Leslie Nichols

Leslie holds a dual role at Boise State University: she's an Anatomy & Physiology lecture and lab instructor, and she's also BSU's A&P Laboratory Coordinator — the person who designs and runs the lab program that 27+ sections and over 1,000 students per term move through.

In plain English: the person who built the labs your kid will hit in college pre-health classes is teaching the high-school version on Saturday mornings.

She didn’t just earn the credential — she used it. Before her current BSU work, Leslie taught biology in Idaho public middle and high schools, and she’s also led a homeschool science co-op for 22 years. That’s a deep bench of experience teaching real lab science to 7th–12th grade students with real specimens, real microscopes, and real lab notebooks. The Saturday cohort is the sharpest expression of that work: small, focused, and built around the part that can’t be downloaded — the instructor.

Teaching philosophy

Curriculum resources are commodity. OpenStax is free. Khan Academy is free. YouTube is endless. What a student gets in a real lab, with a real teacher, in a small group, with a real specimen on the bench in front of them — that’s the part that can’t be downloaded.

Over 22 years of teaching, Leslie has also built a deep library of her own lab materials — custom lab guides, dissection walkthroughs, microscopy keys, and notebook prompts written specifically for middle- and high-school students working with real specimens. Pair that with a curated shelf of college-level A&P references and free open resources like OpenStax, and the cohort runs on materials calibrated to this age group, not generic textbook chapters.

Leslie teaches lab science the way it’s actually practiced: inquiry-driven, slow enough to think, with real tools. The cohort is run on a mastery-based model — we move on when a student can actually do the technique, read the slide, defend the conclusion, not when the calendar says it’s time. Some students master microscopy in week one and spend week two helping a classmate; that’s a feature, not a bug.

The deeper goal isn’t to cover content — it’s to teach students how to reason through the scientific method on their own. How to ask a clean question. How to design an observation that could disprove their hypothesis. How to read a textbook, a paper, or a specimen and extract what’s actually there. Students leave with a working lab notebook, the muscle memory of having done the work themselves, and — the part that compounds — the habits to keep teaching themselves long after the cohort ends.

Credentials at a glance