My teaching/mentoring philosophy is based on the belief that students have innate desires to learn and grow, and when a mentor provides a stimulating environment, it facilitates and changes students' learning. To enable students' learning through a stimulating environment, well-structured learning tasks and expectations are important, in which students can direct and manage their learning. Further, a supportive learning community could facilitate learning, where SPUR student can learn together as a community with a mentor, graduate students, and undergraduate students of the lab. More important, the learning community with multiple members needs to provide multiple perspectives so that students can compare, contrast, and critically evaluate them.

This can be done by multiple activities with different formats with multiple members involved. Specific activities:

Bi-weekly lab meetings: Where PI, graduate students, undergraduate students, and the SPUR student gather together to discuss project prospect and evaluation on what needs to be done, what has been found, what needs to be changed and what the implications are.

Weekly individual check-in's: PI and SPUR student will have one-on-one meetings to go over the weekly goals, expectations, and any questions that the student may have.

Weekly mentoring sessions: The SPUR student will closely work with graduate students in hands-on part of the project, on running observation, and extracting and analyzing data, for example.

Weekly journal reading: PI and the SPUR student will communicate online by emails and google doc, where they will read and discuss previous literature and future study ideas