Michigan State University is fortunate to have passionate educators who are committed to enhancing the experience of their students and who help to provide the best education possible.

The Graduate School is featuring some of these educators – graduate and postdoc educators every month to share their unique stories and perspectives on what it means to be a dedicated educator, how they’ve overcome educational challenges, and the ways they have grown through their experiences.

For June 2023, we are featuring Riley Pizza, a doctoral candidate in Plant Biology. In their feature, Riley explains how an educator doesn’t just tell students what to learn, but shows them how to learn and empower themselves as learners.

What does it mean to be an educator at a university? 

To me, being an educator at a university means taking students on a journey of self-discovery, guiding them to become better learners, more confident people, and more knowledgeable citizens. My belief in the role of educators is rooted in my experiences as a learner.

During primary school, I constantly struggled to understand core concepts in my courses until my high school biology teacher taught me how to learn, not just what to learn. Understanding what techniques best helped me learn not only increased my comprehension, but it also inspired me to take responsibility for my own learning.

I believe that once students understand how to learn, they become more engaged in meeting the competencies of any course and learning about topics and skills outside of the classroom. My role as an educator is to give students opportunities to learn how to learn, bolstering their confidence, and empowering them to become responsible for their own learning.

My job is not to regurgitate facts for them to memorize (although that is often what my students believe my job is). Instead, my job is to provide students with multiple opportunities to understand a concept by encouraging them to try different learning tools (e.g., watching a video, explaining the concept to another student, drawing a model).

In my experience, a student that is “stuck” on a concept has not been exposed to it in a way that “clicks” in their brain. Once they find a tool that makes the concept “click”, it boosts students’ confidence and validates that they can overcome learning obstacles if given enough time and practice. Once students gain that confidence, they will be able to tackle obstacles in their own lives outside of the classroom, knowing that they have the tools they need to succeed.

I know that in a university setting I will interact with most students for only a few weeks during a semester. However, those few weeks can be incredibly impactful if students take away some learning tools that they can use as they move forward both academically and professionally. As an educator, I hope to promote student’s autonomy over their own learning and confidence in themselves, as my educators did for me.

Challenges you have experienced and how have you grown from these?  

The greatest challenge I’ve faced as an educator (specifically in biological sciences) is motivating students, and I don’t mean motivating them to want to get an A. I mean motivating them to want to learn about and understand the natural world around us. I want students to come to class not because they’ll lose points if they don’t, but because they want to be a better learner, or want to know more about the subjects I’m teaching about.

My hope was that if I was just charismatic and passionate enough, students would be excited to walk into my classroom. Unfortunately, as I learned during my first year of teaching, that just wasn’t the case. Instead, I’ve found that some of the best ways to engage students are by connecting what they’re learning to their regular lives: this includes engaging football players in gel electrophoresis by explaining the role of electrolytes, or emphasizing to pre-med students that doctors often work in teams, which is why learning to work in a group is such an important skill. While it’s always a work in progress (I have yet to reach 100% engagement in my courses) I’ve found that once students understand WHY they should want to learn something, they’re much more interested in learning it.

On the back end of teaching, it’s also been challenging to be expected to “do it all.” When I’m not educating in the classroom, I’m a learner in a professional development workshop, a secretary answering emails and uploading files, a grader tallying participation points, a sympathetic listener for my students struggling to stay afloat during a challenging semester, a judge for students fighting over lost points and, on top of that, a scientist completing my dissertation work—it’s a LOT.

When I first started teaching, I could tell I was rapidly approaching burnout. I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going to lose the joy I typically got from helping students in a classroom. Nowadays, I still do all those things, but only from 9am-5pm. Yes, that means some emails go unanswered and some teaching professional development opportunities are skipped, but I’m a much healthier and happier person because of it. Although society can sometimes try and tell me differently, setting boundaries to preserve my own peace has made me an infinitely better educator: remember, you can’t pour from an empty cup.

What value do you see in Teaching Professional Development?  

As a graduate researcher, I rely a lot on my lab mates, PI, and other researchers in my field to help me refine my research ideas and practices. Talking with other researchers exposes me to different research questions or methods and provides me opportunities to get feedback on what I’m working on. Teaching is no different! Interacting with other educators exposes me to different ways of thinking, teaching, and learning.

Just like in my research field, the best educators are those that never stop learning. No matter how much experience you have in the classroom, nor how many awards you earn, you can always improve your teaching skills. By attending teaching professional development opportunities, I gain valuable skills, knowledge, and feedback on my own teaching style. I use those to refine my teaching strategies to ensure I’m providing my students with the best possible learning opportunities.

What is one piece of advice you would give other graduate educators?  

I know you asked for 1, but here’s 3:

1. Be kind to yourself. There will be days where you make mistakes, or are less prepared than you expected to be, and that’s okay! Just like your students, you too are learning. These mistakes do not reflect on your teaching aptitude, what does is how you react to those mistakes and use them to grow. Use those moments to humanize yourself to your students, you’d be surprised how much they appreciate that. Plus, every educator has a teaching experience that makes them cringe to think back on—welcome to the club!
2. Find teaching mentors that you can lean on for support and motivate you to be the best educator you can be. The last few years have been difficult, especially for educators. Having a mentor who understands how important teaching is to you and can provide you with resources to hone your teaching skills, as well as help you preserve your joy around teaching, is going to ensure you keep teaching for a long time.

3. Save those really nice emails your students write to you and the comments they put in their student evals. There are days where teaching can be difficult, and you might start to wonder why you do it—that’s where these come in! I print all mine out and put them in a folder labeled “rainy day” and I pull them out at least once a semester. These help me remember that even on my worst days, at one point my teaching did make an impression on someone, and knowing that helps me keep pushing through.

What do you enjoy in your free time? 

On the weekends, you can find me playing dungeons and dragons with other grad students, or walking/running/skiing through the woods. During the week, I’ll be lifting heavy objects repeatedly at the gym, petting my cat, and eating too many vegetarian subs from Babe’s corner.