My teaching is built around a single conviction: that good instruction is not the transmission of content but the deliberate construction of conditions in which students build durable knowledge, transferable skills, and a confident professional identity. What follows is how I design my courses - the theoretical foundations that underwrite my practice, the tools that operationalize it, and the responsibilities I hold to both the students in front of me and the systems they are about to enter.
Three layers. At the centre, the student - a whole person whose identity, prior knowledge, and lived experience are starting capital for learning. Around them, four learning-science frameworks set the conditions for growth. Around those, the everyday tools I use to put theory into practice. Switch tabs to filter; hover or tap any card to read more.
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The frameworks below are not a reading list - they are decision rules I apply when I draft a syllabus, sequence a unit, or grade a paper. They keep me honest about whether each course element is actually doing pedagogical work, or just filling weeks.
I sequence courses so that each new task sits just beyond what a student could do alone, but within reach with structured support. Tutorials, exemplars, peer collaboration, and instructor feedback are the temporary scaffolds that close the gap.
Students do not enter a course identical, so I do not require them to demonstrate learning identically. I offer multiple pathways to engage with material and to show mastery - written, oral, visual, individual, collaborative - all graded against the same rubric.
Early assessments target recall and comprehension; later assessments push students into analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and creation. By the end of the course, students are not summarizing the literature - they are critiquing it and producing their own.
I map every course to specific knowledge and skill outcomes, and align each activity, assessment, and feedback loop to one of those outcomes. If a learning activity does not move a student toward a declared outcome, it does not survive the syllabus.
The frameworks above only matter because they serve a deeper orientation. I take a constructivist view of learning: students build understanding by acting on material, not by absorbing it. I take a student-centred view of the classroom: the instructor's job is to design conditions for that construction, not to perform expertise. And I take an identity-aware view of the learner: who a student is - their language, culture, gender, sexuality, disability, prior schooling, first-generation status - shapes how they enter the material and what it costs them to engage. Pretending otherwise produces a classroom that quietly favours students who already look like the people the curriculum was written for.
I came through university figuring out the unwritten rules on my own as a first-generation college student, while also working through chronic illness and the everyday weight of being a queer student on campus. I know what it feels like to find your own life in the syllabus - and what it feels like not to. That experience shapes how I select readings, write rubrics, and respond to a student who turns up to office hours unsure they belong.
One thing I try not to lose sight of: every grade I assign is, in effect, a public endorsement. A transcript is the document a future employer, residency director, or graduate-admissions committee will use to decide whether to trust this person with patients, with data, with policy, with people. I hold both ends of that responsibility at once - the obligation to teach generously and the obligation to evaluate honestly.
I also try not to be naive about what the university is. It is, among other things, a tool of social mobility. For many of my students - particularly first-generation, low-income, racialized, Indigenous, and immigrant students - a degree from a Canadian university is one of a small number of credentials that can change the trajectory of a family across a generation. That is a serious thing to be part of. It means I take seriously what it would cost a student if I taught carelessly or graded thoughtlessly. It also means I take seriously what it would cost the public if I certified work that was not, in fact, ready.
Give them every legitimate chance to succeed: clear expectations, scaffolded practice, real feedback, accommodations that match the barrier, and a relationship in which they can ask for help without feeling small.
Endorse only the work that meets the standard. The signature I put on a transcript is a promise to whoever comes after - the patient, the policy desk, the community partner - that this person is ready to do the work.
I do not think these two obligations are in fundamental conflict, but I do think they live in productive tension. Rigour without generosity is gatekeeping. Generosity without rigour is a disservice to everyone the student will go on to work with. The job is to hold both.
These are the concrete instruments I use to put the theoretical frameworks into practice. Each one exists for a reason that traces back to a specific framework above.
Content delivery (recorded lectures, readings, coursebooks) happens before class so that classroom time can be spent on the work students cannot easily do alone - guided application, problem-solving, peer learning, and instructor feedback.
Every assignment ships with a transparent rubric and worked exemplars from day one of the course. Students should never have to guess what success looks like - and I should never have to grade against a standard I have not made explicit.
Detailed syllabi, weekly outlines, and assignment guides function as the course's operating manual. The goal is to remove every avoidable source of friction so cognitive effort can go to the material, not to figuring out what the instructor wants.
Before the course begins, I survey students on prior coursework, software experience, accessibility needs, language background, and the questions they came in hoping to answer. The results actually change how I sequence the first three weeks.
At roughly the course midpoint I run an anonymous evaluation focused on what is helping learning and what is getting in the way - and then I tell students what I changed in response. This treats the course as a live system, not a fixed artifact.
Major assignments are broken into staged components - proposal, literature scan, draft, peer review, final - so that feedback arrives early enough to act on, and students learn the process of producing the work, not just the product.
Concept maps, minute papers, brief polls, and peer teaching let me see in near-real-time whether students are tracking the material. They also normalize the experience of not yet understanding something - a precondition for actually learning it.
Assignments are designed to be carried out of the course: a policy brief a student can show a future employer, a knowledge-translation product they can put on a website, a piece of analysis they can cite in a grad-school application.
I am genuinely passionate about teaching as a craft - the design of an assignment is a creative act, and a well-built course is a thing of real beauty. But the craft has a purpose. I want students to leave each course with deliverables they can actually use: an analysis they wrote and ran themselves, a policy brief that could be sent to a real decision-maker, an evaluation framework a community partner could adopt. Across a degree, those artefacts add up to a portfolio of demonstrable work - the kind that gives a student something concrete to show, beyond a transcript, when they apply for a job, a grant, or a graduate program.
I also write courses so that students leave with translatable statements - language they can use about themselves in interviews and on CVs that is honest, specific, and grounded in work they actually did. “I designed and delivered a health-policy briefing on overdose response” means something to a hiring manager in a way that “I took a public-health policy course” does not.
This applied orientation also reflects how I think about the relationship between the university and the rest of the world. My students are not training to be academics - most of them are going into clinical practice, into health authorities, into NGOs, into policy, into industry, into community organizing. The work they do in my classroom should look enough like the work they will do afterward that the transition is short.
A growing body of evidence - from labour-market research, from employer surveys, and from health-services literature in particular - tells us that what employers and the public most often find missing in new graduates is not technical capability but the relational and self-regulatory skills that surround it: communication, collaboration, emotional regulation, leadership under uncertainty, the ability to receive feedback, the ability to disagree well. These so-called “soft skills” are, in my experience, neither soft nor optional. They are the skills that decide whether a graduate's hard skills ever get to be useful.
I build deliberate practice with these skills into my courses. Group projects are designed (and scaffolded) so that real teamwork is required, not just labour-divided parallel work. Peer-review cycles teach students how to give and receive feedback on substance. Briefing-note assignments require students to write for a non-academic reader. Presentation assignments include guided rehearsal and structured peer critique. Office hours are framed as an ordinary part of working with a supervisor, not as a sign of weakness.
I am especially mindful of this in the health-systems and public-health programs I teach in, because the graduates of those programs will work in environments where listening well and communicating clearly are not garnishes on the technical work - they are part of the technical work.
Equity and fairness in the classroom are not the same thing, and the difference matters. A “fair” classroom that treats every student identically can still reproduce the inequities students walked in with. I design courses to be equitable: multiple formats for materials, multiple pathways for assessment, generous and clearly published policies for extensions and accommodations, and rubrics that evaluate the same outcomes across those pathways. Accommodation is built into the design of the course rather than offered as a quiet exception to it.
I also take approachability seriously. I tell students explicitly, on day one and again at midterm, that office hours are not reserved for students in academic trouble; that asking for help is part of the work; and that I would rather hear about a problem early than receive a polished excuse late. I try to be the kind of instructor who is easy to email and easy to find - because the students who most need a relationship with their instructor are often the ones least likely to assume they are allowed to have one.
None of this softens the standard. The rubric is still the rubric, and the endorsement at the end of the course still has to mean something. But the route to meeting the standard is wider than it used to be, and that, to me, is the work.
