Teaching
Throughout my time at Texas A&M University, I have been the primary instructor for one course of International Political Economy in Fall 2024. In addition, I have been a teaching assistant for six undergraduate courses and responsible for eleven undergraduate labs. I was a teaching assistant for POLS 209 Introduction to Political Science Research for ten sections (under four different faculty members) and POLS 308 Game Theoretic Methods in Political Science for one section. In each of these assignments, I was responsible for holding and preparing materials for a weekly lab. These forty-five-minute labs were held every Friday during each semester. I was typically responsible for two sections of about twenty students per semester. I have taught a total of two hundred and sixteen undergraduate students throughout my assignments.
In each of these teaching assignments, I was responsible for the majority of the grading of my sections, held frequent office hours for student questions, and was the primary point of contact for students enrolled in my sections. For nine of the eleven assignments, I was responsible for preparing almost all of the lab materials for use in my lab.
The purpose of the POLS 209 labs was to teach students how to conduct statistical analysis using large data sets in the R coding language. Although two of the four primary instructors who taught this course would sometimes include some code elements within the weekly seminars, most coding taught to students occurred entirely within the weekly Friday labs. This course is required for undergraduates pursuing a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science in political science. For most students enrolled in this course, this class was the first time they were introduced to statistical methods, coding, and writing research papers.
As such, students in this course often needed extensive help, and I have always taken pride in how responsive I have been to student emails and attendance during my weekly office hours. For example, in the Fall of 2024, my weekly office hours became so heavily attended that I often had to move the 5-8 students present at each office hour to a conference room in the department, where I helped troubleshoot coding issues faced by the students, and encouraged them to work together to address coding issues they faced.
When I was a teaching assistant for POLS 209 in the Spring of 2024 and in the Spring of 2022, I was given additional responsibilities due to my experience with the course. In the Spring of 2022, I was the head teaching assistant, primarily communicating with other teaching assistants to ensure that grading, materials, and standards were similar across sections. Additionally, I was asked to draft a short guide for other new teaching assistants on the best practices for teaching code in the Friday labs. In the Spring of 2024, another experienced teaching assistant was often responsible for drafting grading rubrics and ensuring similar grading criteria across sections. In addition, I was asked to instruct other teaching assistants on the best practices for holding labs for the course.
The purpose of the POLS 308 lab was to solve game theoretic problems with the students to provide them with experience with solving the types of questions they would see in their homework and exams. Solving game theoretic questions involves applied calculus. Unfortunately, however, due to course requirement issues, completing a university-level calculus course was not a prerequisite for enrollment in this course. As such, much of my office hours were spent reviewing both calculus and our covered solution concepts with students, who often struggled greatly with the materials.
Figure One
The average teaching evaluation scores for each section are shown in Figure 1 above. Each dot represents a section taught, with the responses organized on a course-semester basis. The graphics show that, on average, my sections have rated me very highly in my ability to foster an effective learning environment, contribute to their learning, and encourage their self-learning. Additionally, Figure 2 shows the grade distributions for each semester. For most semesters, the median grade each semester was a high B, with some outliers receiving failing grades within each semester. Both my evaluation and grade distributions are slightly lower for POLS 308. I attribute these lower rankings to the extreme difficulty many political science students had with the applied calculus utilized in the course.
Figure Two
For an overview of my teaching evaluations, see the Teaching Evaluation Overview link below. For detailed students comments on my teaching, see the Teaching Evaluations: Student Comments link below.