Teaching Statement & Philosophy

While new technologies such as ChatGPT and the lingering effects of COVID-19 have added new challenges to teaching and mentorship, the essential foundation for successful learning remains the same: students’ inherent curiosity. Psychology and neuroscience are particularly well-posed to leverage this advantage because students can connect the material with their own lives and identities. My teaching philosophy builds upon this connection by placing students’ natural enthusiasm and interest at the center of each learning objective. Specifically, I use a variety of active learning strategies to give students ownership over their progress and cultivate their critical thinking skills in ways that will extend beyond the lab or classroom.

My teaching philosophy is deeply intertwined with mentorship, which has been central to my professional identity since my own undergraduate mentor first sparked my passion for cognitive neuroscience. Over the years, I have mentored more than 60 students, most of whom were undergraduates. I find that new researchers are usually enthusiastic but struggle to translate this energy into the sometimes slow work of scientific research. Effective mentorship, in my view, involves connecting trainees’ enthusiasm for a project’s big-picture goals with the finer details of the scientific process. I maintain trainees’ motivation by emphasizing the project’s theoretical significance and incorporating weekly article discussions. We alternate the responsibility for selecting each week’s article, which helps me model my expectations while helping students iteratively refine their literature-search skills. These discussions are paired with practical training in research skills. I use a scaffolding approach to build both their expertise and confidence: trainees master one skill, such as data collection, before moving on to more advanced tasks like analysis. Crucially, I ensure that we share our research successes. My mentees have earned 15 co-authorships on my posters, led eight of their own, and joined me on two manuscripts. Many other students have earned honors theses and entered graduate or medical school as well. Currently, I am working on ways to provide more structure for my trainees through a mentee handbook along with formalized, bidirectional feedback.

Madison Hunter & I presenting our work at CNS '19.

"Matthew was a great TA who was very knowledgeable of neuroscience and research, caring of his students, and willing to help inside and outside of class."

Although teaching in the classroom differs substantially from research mentorship, my goal is still to spark students’ natural enthusiasm and help them take ownership over their learning. I discovered that flipped classrooms can effectively achieve this goal during my teaching assistantships for Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience and Biological Bases of Behavior. In each section, students read and discussed research articles connected to lecture material, with each class culminating in a student-led presentation. This structure allowed them to gain mastery of a manageable portion of the content and the confidence to teach it to their peers. My role was multifaceted: reassuring nervous students as they presented, guiding and deepening discussions, and pushing students to evaluate the evidence and strengthen their critical thinking. For example, in one session we debated whether a brain region was uniquely sensitive to faces or broadly tuned for expert object recognition. By playing devil’s advocate for each side, I encouraged students to examine both the strengths and limitations of each theory. Notably, this flipped classroom strategy proved effective in both courses, despite differences in student level. Student evaluations appreciated the discussion-based format and my enthusiasm for the material, but also noted that more precise feedback would strengthen their experience, which I have improved upon in later teaching and mentorship opportunities. Altogether, these classroom experiences taught me new ways to balance individual learning opportunities while fostering critical thinking skills at a group level. Furthermore, they re-emphasized that the most lasting learning occurs when students see themselves as active participants in their education.

One limitation of flipped classrooms is that students’ attention can fluctuate wildly: focusing intensely during their own presentations but lapsing during their peers’. One way to address this concern is by consistently engaging students with hands-on learning opportunities that fully immerse them in the scientific process. I employed this approach while assisting with the Brain Waves and Cognition course. The first half of the course taught students the core ideas and theories behind modern electroencephalography (EEG). They then applied this knowledge to the second half of the course while they collectively ran an EEG research project. Critically, this project took on a research question that was completely novel; the authenticity of this scientific experience fueled and sustained students’ motivation across the semester. Together we reviewed past literature, designed the experiment, developed hypotheses, collected data, and analyzed the results. I instructed them at each stage of the process through lectures, demonstrations, and workshops. Students responded enthusiastically, highlighting how these opportunities deepened their grasp of the lecture material; they also rated my teaching effectiveness as 4.83/5.00. For me, this course was particularly rewarding because it allowed me to teach within my methodological experience while providing students with authentic research skills. The success of this integrated approach is something I aim to emulate as I design my own courses in the future.

“I felt like Matthew was a great TA. He clearly put a lot of effort into preparing class materials and worked to make things as user-friendly and understandable as possible. He was also extremely patient with us when we asked a ton of questions.”

I supplemented my pedagogical skills through several professional development programs. In the Certification in College Teaching program, I learned how to implement various pedagogical techniques and develop effective teaching materials. I also co-led a group on diversity and equity that frequently discussed how these topics related to teaching. For example, we collaboratively wrote more inclusive syllabi language that was adopted by several of our colleagues in the department. Additionally, I completed a mentorship workshop series where I reflected on my mentorship style and identified areas for growth. Together, these experiences expanded my teaching and mentorship skills to better serve a diverse range of students.

In the future, I hope to continue refining my teaching skills by addressing some of the challenges I see facing modern classrooms. For example, I want to teach students how to use tools like ChatGPT effectively, without undermining their critical thinking skills. For example, I could challenge students to develop novel research ideas on their own and then use ChatGPT to refine their experiments or produce counterarguments. Critically, students would need to document their use of such tools, modeling the transparency expected of scientists. I may also allow students to use ChatGPT to edit initial drafts of class papers, which may be particularly useful for non-native English speakers. In general, I think that if our teaching strategies can engage and sustain students’ genuine interests, learning follows as a natural consequence.

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