The mission of my teaching is to incorporate experiential learning into my courses. I believe helping students experience the material deepens their learning and encourages them to practice important skills to become confident lifelong independent learners. Through experiential learning, I expect my students to practice critical thinking and problem solving both collaboratively and individually. I encourage them to test, fail, and retest a model or idea, imitating the experience of a professional scientist. I believe communicating information is essential to deeper learning, so I hope to build confidence in my students and their knowledge by encouraging them to practice writing and speaking in class. Not only are these lifelong skills required for success after my courses, communicating helps to increase thoughts about the material, and spur independent learning. I also recognize that the field of science does not often contain a diverse set of voices. It is imperative to me that my classroom is a place where all student identities (gender, race, socioeconomic status, sexuality, ability and religion) are valid, and that it has a diverse set of perspectives, as this is imperative to both class success and overall scientific success. I hope to encourage collaboration of students across identities and build confidence in their learning and ability by understanding their unique perspective. My goal is to create a classroom of thoughtful, reflective, and self-guided students with the skills and confidence necessary to take on the workforce in a diverse and changing world.