Teaching Statement

My graduate training is in cognitive neuroscience in the specific subfield of neuroeconomics. I see myself broadly as an integrative social scientist who takes a broad and strategic approach looking for linkages between the levels of analysis used across social scientific fields, developing a deep understanding of the data science and research methods from mathematics and the natural sciences, and applying them to the complex social phenomena we face each day. For me as a researcher, I apply the following approach:

1. Ask interesting questions

2. Identify the appropriate level of analysis to address this question

3. Iteratively refine a research methodology that addresses the question at the appropriate level of analysis. This process is necessarily collaborative!

4. Determine the correct analytical approach and engage with experts to determine whether this analytic approach is valid, accurate, and applied correctly.

My aim as an educator is to instill this iterative approach to curiosity, exploration, and knowledge generation to my students. I also use this approach in my curricular design—gathering and learning from feedback and from my mentors is important to always being a humble and innovative teacher.

What I have taught:

As an educator, my teaching is characterized by my adaptability to different delivery formats, teaching methods, and topic areas. At Duke, I have served as a teaching assistant for Psychology Research Methods (twice in different formats), Cognitive Psychology, and Social Psychology. For my first term of Research Methods, I led 2 weekly discussion sections (interactive lab) with 18 and 15 students, respectively. In our sections, my students worked on group projects, did small group activities, and played interactive exam review games. In both terms of Research Methods, I gave a guest lecture on quasi-experimental designs. Given constraints in coordinating different course instructors, we had to modify our course in my second term such that we integrated 4 virtual “lab within class” sessions based on the same material as the previous year. In Cognitive Psychology I was a co-TA and was responsible for leading two discussion sections of 21 and 18 students respectively. When we transitioned online, my co-TA and I designed new section materials and jointly led asynchronous virtual sections and held live virtual reviews. For this course, we also wrote and graded 3 exams. Finally, I served as a teaching assistant for Social Psychology where I held weekly office hours, graded assignments and exams, and gave one guest lecture on Group Decision Making. I have also mentored twelve undergraduate students in work relating memory and decision making. In my teaching practice thus far, I am most proud of the agility that I have displayed in teaching in different formats and developing a reflective teaching practice to iteratively improve as an educator.

How my students learn:

Whether my students are completing an independent study in my lab or enrolling in a discussion section for a lecture course, my students learn by doing. I encourage students (particularly those I mentor) to generate their own learning objectives and goals. While I have specific learning objectives that I would like students to meet, such as being able to identify threats to validity in a published empirical paper, my students have the flexibility to apply their knowledge with great flexibility. My students learn about the importance of open science and reproducibility and share their work with the world. In my research methods discussion section, my students would break into small groups to practically apply their knowledge of study design, threats to validity, and science communication to published empirical studies by Duke researchers and presenting their findings to the class. My students also applied this knowledge through ungraded assessments, such as this short "quiz" on threats to validity.

A practice that is currently not a part of my current teaching repertoire but which I hope to integrate into my teaching practice is team-based learning. I have shadowed colleagues in my department who have used team-based learning to allow students to engage more deeply with content in our Introduction to Neuroscience sequence. This approach is particularly effective in dense, content-rich courses such as the cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology classes that I may teach in the future. These courses typically have a reputation for long, dry lectures and assessments that require the regurgitation of a list of “facts.” With a team-based learning approach, students can experience the content of these courses as we do as graduate students, post-docs, and faculty—as an ongoing series of arguments and debates. By grappling with the actual questions, hypotheses, designs, and implications, students gain a deeper and more critical understanding of how science really works. Students in team-based learning settings will arrive at the same essential basic conclusions as students in lecture-based courses. Furthermore, they also develop the scientific inquiry skills that will prepare them for scholarly debate not only in academia, but also in legal, business, policy, and other career paths that require teamwork, creative thinking, and justification of decisions.

Trans-disciplinary approaches are vital for students to grow as creative problem solvers for the complex issues of our modern world. At Mount Holyoke, I will be teaching three courses adopting trans-disciplinary approaches including. Human Behavior Change applies psychology and economic principles to public health and policy issues. Introduction to Decision Science integrates neurobiological, psychological, and economic approaches to understand the complex human behavior of decision making. Finally, my seminar on memory-based imagination draws on psychology, philosophy, and documentary to broaden the way that we think about psychological phenomena.

Reflective practices:

I am in the Certificate of College Teaching program at Duke and as part of this process I have developed a reflective teaching practice. I have an excellent set of teaching mentors on whom I can lean to give honest and constructive feedback. Likewise, I am continuing to read and follow research articles on best practices in teaching in psychology including work presented at the behavioral research informing teaching excellence (BRITE ideas) series in my department. Additionally, I am currently a Preparing Future Faculty fellow where I have a mentor from North Carolina State University and attend sessions with faculty and administrators at our six partner institutions to learn about career possibilities at schools very different from Harvard and Duke. Through the Certificate in College Teaching program, I have engaged in peer observation where colleagues in different disciplines shared their impressions of my teaching style and I could learn from their classroom approaches. I have learned that as long as students meet the learning objectives that we agree upon, my teaching practice can and ought to evolve in each iteration.