The Teacher-Scholar in Practice

My teaching and scholarship are inseparable. The questions I pursue in my research — how citizens engage with democratic institutions, how political communication shapes public understanding, how civic capacity is built and eroded — are the same questions I bring into every classroom. I teach not as a survey of structures but as an ongoing inquiry into democratic practice, one that asks students to locate themselves as participants rather than observers.

That integration is not incidental. I believe deeply in the teacher-scholar model — not as a balance between competing obligations but as a single, mutually reinforcing practice. Research makes me a better teacher because it keeps me connected to the live questions of the discipline and models for students what genuine intellectual curiosity looks like. Teaching makes me a better researcher because students ask questions I would not think to ask on my own, and because explaining complex ideas to a first-generation college student who has never taken a political science course is the best stress test for whether you actually understand what you think you understand.

Over more than two decades I have taught more than a thousand students across five institutions, from technical college freshmen encountering American Government for the first time to doctoral candidates developing their dissertations. That range has sharpened my pedagogical commitments and given me a comparative perspective on what works across very different student populations and institutional contexts.

High-Impact Practices and Pedagogical Innovation

The most consistent finding in the scholarship of teaching and learning is that students learn best by doing — by engaging with real problems, producing real work, and receiving real feedback in environments that demand genuine intellectual effort. High-impact practices are the curricular expression of that finding, and deploying them well is one of the things I care most about as a teacher and as a department chair.

When I arrived at Radford in 2021, 27 percent of departmental courses incorporated high-impact practices. By 2026 that figure is 78 percent. That shift did not happen by mandate — it happened by working alongside colleagues to redesign what high-impact experiences look like in our context, how they are assessed, and how they connect to student learning outcomes across the curriculum. Growing that number is one of the administrative accomplishments I am most proud of, because it represents a genuine transformation in how an entire department teaches, not just in how I teach.

My own courses have always been built around active learning. In large American Government sections I use the Game of Politics simulation to give students experiential contact with the strategic logic of democratic competition. In Political Communication, students prepare and produce their own newscasts to experience firsthand the selection and framing decisions that shape political media. In Political Campaign Management, students canvass colleagues' offices on campus to simulate the door-to-door experience of a real campaign. In Senior Seminar, students rotate serving as lead discussants guiding inquiry on their research topics, then present that research at our departmental Political Science Days event. The Virginia Government Simulation — the statewide mock legislature I co-founded in 2024 — is the fullest expression of this pedagogical commitment at scale, bringing students from across Virginia onto the floor of the House of Delegates to practice the complete arc of the legislative process under authentic parliamentary rules.

Civic Pedagogy and Democratic Engagement

My career began with a commitment to building civic engagement in students, and it has deepened and grown into a scholarly specialization as well as a pedagogical practice. In my Political Communication courses I use ADP-aligned deliberative dialogue activities, including the Unify America online dialogue platform, where students of divergent ideological backgrounds are brought together to practice the difficult work of civic understanding across difference. My 2024 chapter "Three Challenges to Civic Skill Instruction in Higher Education" — published in Civic Pedagogy: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics — reflects my ongoing effort to theorize and improve the practice of civic education, connecting classroom experience to the broader research literature on what civic learning actually produces.

The through-line in all of this is a conviction that the most important thing I can teach students — regardless of the specific course — is the disposition and the capacity to engage as citizens. Political science gives me content. Civic pedagogy gives me purpose.

Assessment-Driven Improvement

I use data from previous classes to improve my pedagogy, and I hold my teaching to the same evidence standard I apply to administrative programs. The Closing the Loop Award I received at Fort Hays State University in 2015 recognized a specific example of that practice: internship providers reported that students lacked professional readiness — punctuality, appropriate dress, workplace decorum — so I completely overhauled the Internship course curriculum to address those specific gaps. Provider evaluations of student performance jumped from mid-range to nearly 5.0 on a 5.0 scale. That is what closing the loop means: not collecting data and filing it, but reading it honestly and changing something.

That same data discipline now shapes how I think about curriculum at the departmental level. The overhaul of the departmental assessment program I implemented at Radford — deploying AAC&U VALUE rubrics and a centralized data repository — was designed to make the kind of evidence-based teaching improvement that won the Closing the Loop Award available to every faculty member in the department, not just to me.

Undergraduate Research and the Wicked Problems Approach

Part of teaching well is teaching students how to produce knowledge, not just consume it. At Radford, I have integrated Paul Hanstedt's Creating Wicked Students framework into the curriculum — an approach that positions students as authorities in persistent public problems, requiring them to research, develop, and publicly present proposed solutions to real-world challenges. The Wicked Festival, which the department helped seed and which has grown to a 500-plus student university-wide event each semester, is the co-curricular extension of that pedagogical commitment.

In my own courses I require student papers to be peer reviewed and presented to the class, evaluated by both fellow students and instructor using shared rubrics. I have co-authored published work with undergraduate and graduate students over the past seven years — a practice that treats student research as a genuine scholarly contribution rather than an approximation of scholarship. My Political Parties course connects students with practitioners in the field, building the professional relationships that students then leverage into internships and career opportunities.

Teaching Evaluations and Recognition

Student evaluations of my teaching have been consistently strong across all three institutions where formal data exists: 4.35 at Radford, 4.61 at UWG, and 4.20 at FHSU, all on five-point scales. Those numbers reflect not just student satisfaction but sustained engagement across course types, student populations, and instructional modalities. I have been recognized for teaching quality by sources as varied as the Mortar Board honor society, the Interfraternity and Panhellenic Councils, and the Honor Society, and was a four-time finalist for FHSU's highest teaching award.

Evaluation data and recognition matter, but what I am most proud of is what former students have done. My alumni are state representatives, lobbyists, political professionals, and public servants. Watching students I taught in American Government or Political Campaign Management build careers in the fields we studied together is the measure of teaching effectiveness that no rubric fully captures.

Teaching and Administrative Leadership

For a dean search committee, the relevant question about a candidate's teaching record is not just whether they teach well — it is what their teaching philosophy reveals about how they will lead faculty. My pedagogical commitments — to evidence-based improvement, to high-impact practice, to student engagement as an institutional priority rather than an individual preference — are the same commitments I bring to administrative work. The way I have led departments reflects the way I teach: by creating the conditions for others to do their best work, by using data honestly to identify what needs to change, and by treating the people I work with as capable of more than they have yet been asked to produce.

The subpages in this section document student evaluations, peer evaluations, and the simulation and active learning programs that give the philosophy above its concrete expression.