Aimee’s Teaching

Teaching Awards and Certifications

• Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Missouri, St. Louis (2024)
• Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, to a Tenured or Tenure Track Faculty Member, University of Missouri, St. Louis (2022)
• ACUE Certification for Excellence in Online Education
• Excellence in Teaching Award, UMSL Chapter of the National Society of Leadership and Success (2019)
• Emerson Excellence in Teaching Award (2017)

Courses

Core Teaching

Introduction to Animal Behavior (BIOL 3102)

Taught every spring. This course covers the foundations of animal behavior, including mechanisms, evolution, and ecology of behavior. For the writing portion, students are split into working groups where they write paper reviews, and create infographics and scientific posters, all focused on the behavior of a single animal in a blog format. For spring 2021, it was completely redesigned as an online asynchronous course using current best practices for student learning in this setting, and this was updated in 2025 for a summer offering. For spring 2022 and following, I merged successful online active learning techniques with my traditional in person course allowing for flexible in person attendance. Enrollment is typically around 40-50 students.

Animal Behavior Laboratory (BIOL 3103)

Taught every spring, this is an optional course with Introduction to Animal Behavior. This is a classic animal behavior lab with an emphasis on experimental design, analysis, and interpretation of data. In the last quarter of the course, students complete independent projects. We developed a mix of in person and online lab exercises in response to the pandemic. We have redesigned multiple labs to streamline lab set-up and TA tasks. Enrollment is typically 32-36 students across two sections.

Behavioral Ecology (BIOL 4102/6102)

Evolution of Cognition (BIOL 4502/6502)

Taught every other fall (odd years), this course covers topics within cognitive ecology, including recent additions of invertebrate sentience and welfare. After many iterations of both courses, this course is now structured similarly to Behavioral Ecology in terms of papers, exams, and format. As with behavioral ecology, it has undergone many iterations of course designs and will now be taught completely in person. The course each week features 1 hour of lecture and then one hour of discussion of papers. Writing a grant proposal can be a daunting proposition for undergraduates and early-stage graduate students, thus we spent 30 minutes a week working in class for each stage of this scaffolded assignment. Exams have also been updated to be oral exams with each student.

Directed Research (BIOL 4905)

Undergraduates in the department may take credits for research efforts within faculty research laboratories. The unstructured nature of these credits has proven problematic for students not quite ready for independent work. For this reason, and to increase transparency, I have added some structure to these credits with a syllabus and Canvas page. In the first week of the semester, students collaboratively work on a research contract where they outline what they will be doing, what their schedule will be, and choose their form of assessment will be (paper, poster, presentation, or other product). We meet and discuss this contract and then provide the training they need for their work. Students are assigned points for each third of the semester, to ensure they stay on track. They turn in a draft of their assessment before the end of the semester, and I give them feedback and work with them to improve their paper, poster. etc. Because I work closely with my graduate students on developing their mentoring skills, we are able to work at a larger scale in facilitating research experiences for multiple undergraduates each semester.

Topics in Animal Behavior (BIOL 5089)

This is course provides credits for participating in the long-running weekly Animal Behavior Discussion Group, which has participants from multiple institutions. I co-run this journal club with Professor Emerita Zuleyma Tang-Martinez. Our prevailing philosophy is to run a critical but kind journal club, where questions are welcome. For the 1 credit, students lead a discussion, write a summary, and participate throughout the semester. In response to the pandemic we switched this course to synchronous online using Zoom and have kept this structure as it allowed non-thesis masters students to participate from their jobs during their lunch breaks. In the new structure we have been able to include participants from multiple countries, including some alumni from our department.

Periodic Teaching

BIOL 5178 Introduction to Graduate Research in Biology

This is a rotating service course for new graduate students, which I helped design in its original initial phases. In 2021 I overhauled this course to add structure and to respond to needs expressed by current graduate students. The course serves as an introduction to the department and covers skills needed by graduate students.  An important goal of my redesign of the course was to make the “hidden curriculum” as transparent as possible. This is critical because our students come with diverse backgrounds, different amounts of previous mentoring, and sometimes quite different preparation for the independence of graduate studies. We invite guest speakers on department research and campus resources, and host panels on work-life balance, getting the most from mentoring relationships, and advice from current graduate students. I added new components for creating individual development plans, discussions with our teaching faculty, a panel on grant writing, and curriculum on resilience for early career researchers (from the NIH). These materials have been shared with colleagues.

BIOL 6915 Graduate Research Practicum “Biology PhD Comprehensive Exams”

In 2022 our department revised our PhD comprehensive exams to include a course preparing them for the exam. Bethany Zolman and I designed and have been teaching this course, which focuses on synthetic writing, grant writing, as well as some details of the exam itself. The goal is to make the requirements and the skills we are examining them in to be completely transparent. We prepare students to avoid common pitfalls and succeed, while making the process less daunting and less stressful. All of this allows us as a faculty to more accurately assess the work the students are producing, which is the goal. Students have reported less stress and more confidence as they enter the comprehensive exam process.

Aimee’s Teaching Philosophy

I find great joy and satisfaction in my role as a teacher-scholar. Teaching is a worthwhile challenge and I appreciate the ways in which my research as a scientist enhance my teaching and the ways in which my teaching enhances my work as a scholar. My approach for both teaching and mentoring best fits within the paradigm of scientific teaching. I read the empirical work on pedagogical approaches, experiment in incorporating effective techniques, assess how effective a given technique was on student learning outcomes, and adjust as needed. I am constantly tinkering with my courses and my approaches as a research mentor, inspired by reading, by workshops, and especially by my colleagues at UMSL and in my field of animal behavior. This agility has proven to be useful and necessary as we navigate the continued impacts of the pandemic on our students. My teaching and mentoring philosophies are guided by principles of inclusivity, transparency, kindness, and an enthusiasm for the natural world. I integrate my own research into my courses, and I infuse teaching and experiences for undergraduates into my research laboratory. All of these aspects help me better meet my teaching goals of incorporating transferable research skills into my classes as well as the subject area content of my courses.

I feel fortunate to teach courses related to animal behavior, my area of study for 25 years. I absolutely love talking about animal behavior. Throughout my career, student evaluations reveal that students appreciate my enthusiasm for the subject, and I lean into this. I keep up with the newest work in areas of animal behavior, incorporating new and compelling material into my courses. I highlight work across my own career where we discuss the process of a research project and the many people who are typically involved in such work. During my training and into my current research, have worked in some foundational areas of animal behavior, which are classic examples from their textbook. I use these well-chosen examples across the course. For instance, much of my current research focuses on bees. In animal behavior, they learn about the waggle dance in honeybees as they learn about levels of analysis of behavior. We pick up bees again as they learn about the sensory systems of animals, and I give them examples of how we learn about sensory systems with research on bees. As they learn about neurobiology, we use classic examples of changes in the brains of bees as they learn to forage, and then extend this knowledge with additional research examples when we cover genes and development. Finally, as the course moves into the function of behavior, we revisit foraging bees to understand social information use and foraging theory. By the end of the course they have learned a layered example of how and why a behavior happens, and I leverage my research knowledge and enthusiasm in this process. I use my past research in conjunction with more recent work on additional extended examples of mating in prairie voles and seed caching in birds. One of my research projects on the evolution of learning is even highlighted in their textbook. I work to show students how and where a graph or figure in their textbook comes from. This process of science is the foundation for the skills-based learning I integrate into my courses. I build transferable skills into my assessments, for instance finding and citing peer reviewed literature, reading and critiquing empirical literature, experimental design, and writing synthetic reviews of literature as well as research proposals. For my upper division courses, we delve into the roles of peer review and of editing, both of which are critical for a successful working scientist. I share my own experiences as a researcher, a manuscript and grant writer, a journal editor, and a grant reviewer, and what I see when I read the scientific literature that we are discussing in class.

Teaching is an integral component to my research and the majority of my research program is accomplished with student collaborators, both graduate and undergraduate. Publications from my lab often have undergraduate co-authors. Thus teaching and mentoring in the research laboratory form a critical part of my work as a scholar. I design research in my own lab to maximize undergraduate involvement and when I write grants, I always include a budget for paying undergraduates as research assistants. For instance, a current research grant from the USDA has provided over 30 UMSL students experience in agricultural and ecological research, and I have written many recommendation letters and provided references for job searches for these students. Many students are learning research in my lab while taking directed research credits. I work to match students to projects fitting their time commitment, skills, and motivations, and the team structures in which these projects happen. I work with students as they learn to design and conduct experiments while overcoming the challenges inherent in research. Students learn their specific research, but also skills in project management, experimental design, data collection and integrity, working as part of a diverse team, and writing and presenting research, among other important skills. Mentoring plays a huge role in this learning and I continually work at my mentoring skills. I read about and apply evidence-based practices in mentoring and participate in mentoring workshops. Many studies describe the benefits that high quality mentoring can have on students, playing a large role in making science more inclusive. High quality mentoring can have a large impact on students persisting in STEM, especially students who have traditionally been underrepresented in STEM. My mentoring education is a work in progress. For instance, during this past year and a half I have taken a deep dive into the resources on mentoring students with disabilities

I highlight a few aspects of inclusive mentoring and teaching for the students in my research lab. First, I place a priority on students gaining a sense of belongingness as they learn in the lab. I actively nurture the diversity of students within the lab and am happy that the composition of my lab has reflected the diversity of UMSL students, in both visible and less visible ways. As with my more formal teaching, my mentoring features a large amount of self-reflection. Whether it is a longer-term mentoring relationship or a semester-long one, I am making adjustments to tailor my approach to individual students, their projects, and our expectations. Representation is also important. For instance, I am a disabled professor in STEM, and statistically, our numbers are small. I self-identify to my students in case they are also disabled. For other students, I work to connect them to networks of scientists that share their identity. Finally, I frequently take a coaching approach to mentoring students. Every student needs to know that a professor is on their side and wants them to succeed. We are all working under different constraints, some more visible than others, and there are many routes to success. While my students go on to work across many fields, my goal is that they take their research skills with them, along with an understanding and appreciation of what animals are doing in nature and perhaps how we might study the animal behavior they just saw on a viral video. I hope this knowledge brings them joy as well, as they live their lives with a deeper appreciation of the fascinating things happening with the animals around them.