For many students, their introduction to earth science and environmental change begins in Max Christie’s classroom at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It’s a fitting role for someone who has always seen himself as a teacher first, which is only natural given that he comes from a family of educators. But Christie’s approach to teaching starts with a counterintuitive idea—not with answers, but with uncertainty:
“As a scientist, your job is to not know things until you know them,” he said.
As a student himself, Christie once planned to teach high school biology, but somewhere between that plan and his career today, a single college course in paleontology reshaped his trajectory—and set him on a path toward teaching earth science at a deeper level.
“In high school, I never had any sort of earth science,” he said. “And then when I was a sophomore in college, I took a paleontology class. And I fell in love.”
Christie still approaches his college courses with the mindset of the high school teacher he once planned to be, blending accessibility with depth in a way that reflects both his background in biology and his work as a paleontologist and stratigrapher. That approach has helped shape him into an award-winning educator, recently recognized by both the College of LAS and the Provost’s Office.
Teaching students to think like geologists
At the core of his teaching philosophy is a simple but demanding question: What should students be able to do when they leave the classroom?
“So when I'm thinking about class design, the thing I'm always coming back to is, ‘What are the things I want the students to be able to do when they come out of this?’” Christie said. “How do we take things like real data sets and make something out of that?”
That emphasis on doing—on engaging directly with scientific thinking—shapes everything from his assignments to his assessments. Rather than focusing on how students perform on traditional exams, Christie prioritizes how well they can explain what they understand and work through scientific ideas in real time. He designs his courses so students are constantly interpreting information, making sense of data, and putting concepts into their own words.
“I traditionally stay away from multiple-choice exams because I find them more useful for understanding what you don't know than what you do,” he said. “Even a sentence can tell me a lot about what a student has actually captured from that material.”
It’s an approach that aligns with the teaching practices highlighted in his recent awards: observation, hypothesis testing, and reflection. In Christie’s classroom, these become daily habits rather than abstract concepts.
“It’s about breaking down a problem into something that can be solved in 50-minute chunks,” he said, allowing students to work through real data and arrive at their own conclusions. The goal is to move away from the “sage on the stage” model and toward something more participatory and more enduring.
That philosophy extends even to non-majors, whom Christie challenges just as directly as his advanced students.
Instead of simplifying the material, Christie focuses on how it’s presented. With the right structure and support, he believes all students can engage with complex ideas. “If you present things in the right way, you can get to that place,” he said. “There’s no reason that they can’t understand the complexities of what you might get in a 400-level course.”
For many students, that introduction to geoscience comes in one of Christie’s most distinctive courses, “Hollywood Rocks: Earth Science in the Movies,” where films like Jurassic Park, Apollo 13, and San Andreas serve as case studies in scientific accuracy and natural hazards. But that course is just one entry point into a teaching portfolio that spans the full arc of earth science—from introductory explorations of the planet’s physical systems and natural disasters to deeper dives into the history of life and Earth’s changing environments, all the way to advanced, data-driven courses in sedimentology, the layers of the earth, and even studying how the organisms that became fossils lived and evolved.
Curiosity at the core
All of these courses reinforce one of Christie’s broader goals: helping students understand not just what scientists know, but how they come to know it, and how much remains uncertain.
“I want them to appreciate that the Earth is complex,” he said. “There are interesting things to learn about Earth, and many things we don’t know.” That uncertainty, Christie emphasizes, isn’t a weakness of science—it’s what drives discovery.
After nearly a decade at Illinois, the impact of that approach is already visible. Former students are now completing graduate degrees and moving into their own scientific careers, a progression Christie finds deeply rewarding.
“Interacting with students and just seeing them grow, that’s always a true joy,” he said. “To see how they’ve gone from someone who maybe really had a hard time developing these ideas, to someone who’s a scientist, that’s incredibly rewarding.”
For those still deciding whether to take that first step into geology, Christie’s pitch is characteristically direct:
“You live on this planet,” he said. “You should know something about it.”