Mark Twain wrote, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." When I teach, I try to instill in my students a heightened sensitivity for language, and a belief that words matter and are therefore worth the time it takes to get them right.

I was very fortunate during my own education to have had intellectually curious, creative, and dedicated professors for whom words deeply mattered, and who threw themselves into their teaching with tremendous enthusiasm. They were models for me, and in turn I strive to model my love of reading, writing, and teaching for my own students. The methods I use vary from class to class and include workshop, group discussion, peer group, lecture, in-class writing, individual conferencing, and collaboration. Always, though, I put an emphasis on how texts are constructed—the choices that authors make and how these choices affect meaning—so that students may come to see literature as something alive and relevant, and technique as something they can learn to apply.

This is not to say that active and engaged reading automatically translates into the ability to produce quality writing. To help students along in their apprenticeship as writers, I ensure that they produce a lot of material. My role is to guide students toward complexity in their writing and a more complete, precise, and nuanced articulation of their understanding of the world. I point them toward texts that might serve as models and help them to become conscious of the decisions they are making on the page. All the while, I remain mindful that, ultimately, the students themselves do the most important work—writing, rewriting, and then rewriting still more, until what once might have seemed beyond their grasp becomes within it.

Despite my emphasis on technique, I impress on my students that literature is more than the sum total of technical decisions. One of the most helpful things a professor ever said to me, after I had shown her a fifth—or maybe it was a tenth—revision of the same section of a short story, was this: "It's not a writing problem. It's a thinking problem." I had been trying to find a technical solution to what wasn't a problem of craft. Until I committed myself to seeing not just the paragraph in front of me, but the world that the paragraph was inadequately representing, more revision would only mean a more elegant version of the same limited thinking. Thus I have always urged my students to hold two thoughts in their minds simultaneously: that mastery of craft is essential to their development as writers, and that mastery of craft, however important, is only useful to the extent that the imagination is primed and the mind open to the world of ideas.

Annotation note: Notice in this example how the instructor provides personal details about his experiences as a student and how these influenced his own practices.  

Teaching Philosophy - Sean Stokes
My teaching philosophy is rooted in a simple belief: students learn best when they feel supported, challenged, and genuinely seen. As an organic chemistry professor working with hundreds of students each semester, I strive to create a learning environment that balances rigor with empathy, structure with flexibility, and deep disciplinary expertise with an equally deep commitment to pedagogy.

Teaching as a Responsive, Student-Centered Practice
Teaching organic chemistry, especially in large-enrollment courses, requires more than content mastery. It demands attentiveness to how students think, process complex information, and respond to academic challenges. Students arrive with diverse backgrounds, learning histories, and levels of preparation, and they deserve a classroom experience that acknowledges these differences.
I work intentionally to understand how my students learn. While no framework captures every learner, tools such as Felder and Silverman's Index of Learning Styles help me think about students as sensory or intuitive processors, visual or verbal learners, active or reflective thinkers, and sequential or global organizers. I design my courses to provide multiple entry points into the material: visual models, guided problem solving, verbal explanations, conceptual maps, and structured practice, so students can build understanding in ways that match their learning strengths while also developing new ones.

Clarity, Transparency, and Accessibility
Although I set high expectations, I aim to make those expectations transparent. I want students to understand not only what we are learning, but why it matters and how it connects to the larger narrative of organic chemistry. I work close to my students (physically in the classroom and relationally through communication) so I can sense when comprehension falters and adjust my approach.
In large lecture courses, I take deliberate steps to project approachability: greeting students before class, encouraging questions during problem-solving segments, and creating multiple channels for interaction. Through strategies such as doc-cam walkthroughs, practice examples that move from simple to complex, and opportunities for students to explain their reasoning, I make space for students to reveal their thinking without fear of judgment.

Active Learning and Conceptual Integration
Organic chemistry becomes meaningful when students see it as a connected system rather than a list of isolated reactions. To promote this understanding, I routinely use interconnected problem-solving activities with what I call "reaction webs" that begin with a simple molecule and expand outward to demonstrate how functional groups transform, interact, and interconvert. Working both forward and backward through reaction pathways helps students identify patterns, reinforce core mechanistic concepts, and situate new content in a broader context.
These techniques support one of my central teaching goals: helping students shift from memorizing reactions to recognizing relationships and reasoning through mechanisms.