This is Why I Teach
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
y true passion in psychology lies in the interactive discussion and formulation of ideas, and the tremendous excitement I have in seeing others learn to share in my enthusiasm for human psychology.
I believe the field of psychology should provide students an understanding of the architecture of the mind and the framework for exploring human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Every student that I instruct has a first-hand experience with subject matter of psychology; it is a science of the human condition. There is more than a casual interest in psychology among the students, as the field speaks particularly poignantly towards the problems many young college students find themselves facing through their university lives: understanding their personal relationships, struggling with peer pressure, dealing with loss, sorrow, and anger.
From examining course assessments and directly collaborating with students on class materials, I believe the most critical component to quality education is to provide an opportunity for students to get excited.
If I can provoke genuine enthusiasm for a subject matter, an active desire to learn, then I no longer need to design materials to demand student attention, but instead provide materials that allow for exploration. For example: I have an in-class activity based on memory malleability work by Elizabeth Loftus (e.g., Loftus & Palmer, 1974) in the middle of the semester in which I challenge students to recount simple cues in their class environment: the number of windows on a wall, the color of a wall in the back of the room, etc., to illustrate how memory does not function like a recorder, and is malleable and has gaps.
Students have expressed amusement and interest in these concepts and a desire for a more experiential focus of hands-on in-class activities that directly relate to their lives, which prompted me to design a number of additional materials about direct applications of psychology to areas such as health, sustainability, or the law. When students grapple with a new psychological concept, I encourage them to frame it in terms of their everyday experiences.
M
“Every student that I instruct has a first-hand experience with the subject matter of psychology; it is a science of the human condition, and they have lived it.”
MY PHILOSOPHY
Psychology as a field is unique, insofar as what we study, and teach, should be familiar to the students: they live the field, with every waking moment. For example, in my introduction to social psychology courses, I may discuss a concept whose terminology may initially seems foreign: such as basking in reflected glory (Cialdini, 1976): sharing the joy and sorrow of a group’s failure and successes. But by discussing this concept in terms of student experience – wearing the same colors and symbols as a team, hearing the roar of the crowd at a football game, the rush of victory and sting of defeat, the language they and their friends use to talk about the team and game – the concept becomes salient, immediate, and recognizable.
Allowing students to place the abstract into their own experiences personalizes a class, and incentivizes continued participation and interest: learning about psychology becomes an exercise in learning about the students themselves. Although many students already grapple with these issues through a variety of their own devices, one of my goals is to move them from casual interest and natural reactions, as passive participants, to active observers of psychological phenomena. They are realizing a new framework to consider both their own experiences and the shared human condition.
The origin, and clearest demonstration of this interest-focused conceptualization can be seen from soliciting direct feedback from students in my courses. Students are provided an anonymous platform to discuss their continued participation in a course and what particularly drives their interest, and noted engaging visual materials, instructor enthusiasm, and opportunity for hands-on participation were key; as such, I have began focusing on these areas for development. I additionally used these midterm feedback forms both to highlight course concepts for classes such as Research Methods (such as survey design or explicit attitudinal measures), and as an opportunity for students to directly discuss their own feedback with me as in-class activities.
These techniques not only give me a way to discuss class concepts, but gives student insight into the fact that their feedback is valued: it has been reviewed, discussed, and treated with care. They are invested in the course, they have a role in its development.
“wearing the same colors and symbols… the rush of victory and sting of defeat… the concept becomes salient, immediate, and recognizable.”
ON FRAMING PSYCHOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE
In addition to trying to foster an engagement-focused environment, as learners in my classes students explore a diverse range of activities and experiences to better understand the complex array of different minds and cultures that exist. Students are encouraged to critically reflect on their own underlying assumptions and challenge their preconceived notions.
The entire field of social psychology is a particular valuable tool for emphasizing and discussing diversity of religion, race, creed and background, through topics like group processes and stereotyping and prejudice. This attention extends to a diversity in kinds of activities that students have reported foster their best growth. In this current semester, I am teaching a social psychology course that is additionally a writing class. As such, I wanted to focus on providing them with the broadest range of communication experiences: from collaborating in team-based environments in leadership positions to finding and discussing a research study that most interested them, to taking on roles as an adviser and directly applying social psychological principles to address a social issue.
Students have additionally expressed interest in communicating beyond scientific writing, and as such we collaboratively organized a project-based plan that involved a diverse even practicing presentation skills; across my courses, students actively introduce their materials to small groups or in front of the entire class. William James once wrote that “my thinking is first and last and always for the sake of doing” (James, 1890). I believe that by focusing student attention on application, we can ensure that their course-relevant thinking will be similarly directed into actionable skills.
Importantly, this attention to a diversity of skills and backgrounds means that my teaching methodologies change depending on the background of the students I instruct. For classes such as research methods that may include new psychology majors, I provide a broad background environment, such as guided in-class activities in which I pose a psychological question (e.g., suppose people are more helpful in the winter than the summer: what are three reasons why this may be?) that students work out with their colleagues. These hands-on activities have proven fantastic for focusing students on the interaction between different areas of psychology, and the application it can have into their own lives.
“William James once wrote that “my thinking is first and last and always for the sake of doing” (James, 1890). I believe that by focusing student attention on application, we can ensure that their course-relevant thinking will be similarly directed into actionable skills.”
ON SKILLSET DEVELOPMENT
With more senior students, who already interested, invested, and committed: they just need an open opportunity to explore their interests, with a guide to make sure they stay on track. As such, allowing students to develop ownership of their own research projects, such as in a psychology laboratory, has provided to be more motivating and produce better quality of discourse and deeper learning. These upper level students are challenged to take a position and then defend it using psychological concepts by self-directed assessment of modern research. Indeed, I have even instructed my students in research writing courses to share this focus on attention to background experiences in their own writing by using the mnemonic ‘CAT’ to remind them to consider ‘Clarity, the Audience, and the Topic at hand.’
I have additionally learned a tremendous amount from other instructors, both in psychology department and others, through the Graduate Teaching Fellows program. While I was fortunate to have a number of senior instructors who provided feedback and shared critiques of my instruction, I found that many other instructors were less fortunate. In light of this, I am additionally deeply passionate about working on new materials for instructors: teaching for teachers. I have written some guidelines to acquiring and using student feedback in a timely fashion and provided workshops on creating effective visual presentations for teaching. Lastly, I have an ongoing project of codifying psychology teaching resources from different universities and websites, from videos that demonstrate psychological concepts to writing resources, in an effort to create a hub of psychological content.
I consider it a tremendous privilege to have the opportunity to teach. I am constantly driven to improve and find it immensely rewarding. The more I teach, the more I learn from my students, and the more I learn the better I teach.
This is my passion. This is why I teach.