Pedagogy, the science of teaching and learning, explores the principles, practices, and methods that shape how knowledge is transmitted and retained. Over time, pedagogy underwent a fundamental shift from a traditional, teacher-centered methodology based on rote memorization to a more collaborative, student-centered approach that encourages exploration and questions. The ongoing evolution of pedagogy continues to drive scientific education, especially as new technologies create opportunities for personalized learning. Exploring innovative teaching strategies allows for the cultivation of critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability—skills that are vital in an environment where research and knowledge continually evolve. Integration of effective pedagogy in the Tri-I is key to fostering an academic community that thrives on discovery, collaboration, and the advancement of knowledge.

History of Pedagogy

The first pedagogical traditions evolved in ancient civilizations like Egypt, China, and India. Considered one of the earliest formal education systems in the world, scribe schools in Egypt taught students mathematics, writing, and religious texts to raise the next generation of government officials. In India, Vedic education was focused on sharing knowledge through oral tradition. Similar to Europe, education in India was based on the social caste of a student. In ancient China, where Confucius heavily influenced education, the emphasis was placed on moral development, piety, and classical texts. This model was replicated across East Asia in Korea and Japan.

The roots of Western pedagogy trace back to Ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C., where slaves acted as educators for noble children and education was mostly informal, relying on oral traditions and apprenticeships. During the Middle Ages in Europe, education became more organized through the Catholic Church and was largely accessible only to the wealthy. The Church established schools to train clergy, focusing on classical studies and religious instruction, with limited depth for arithmetic and grammar beyond practical use and strong restrictions for women and girls. By the late nineteenth century, pedagogy was recognized as an applied science, evolving alongside societal and technological changes.

Today, pedagogy is regarded as a discipline aimed at guiding effective teaching and learning processes. In STEM education, pedagogy refers to the diverse methods and approaches educators use to teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Effective STEM pedagogy focuses on inquiry-based exploration and real-world problem-solving, which are designed to foster critical thinking and collaboration. By teaching STEM knowledge within practical frameworks, educators can implement projects that align with learning outcomes and enhance the development of essential scientific skills, preparing students for real-world challenges.

Pedagogy and STEM Education

Pedagogy plays a crucial role in engaging students with STEM subjects. Science is inherently creative, and scientists must be able to think critically about data—how it is collected and presented—to propose new ideas. Graduate classes are designed to foster these critical thinking skills through journal clubs or writing mock grant proposals. In recent years, pedagogical trends in STEM have shifted away from traditional, lecture-based classes towards active and inquiry-based learning. Active learning in STEM classes promotes deeper conceptual understanding, increases student engagement, develops critical thinking skills, and improves problem-solving abilities—all of which are crucial for success in STEM fields. A study by Dr. Stieha and her colleagues investigated the benefits of active learning in undergraduate STEM classes and found a strong association between active learning and increased confidence, self-efficacy, and motivation, all of which positively impact persistence in STEM. With inquiry-based learning—a type of active learning—students are given space to propose questions and become invested in completing an experiment, from collecting data to interpreting the results. Active and inquiry-based learning can also improve the accessibility of STEM subjects. In undergraduate STEM courses, these methods significantly narrow the performance gaps between overrepresented and underrepresented students, with minorities and students with disabilities often experiencing the most significant gains.

Dr. Tim Stearns, Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Rockefeller University,  has experience developing innovation-based coursework. While at Stanford, he created a pre-graduate program called Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) for students interested in research. A key part of the program was an introductory research lab course, where students could gain valuable research skills by planning their experiments instead of having to follow a lab manual. “The standard biology lab course was a cookbook variety… and there typically [are] a variety of experiments you do over the semester with different organisms. … That’s not science, it’s demonstration science,” he said. “Science is about having a question that’s addressable, thinking about an experiment to address it, looking at your results, and then considering what to do next.” Another unusual aspect of the program was that students had twenty-four-hour access to the lab. He remembers, “I had a complaint one time from a faculty member from the adjoining lab saying ‘the students in your teaching lab are there at 2am playing music’…[but they’re] doing real experiments where students own a question and doing experiments with real data where the answer is not known in advance.” The program was highly successful at Stanford, and in January 2024, Rockefeller implemented a CURE course for Hunter undergraduate students in collaboration with RockEDU, the university’s science outreach program.

Several critics have argued that inquiry-based learning can discourage students from memorizing basic facts, which in turn could make them less efficient at solving more complex problems. As Khan Academy founder Sal Khan explained in an interview with The 74 about the decline of math performance post-COVID: “Say you’re a little shaky on what seven plus seven is, and you have to count on your fingers. Then you move on to multiplication, which is repeated addition: seven plus seven plus seven. If you have to compute those things and don’t know off the bat that seven plus seven equals fourteen, you’re not going to get multiplication fluency either. All of a sudden, you start doing word problems or exponents, and you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Pedagogy in the Tri-I

When Dr. Stearns first started as an Assistant Professor at Stanford, he had the idea of creating a course on the biophysics of macromolecules in the context of the cell cycle but realized that he knew little about teaching undergraduates. “I had very positive and negative experiences in the classroom along my way as a student, and I had thought I developed a sense of what seemed to work well in the classroom and what didn’t, although I hadn’t really thought deeply about it and certainly had not engaged with any science education literature. Most research professors have no idea that this literature even exists,” he admitted.

There are a variety of ways for students in the Tri-I to gain teaching experience, with various levels of commitment. One of the more involved programs is Rockefeller’s Summer Science Research Program (SSRP), a full-time research experience for high schoolers. Graduate students and postdocs can sign up to lead various research tracks or serve as support scientists. They receive training on how to teach, design a realistic course framework, plan a budget, and obtain course supplies. Other related programs within the Tri-I include RockEDU’s Jumpstart program and the High School Catalyst Program.

The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) at Cornell University is another resource that supports instructors through individualized services, programs, institutes, and campus-wide initiatives. Senior instructional designer Rachel Gunderson often starts consultations with instructors by creating three to five clear learning goals for the course and determining how they will be assessed, before going into more detail about class structure, learning activities, and syllabus development. Her goal is to foster critical thinking skills and a growth mindset while streamlining the learning experience for students. “We want to keep in mind…what is it like to be the student and how can we design [a course] to be received the best by the student?” she said.

As classes often contain many different types of learners, Gunderson is interested in implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework that aims to eliminate barriers in learning experiences. UDL could look like giving students multiple formats for content delivery—for example, making notes or class recordings available alongside live teaching. It could also look like making different assessment types available, so students can choose the option that works best for their learning style. One example of a different assessment type is the use of social annotation, through which students can make asynchronous comments and notes on a shared online document, mimicking a live seminar discussion. This kind of assessment can help give neurodivergent people or those with severe anxiety a chance to participate in class discussions. “I just heard a teacher speak at Cornell who said that they were just blown away with the brilliance of the students in those experiences because those were some of the students that were not saying anything during the live seminar,” Gunderson said. “They were able to draw from different students in a very different way and just hear that they’re actually quite thoughtful and very critically thinking, very intelligent.”

CTI can also help with improving teaching presence and building community within the classroom. Some ways teachers can develop their teacher presence is to check in often with students, acknowledge difficulties of the course, and be vulnerable. “It really goes a long way for a teacher to talk about times in their life when they needed to get help in a class,” Gunderson notes. “It makes it more likely for students to be able to want to go and access extra support and resources when needed.” Third-year Tri-I student Anoosha Banerjee, who co-led a 2024 SSRP track called “Protein Pioneers into the Vireon,” suggests using tools like Kahoot that can anonymize assessment while still gauging understanding, in order to create an environment that encourages students to ask questions. “Setting a vibe for the class that there are no wrong questions is obviously very important, like being very kind and forgiving when people ask questions and making it interactive but not a stressful interaction,” she said.

Advice for New Instructors

Similar to Dr. Stearns’s experience, many college- and graduate school-level instructors begin teaching without much experience or knowledge about effective educational practices. Gunderson noticed that a common mistake new instructors make is trying to include too much content in the course. “Try to keep things really simple with your courses; don’t try to do too much,” she said. “[New instructors] often will put too many goals in their course, like too many learning outcomes, and they have to assess each one of those, and it can just be very overwhelming and an overload for the students.” She also recommends giving students multiple assignments so they have the chance to make mistakes without feeling stressed. “I think a lot of people learn through failure. So you need to give students an opportunity to have trial and error and work through really hard content and still be able to be successful in the course,” she said.

Banerjee remembers feeling surprised and nervous at how uninterested her students seemed during their first meeting. She did not take it too personally, however. “We think that our teaching needs to be superb and excellent, but it’s really not about us. It’s about the students and what they learn. I think that we need to be less inward-thinking about teaching and mentoring in general in science. It’s not about you and your legacy or what you think you know, it’s about the people who are learning,” she said.

From his own experience, Dr. Stearns recommends that new instructors give themselves enough time to create their lectures. “Most people don’t understand the ratio of time spent preparing and time in the classroom… maybe ten hours to one hour,” he said. Co-teaching a course can also make the experience less daunting, in addition to giving instructors the opportunity to learn from each other. “You both are responsible for the course and have some notion about how to teach, but you have to have a discussion together about how to teach, how to evaluate the students, do we go to each other’s lectures… I found that to be the most interesting part of being a professor, and I highly recommend it,” he said.

Gunderson had a final piece of advice for new teachers: don’t be afraid to change things about the course. “Even when you think you have your class perfectly developed, there’s always going to be issues that come in. So that’s normal and common with every teacher. And you kind of just learn as you’re doing and you can adapt things on the fly. So even if you had a plan going in and it’s already not working with the students, you can still change things. … You can salvage things even if they’re going wrong.”