I view teaching as a continual act of learning. In the classroom and research lab, student perspectives and questions routinely bring enthusiasm and new ways of thinking about a question. These opportunities to learn with and from undergraduates motivate me as a teacher and scholar and are why I am exclusively interested in an institution that prioritizes excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring. My undergraduate experience at Wellesley College and my time as a faculty member at Grinnell College have impressed upon me the value of the unique intersection of dedicated teaching, research engagement, and mentorship at liberal arts colleges. I have taught Introductory Psychology (with and without lab), intermediate and advanced Developmental Psychology courses (with and without labs), Research Methods, and Statistics labs in class sizes from 12 to 40 students. I have also coordinated and mentored 14 undergraduate teaching assistants in a large Introductory Psychology course. These experiences, along with my research mentoring, have led me to a teaching philosophy that emphasizes creating a community in which students work together to curiously engage, critique, and generate psychological questions.
I want to create classroom and research lab environments in which students can discover ideas and concepts that inspire them to explore their own questions and make connections to their worlds. Most of my students will apply their knowledge of psychology to a diversity of career paths. Thus, I design my courses to be meaningful and relevant for students in any field of study. I strive to integrate what students are learning in the classroom with actual experiences and events. This goal drives the content I include in my courses, the active learning opportunities I weave in, and the types of assessments I design. For example, in discussing parent-child attachment, we discuss how the creation of a foster care system in Romania provided a natural experiment on the role of attachment in development, as well as the implications of those findings for the development of children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Students actively practice applying what they learn during class time with small group active learning projects (ALPs). In one activity, I invite young children and their caregivers to my class to illustrate parent-child interactions and classic tests of cognitive development. In course evaluations, students highlight these activities as their favorite aspects of the course, with one student reporting that “doing the ALP allowed me to have a better understanding of the materials because we often got to apply the concepts to real-world cases or problems.” Other students reported sharing what they learn from class with family and friends or noticing psychological phenomena in their daily lives. I also design learning assessments to encourage such connections. For instance, in several of my courses, students are challenged to apply a course concept in relation to current events, popular media content, or public policy. Facilitating these moments of connection between the classroom and students’ lives is one of the reasons I am dedicated to a career as a teacher-scholar.
The field of psychology and a commitment to the common good are fundamentally connected and I work to help students discover these connections for themselves. The breadth of Introductory Psychology, in particular, provides frequent opportunities to tackle the psychological dimensions of many societal issues. In the section on clinical psychology, my primary goal is to bridge the gap between “normal” and “abnormal” in an effort to demystify and de-stigmatize aspects of mental health and treatment. To do so, I introduce students to the basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the role cognitive distortions (i.e., unhelpful thought patterns) can play in shaping our emotions and behavior. Students work together to think about these distortions and generate examples for a “typical” college student and what they would tell this student to help counter each distortion. Students strongly connect to this activity and report that this activity was eye-opening because it illustrated that such distortions are common and not “abnormal” and gave them the basic language and tools to begin to think about how these concepts play out in the world around them. Throughout the course, activities like this one use psychological science to not only promote student wellness, but also prepare students to be citizens of the world who are committed to the common good. I presented this activity at the Psychology One Conference (a teaching conference for Introductory Psychology instructors), and I also mentored undergraduate student teaching fellows in implementing this activity.
Students encounter psychological research in popular press articles and social media posts, and they need to be critical consumers as they engage in the world. One way I foster this skill is by highlighting how research is translated (or misinterpreted) for mass consumption. I explain to students how this translation is like a game of “telephone” and the message can often become misconstrued by the time it reaches the public. Students read popular press articles about whether loneliness is worse for health than smoking or whether having a dog benefits child-parent attachment, and then compare these articles to empirical sources. Small groups discuss the faithfulness of popular press articles to the peer-reviewed publications and critique the research methods of the empirical articles as well. With students in my Introductory course, I have students serve on an Institutional Review Board and they review mock research proposals with a range of ethically questionable methods. Students apply what they have learned about research ethics to make their IRB decisions and remediate the identified issues. Students in my Advanced Developmental Psychology course developed their own research studies examining college student peer relationships and went through the process of obtaining IRB approval and pre-registering their studies prior to collecting data so that they could more fully experience the entire research development process. My goal with such activities is for students to be able to identify and navigate ethical challenges they may encounter in the future.
I also want students to grapple with the idea that there is not a single “best” method for answering a question and that context and ethics factor into researchers’ approaches to questions. In the Introductory Psychology section on perception, I pose Molyneux’s problem: Imagine a blind person who can differentiate between two objects based on touch. If that person’s sight were restored, would they be able to tell the difference between these objects based on sight alone? I ask students to make a prediction and then design a potential study to address the question. Students often struggle to come up with an ethically feasible solution. Then we discuss how Held et al. (2011) devised an ethical approach by incorporating an experiment into a juvenile cataract removal program in India. In my research lab, I also encourage students to explore various methods for addressing questions. Prior to designing a study, students conduct a literature review and compile various methods to critically examine them and whether they might fit our study goals before we decide on a method for our study.
My teaching philosophy extends to my research mentoring. I see my teaching role in research as creating a structured environment that allows students to both learn foundational skills and independently explore concepts to promote learning by doing. When research students come to me with questions, I ask them first to share how they have approached the question and their initial thoughts on the next steps before we together brainstorm additional approaches. My undergraduate research students participate in the entire research process: from literature searches to creating new measures, data collection and analysis, and dissemination of findings, both via publications and reports for parents and educators. Several students have attended and presented at national conferences with me and have earned co-authorship on publications. Even after students graduate, I have continued to work with them to prepare their research for publication and apply to graduate school.
We have much to learn about the factors contributing to students’ classroom experiences, and I have started to explore some of these factors in my research. In one study, I have investigated how students’ relationships in the classroom and course perceptions contribute to their sense of course belonging and engagement. This study’s findings highlight the importance of creating an inclusive learning community that stimulates students and fosters peer connections (Yust, Liu, & Hard, 2021). I will draw on these findings in my future course design plans in a variety of ways, including incorporating frequent small group activities to provide connection opportunities. This research is also well suited to in-course research projects. For example, I could see having students use these findings on course belonging and engagement to design brief interventions for future incoming students in a course focused on young adult development.
I have sought out many opportunities to continually strengthen my teaching and mentoring. I have completed Duke’s Certificate in College Teaching, which involves coursework on pedagogy and teaching observations. As part of Duke’s Preparing Future Faculty fellowship, I had a faculty mentor at Meredith College who has welcomed me into her (virtual) classroom and shared her experiences teaching at a liberal arts college. I also collaborated with fellow Duke graduate students to develop programming and a handbook on mentoring practices for working with undergraduates. This work both helped further our development as mentors and provided resources for incoming graduate students that we wished we had when starting. At Grinnell, I routinely discuss teaching and mentoring practices with colleagues and have had a colleague observe my classes to provide feedback.
At Duke, I took on a special role as teaching mentor to 14 undergraduates serving as “teaching fellows” in the introductory psychology course, each tasked with leading a discussion section. Mentoring these teaching fellows led me to reexamine my own practices and gave me new ideas to try in the classroom. In my first course as instructor of record, I had one student dominate the conversation and other students deferred to this student. Although I encouraged other students to participate and asked that student to help me by providing space for fellow students, the tone had been set for the term. Inspired by one of the fellows, I took a new approach to setting the tone for class engagement in my second course. I now involve students in creating classroom norms to prevent a similar pattern from emerging. These student-driven guidelines not only helped to foster a communal commitment to engagement, but also helped establish a space where students felt comfortable asking questions, sharing, and disagreeing with each other.
Seeing different instructors’ approaches to the first class of the semester has also prompted me to experiment with how I use the first day: shifting from a focus on the syllabus to getting students curious and also comfortable engaging with each other. For instance, in Introductory Psychology I introduce a quotation from Confucius: “The common [person] marvels at the uncommon; the wise [person] marvels at the commonplace” and we discuss examples of the ways psychology gives us the tools to examine the complexities of everyday life. I also actively seek out feedback from students at mid-semester so that I can adjust my teaching, and I learn from end-of-semester feedback to plan for future semesters. My course evaluations are available here.
I see my role as a faculty member to be part of a team, meaning that I will seek ways to capitalize on my expertise as both a generalist in psychology/research and as a developmentalist in serving departmental needs.