Traditional teaching techniques focus mainly on two senses: hearing and eyesight, hence, limiting the interaction interface with the study subject. This lowers the learning outcome. Moreover, passive learning usually tends to make even the most interesting topics boring and contributes mainly to the development of the memorisation skills. Overall, this classical teaching paradigm leaves students less prepared for their future career, and provides only a few transferable skills.

Evidence-based learning, on the other hand, incorporates active teaching methods that drastically improves learning experience. Active methods of learning include using different ways of receiving new information, interactions of students with the subject of study (e.g. practical workshops), active engagement in the social life of the studying group, and the opportunity to incorporate newly acquired knowledge in practice.

Senses

All sensory mechanisms contribute to the efficient study process, since all of them evolved to help humans adapt to the environment and survive. Therefore, using them in combination provides more wholesome studying experience.

Emotions

Incorporation of emotions plays an important role in the efficient study process. When students receive, for example, positive emotion from the studying process, it raises their motivation, hence speeding up the study process, and vice versa, when studying associates with the negative feelings, students tend to avoid it.

Inspiration/Motivation

Inspiration and motivation If students are inspired by the topic they study, and by the teacher they study from, it leads to increased level of performance and encourages student’s independent learning.

Study environment (Feeling of community)

It is very important to create an inclusive and supportive environment in the study community. When students feel that they belong, they want to participate in the study activities more than if they feel isolated.

All these study methods when combined together lead to exponential growth of learning experience, provide students with the necessary skills, and prepare them for future challenges.

Estonia_TUIT Teaching Philosophy Statement

Estonia TUIT follows the evidence-based learning principle when designing educational events and materials.

Target different senses

We design our educational activities to target different senses of participants. While traditional teaching methods focus mostly on seeing and listening, we aim to include as many senses as possible. Incorporating different senses into the studying process enables us to research the topic from a different perspective and allows us to use all the sensory tools that were evolutionarily developed to help humans learn and survive.

Physical interaction

We encourage physical interaction of participants with the subject of the study, like during DNA extraction workshop you need to first crush the kiwi to release cells, then mix it with soap and salt to break the member, filter, precipitate and look at the DNA. And even though this process reminds you of cooking, it teaches you a lot: the composition of the cell membrane and how soap breaks it, why we need to add salt to the solution and what happens if we forget, or why addition of ethanol precipitates DNA.

Emotions and Excitement

We create positive emotions and excitement. Since we are all very excited about what we do, we inspire by example and demonstrate that synthetic biology can be fun! This raises the interest of the participants to the subject of study and sufficiently increases the learning outcomes, since it is a well-known concept that we learn better things we are interested in or care about!

Accessible at home

We ensure that workshop participants get the opportunity to continue doing experiments at home as we provide our protocols to the participants. Moreover, most of our workshops could be repeated at home with the components that could be easily found in the department store. To engage even more people in our workshops, we publish them on our wiki for other teams to use. Moreover, we have translated protocols to 9 languages to enable other teams to use them in local communities.

Target different ages

Our workshops are meant for any age group or level of education. We do not believe in “One size fits all” philosophy and adjust our workshops for the target audience. Children up to 10 years old are usually more interested in the visual and sensory experience, and every time are very excited when we ask them to smash kiwi for our DNA extraction workshop. For high-schoolers we provide extensive instructions to explain the mechanism on why soap is used to break the cell membranes or what happens if we forget to add salt. Therefore, different groups of people come out from the workshop with slightly different outcomes.

Implementation of our teaching philosophy on ourselves

Our Team as an Example of Our Teaching Philosophy

“Preach what you teach” iGEM is a course in the Science & Technology curriculum at the University of Tartu. So the team members study hard to succeed. We do not only teach others using evidence-based learning methods but also incorporate Estonia_TUIT teaching philosophy into our iGEM experience.

We are very diverse, coming from 9 different countries. We create a good atmosphere in our team where everyone feels they belong. This feeling of belonging stimulates more active participation. We are emotionally involved in the project, caring about its success. We support each other all the way through the iGEM season. We learn to solve problems from the moment we search for the project idea, to the moment we need to improvise a new DNA source for our DNA extraction workshop (it was a grass) or during wiki freeze we all interchange roles, and could help the team succeed.