Recombinant Teaching: STEM Education Office Hours with Dr. Justin Shaffer
Aug 5, 2026 · 23 min · 11 segments
We’ve covered how to handle traditional face-to-face classes, but how do you use structure in labs and online situations? In this episode of the STEM Course Design Series, Justin discusses how to use…
So, again, no matter what STEM discipline you're in, you're going to have a lab associated with it, whether it's introductory lab that's teaching lots and lots of students at the service course or maybe an upper division specialized elective type lab.
And we all know how labs are and what they're so great at, which is giving that hands on experiential development.
All this is so, so important to developing as a scientist, no matter what field you go on to as in science or engineering or medicine or anything else.
And so how do you support and design lab courses to give students success? well, again, these principles of high structure directly apply.
Well, we might not say pre-lab, you know, in lab, after lab, and think about, well, okay, what did we do traditionally here when I was in college? How did these things work? You might have had pre-lab notebooks.
You might have had canned experiments in the lab, cookie cutter lab, sometimes we call them.
They help them work through, again, learning some basic skills in the lab, and especially for introductory levels, right? you might want to do more of that.
But again, these high structure principles of getting students engaged ahead of time, during time, and after time can easily apply here to the lab setting too.
So what about pre-lab, right? So what do you do before lab? Well, you could have students preview the protocols.
You could have them maybe look at some data that they might be collecting and what it's going to be looking like.
They might be familiar with the equipment and the experimental methods of what they'll be doing.
You can also have them watch So like we talked about in the pre-class episode, you can do pre-class reading or watching.
There could be the pre-lab reading of these protocols and experimental design methods.
So, again, no matter what STEM discipline you're in, you're going to have a lab associated with it, whether it's introductory lab that's teaching lots and lots of students at the service course or maybe an upper division specialized elective type lab.
And we all know how labs are and what they're so great at, which is giving that hands on experiential development.
All this is so, so important to developing as a scientist, no matter what field you go on to as in science or engineering or medicine or anything else.
And so how do you support and design lab courses to give students success? well, again, these principles of high structure directly apply.
Well, we might not say pre-lab, you know, in lab, after lab, and think about, well, okay, what did we do traditionally here when I was in college? How did these things work? You might have had pre-lab notebooks.
You might have had canned experiments in the lab, cookie cutter lab, sometimes we call them.
They help them work through, again, learning some basic skills in the lab, and especially for introductory levels, right? you might want to do more of that.
But again, these high structure principles of getting students engaged ahead of time, during time, and after time can easily apply here to the lab setting too.
So what about pre-lab, right? So what do you do before lab? Well, you could have students preview the protocols.
You could have them maybe look at some data that they might be collecting and what it's going to be looking like.
They might be familiar with the equipment and the experimental methods of what they'll be doing.
You can also have them watch So like we talked about in the pre-class episode, you can do pre-class reading or watching.
There could be the pre-lab reading of these protocols and experimental design methods.
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