BIPN 100 FA25: Course Retrospective

Round 4 of BIPN 100, check! This quarter was certainly my most hectic one yet. On top of teaching my largest physiology class so far (my first time with 200+ students), I was completely consumed with co-teaching (and designing) BIPN 103, our new undergraduate anatomy course. Therefore, BIPN 100 offered some comforting familiarity amidst the total blank slate that was 103.

Like in the spring, when I taught BILD 5 for the first time, I knew that BIPN 100 would mostly have to operate on autopilot while I focused my efforts on 103. That said, I did want to make a few small, incremental improvements to 100, just to let myself feel like I wasn’t completely neglecting this course.

Content-wise, I finally tightened up my lecture on Regulation of Cardiac Output. I’ve spent hours fiddling with this lecture each time I taught BIPN 100 previously, and I finally feel satisfied (for now) with the current version. I realized that my previous version of this lecture was trying to do too much — I was trying to cram into 50 minutes a discussion about how our bodies regulate both heartrate and stroke volume. As a result, I left too many loose threads unresolved, which I had relied on subsequent classes to address. For example, how exactly is diastolic blood pressure connected to afterload, and how is diastolic blood pressure (DBP) different from end-diastolic pressure (EDP)? How are vasoconstriction and venoconstriction different and how does each one influence stroke volume? These are all topics that I sort of addressed before, but I mostly relied on subsequent lectures about pressure-volume loops and blood pressure to complete the story.

This time, I decided to confront these topics straightaway. First, I needed to free up more lecture time, so I converted all the material about heartrate regulation into a pre-class video (this is consistent with my overall course structure where students watch 1-2 short videos before each lecture). That gave me much more class time to bulk up the stroke volume story, for which I added new graphic organizers and iClicker questions to address those challenging topics. Then, I went through the subsequent lectures in my cardiovascular block to make sure they would call back to these ideas again, thus giving the students a second and third reminder later on. Now, instead of relying on the subsequent lectures to resolve the loose ends, I used them to highlight how the new topics built upon these earlier principles. I do think that this effort paid off — my students did great on the exam questions about stroke volume regulation, and anecdotally I felt like there was much less confusion at office hours.

Besides improving my presentation of technical material, my second goal this quarter was to do a better job of keeping tabs on my students. This was motivated by how over the past three quarters, I would look through my spreadsheet of final grades at the end of the quarter, and I would realize that I couldn’t recognize the names of most the students who failed the class. Despite being together for 10 weeks, almost all these students completely slipped under the radar, and I genuinely had no idea who most of them were. I know that in a large class, a deep personal connection with each student is infeasible, but I would’ve at least liked to recognize these names and have flagged these students earlier in the quarter.  On a more positive note, I would also find myself reviewing final grades and realizing there were students who made absolutely enormous improvements between midterms 1 and 2. Here, I actually did recognize some of the names, as several of these students did come and speak with me after underperforming on the first midterm. However, I felt it was a real missed opportunity that I discovered this improvement so late — wouldn’t it have been great to find out earlier in the quarter, when I could’ve actually celebrated that improvement with the students?

This quarter, I decided to make a few low-effort steps to better keep track of my students and also to let them know that I was following their progress. After midterm 1, I emailed all the students who received high scores, and I also contacted the students who received a failing grade. This email to failing students was adapted from language shared by my colleague Melinda Owens at her recent workshop on inclusive teaching — I wanted the students to know that they were not in trouble or being admonished, and that they had an open invitation to speak with me about how to move forward. In addition, after midterm 2 I emailed the students who made significant improvements from midterm 1. Not only did these emails give me the benefit of recognizing more students’ names, I know that the students really appreciated the messages, and I received many heartwarming replies.

Overall, I am very proud of this iteration of BIPN 100. My students did incredibly well, and I also felt my own confidence growing as a teacher. For example, a continual source of struggle for me has been writing fair but appropriately challenging exams. When I first taught BIPN 100, I was not only inexperienced in this role but also hadn't yet accumulated enough practice problems to provide my students. As a result, the exams were a huge source of stress for everybody, and I actively dreaded showing up to class after each midterm. Over the past few quarters, not only have I built out a body of practice material for the students, I feel much more confident in writing fair (but still appropriately difficult) exams. On the end-of-quarter course evaluations, students are asked to rank their agreement to the statement “Exams were a fair measure of course learning objectives”. This quarter, 96% of student respondents either strongly agreed or agreed that my exams were fair (survey response rate = 89%). I’ve summarized the data from the past four quarters below, and it’s reassuring that I’m trending in the right direction.  

Seeing this upward trend was a huge relief for me — one of my biggest sources of trepidation entering this job was whether students would respond well to being challenged. When students are asked to evaluate whether exams are “fair”, do their minds just translate that to “easy”? When people say a class is “fair”, is that just code for “easy A”? I was genuinely concerned that my attempts to teach physiology at the technical rigor I wanted would be met with endless complaints, but that just hasn’t been the case. Of course, there are always students with grievances (justifiably so - my teaching can always be improved, and you just can’t please everybody), but on the whole, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that this course feels challenging but achievable.

I’m really happy with the continued progress of my BIPN 100 course, and I’m looking forward to teaching it a fifth time next quarter. It’s quite surreal to think that I’ve now completed my first full year as a professor — I still feel brand new in this job, but somehow, I’ve already taught BIPN 100 four times and seen 600+ students through this class?! Next quarter will hopefully be the beginning of a slightly more chill year for me. Winter 2026 will be my first quarter in which I’ve taught all of my courses at least once before. I’m sure I’ll find other ways to make myself busier than I need to be, but at least there won’t be the same frenzied panic to create materials the night before a lecture anymore, and I can instead focus on iterating and refining. That said, next quarter will bring the new challenge of teaching the most students I’ve ever had — I’ll have 250 students in BIPN 100, and 350 students in BILD 5 (double from last time), so my mantra will be to stay organized and to be kind to myself.

I’d also like to eventually sit down and look over my entire BIPN 100 syllabus with fresh eyes, to make sure I’m truly preparing students for what comes next. Since I’ve been teaching this class every quarter, it’s easy to fall into a repetitive pattern as the course material becomes more familiar. I’ll likely have a short break from BIPN 100 next academic year, and that’ll be a good opportunity to ask myself whether I should rethink any components of the course. For instance, several students who took my first offerings of BIPN 100 have now taken the MCAT or DAT, and it’ll be good to survey them to see what gaps those tests exposed in their physiology knowledge, and how I can fill those gaps in 100. But for now, that’s a wrap on year 1, and it’s time for a break :)