in scholarly thinking and writing. For each of my upper division biology courses I require students to write a 10-20 page research paper based on a minimum of five primary sources published in peer-reviewed technical journals. For BIOL 233 Principles of Ecology and GSCI 345 Environmental Science, I provide eight discussion questions at weekly intervals for the students to write a response of 200-400 words. I require these scholarly assignments to be submitted to Turnitin. For BIOL 227 Natural History of California (frequently taken by education majors), I require a poster and a 4-6 minute presentation in front of the class. For GSCI 345 Environmental Science, I also require 6 hours for a volunteer service project, which may include tours that I organize of a local landfill, recycling center, wastewater treatment plant, geothermal plant, solar energy field, or cogeneration plant. Assessment For each course I give 13 lecture quizzes, each usually covering two days of lectures. The lowest three quizzes are dropped. Each quiz (see example in Section 7) comprises two multiple choice and three true or false questions, projected by PowerPoint. The students record their responses on environmentally friendly 4.25� � 5.5� answer sheets (a quarter the size of normal paper sheets; see Section 7). Each multiple choice question is shown for 30 seconds and the three true or false questions are shown together for 1 minute. I then show a 5 second slide imploring students to write down their name, then I repeat the questions a second time. Each quiz ends with a joke to lighten the mood. After collecting the quizzes I go over the answer to each question. Quizzes are usually given at the beginning of each class, sometimes at the end. The advantage of having timed quizzes is that nobody has to wait for late students to finish taking the quiz (if they miss a question they must give and if they arrive after the quiz is finished they get a zero). Students also have an incentive to arrive on time to class. For the courses I teach with a lab component, I usually have a quiz at the beginning of each lab over the previous lab assignment. I give two midterm exams, each consisting of 25 multiple choice questions and 25 true or false questions, plus a bonus essay question. I give a comprehensive final exam with twice as many questions for all but one of my courses. The answers to the questions are marked on a computerized answer sheet which is scanned. Having spent 5 years teaching in a British colonial university in which a typical final exam comprised six questions of which three were to be answered, I prefer my format of multiple choice and true or false questions for three reasons: (1) they cover the subject more uniformly; (2) they are more efficient to grade; and (3) they are more objective to grade. Students are allowed to examine their quizzes and grades, but cannot write anything down or take any away to minimize the risk of cheating. D2L I use D2L for all of my courses to post: (1) my contact information; (2) a copy of the course syllabus; (3) instructions for assignments (including a sample research paper and instructions for posting assignments on Turnitin); (4) PowerPoint presentation; (5) relevant announcements; and (6) grades. Research I realize teaching is a much higher priority than research at PUC. Nevertheless, I feel that students should have the opportunity to conduct original research if they so desire, and that the opportunity to do so distinguishes prestigious liberal arts colleges from others. When I taught in Trinidad and Tobago, students often registered for and participated in research projects, some of which were subsequently published (others have yet to be published). Although a few PUC students have successfully conducted research projects with me, most are apathetic toward natural history and scholarly research. |
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