One area that I am very passionate about is teaching the next generation of researchers and psychologists. As an Educational Researcher, I feel strongly about playing a role in connecting the findings from rigorous scientific research to teaching in classrooms. As such, my teaching is highly informed by best practices coming from my own and other researchers' findings.
Cognitive Psychology (fully online, hybrid, and fully in-person)
Educational Psychology (in-person)
Introduction to Psychology (in-person)
Introductory Research Methods (in-person)
Laboratory in Advanced Research Methods (in-person)
Leveraging Universal Design & Learning Technologies for Student Success (mostly asynchronous)
Research Seminar in Learning Strategies (in-person)
Statistics in Psychology (in-person and fully online)
Student Engagement, Self-Regulation, and Motivation (mostly asynchronous)
My teaching philosophy has three components to it, all of which derive from principles of learning:
Encourage students to develop connections between new information and prior knowledge
Promote students to engage in critical thinking and real-world applications of content
Develop students' belonging in the classroom
Foster students' internal motivation through choices
To address the first component, I develop activities that scaffold students' basic understanding and probe students to think about how their new understanding of the material relates to other concepts they already know. Students have had extremely positive feedback for the activities I have developed for my classes and have explained that these activities help solidify concepts in their minds.
To address the second value, I create opportunities for students to apply course concepts to real-world contexts and critically reflect on how psychological science connects to broader society issues. For example, in my cognitive psychology course, as one of the weekly assignments given after the students learn about attention, I ask students to write a letter to me stating why technology like phones and computers should or should not be allowed to be used in my classroom. This assignment asks students to connect this idea to the content they just learned about (attention) to help develop their understanding of the content, but also asks them to reflect on why technology may both enhance and detract from learning. I also prompt students to share examples of the content being covered from their own experiences or from current media to stimulate class discussions.
To address the third component, I work to create bonds between students in my the class and between each student and my teaching practices. For the first approach, I have students work in groups for almost all of the classroom assignments and try to encourage students to build these connections throughout the course. At the beginning of the course, I have students work in small groups of their choosing and encourage group members to exchange contact information. Students work in these groups the entire semester. For the second appraoch, I work to make the way I present my course very accessible to remove barriers to learning that make students feel like they do not belong in my classroom. I do this by 1) presenting material in many different ways to cater to the variety of ways students like to learn, 2) remove barriers to learning like having easy-to-access extensions and removing harsh due dates from small assignments, and 3) include positive feedback on all student work and enourage students to recognize their growth in knowing by allowing them to resubmit assignments.
To address the fourth component, I recognize that motivation is a vital part of students' learning. As such, I build in flexibility into my classes that allow students to focus on individual areas of interest within the scope of the class in order to encourage internal motivation. For example, for the weekly reflection projects in my cognitive psychology course, I allow students to pick which topic we covered that week to focus on in their reflection. Other than having to answer a couple specific questions, students are free to structure their reflection in any way that makes sense for them.