Teaching

I believe in the value of education. I never expected that to be a particularly controversial position to take.

Is it? I really can’t tell.

My father was a law professor, so I came to this life naturally. On this page, I share my general philosophy related to teaching, and some of the classes I have taught or am currently teaching.

One thing that I hope you pick up on pretty quickly is that I believe education has to be more than just the transmission of information. Education needs to challenge. It needs to engage. It needs to encourage students to THINK BIG and to struggle with ideas that matter.

Have I always been successful at this?

Of course not. Nobody’s always successful at anything. 

But I’d like to think I’ve been successful more than I’ve failed at it, and that I’ve succeeded when it mattered most to my students.

Morrie, wearing a shirt that reads, "Any attempt at interpreting regression weights in the absence of theory is doomed to fail," citing himself. He stands in front of a screen on which the same quote is projected, citing himself. Picture is from a graduate statistics class.
I love my students for a lot of reasons. None of those reasons are that they sometimes give me gifts like this shirt when they graduate. That's just, you know... a bonus. Teachers like bonuses too!

My Teaching Philosophy

Teachers are learners.

Let’s start with that as a given. A teacher who enters a classroom and who is not there to learn is a teacher who will not be successful in teaching.

This is because knowledge is not static. How we understand the world evolves. Science in particular has this nasty habit of critically reflecting on its results and engaging in self-correction that sometimes looks like inconsistency. But it’s not just science that does this.

Any discipline in which ideas are developed and refined, in which the idea of “continuing education” has any merit at all, cannot be static, and should not be taught as static.

To teach is to continue to learn, and not just from books and articles and whatnot. 

Teachers need to be willing and able to learn from their students. We have to listen and respond to student needs. We must consider whether the perspective we use in communicating with our students is one that authentically reflects what we want them to come out of our class understanding more clearly.

We’re not just there to communicate information. That is, to me, one of the least important functions for an educator in the modern environment.

I mean, information?

Come. On. 

It’s everywhere. Students have access to more information than they know what to do with already. We all do!

We can help them organize information. 

Distill it down to essential elements, then build it up in more complex ways.

Critically evaluate information.

Explore how to best communicate information.

But if all we’re doing is sharing information? Not challenging them to think? Not challenging ourselves to find new ways to stimulate thinking?

That’s Doing It Wrong.

In today’s educational environment, it’s our responsibility to meet students where they are. This means listening to their perspectives and understanding their needs. It means engaging them in conversation around challenging topics and allowing them to own their opinions — but also requiring them to defend those opinions. 

Are there times when we need to simply communicate information?

I guess. But always, and only, in the service of helping develop students who can think and communicate their interpretations of that information in a way that is uniquely their own.

Classes I've Taught, and What They've Taught Me

This isn’t a comprehensive listing of my classes — just the ones that give me something mportant enough to share.

Psychological Science Perspectives (PSYC 130)

I’ve been teaching this class (under a couple of names) since around 2010. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach, and is easiest to describe as an introductory psychology class with a lab component. We go more for depth than breadth, covering fewer topics than a typical “intro” course, but hitting each in more detail. Teaching a class like this during my year at Bowling Green State University is what re-affirmed for me that I really love teaching. Still do.

Statistical Techniques (PSYC 210)

Students tend to dread taking their statistics course. I made it my mission to build a class where even students who dreaded statistics could learn the material and be successful. This didn’t involve making it easy. I mean, it’s stats. When content is challenging, and skill-based, and when confidence can be an issue for students, you find ways to help them build that confidence. With stats, you do that by practicing doing problems and seeing yourself succeed. I spent a lot of class time on examples, using the “I go, we go, you go” framework. I would do an example. Then we would work through an example together as a class. Then I would have students get into small groups and work through an example without my help. Students who came in expecting to struggle would come up to me at the end of the semester and say things like, “I actually get it.” I didn’t make it “easy.” I just met them where they were, and helped them find the right process to learn the material.

Humanitarian Work Psychology (PSYC 461)

I’ve only been able to offer my HWP class once, but it was a great experience, and the only advanced/specialized elective I’ve had a chance to teach in the past 20+ years. HWP is a relatively new sub-discipline of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, focused on both applying psychological principles to help humanitarian organizations function better, and helping for-profit organizations do more to help realize pro-social or community-facing aspects of their mission. The class showed me just how passionate our students can be about finding ways to use their education to give back to the community. Not, having been around our students for a couple of decades, that I was terribly surprised!

Capstone in Psychological Science (PSYC 499)

The capstone class creates a nice “bookend” with 130; all our majors take 130 their first semester (ideally), and all of them take 499 some time during their senior year. Capstone is about wrapping up the undergrad psych major experience and getting students ready to move forward–whatever that means. One of the things I want students to be able to do, coming out of their time as a psych major, is apply ideas to things in the world around us. So I have my 499 students do a group project and presentation on the application of psychology to some aspect of popular culture. Big fun (for me, at least)! The class always reminds me of the many directions our students choose to go, once they finish their degrees, and lets me be part of both the professional and emotional transition away from the university.

Proseminar in Applied Psychology (PSYC 579)

Prosem was the first class I ever built “from the ground up.” It was part of our I-O Master’s program curriculum from probably my second or third year at Xavier, until the program closed. (That closure is why there’s no link to a catalog description!) With Prosem, the goal was to provide students with both foundational and applied research drawing on cognitive, social, and personality psychology. We read primary literature from both the core domains and from I-O publications utilizing the underlying principles, and pretty much every piece of writing or testing for the class had to do with critically applying ideaws to the workplace. While this class isn’t what I miss most about our program (that would be our students!), it is the class I most miss getting to teach.

Advanced Statistics II (PSYC 512)

I taught the second half of our graduate statistics sequence (and its attached SPSS lab) for about 20 years. It is with no small amount of pride that I reflect back on the comment from one of the 512 course analyses that said (paraphrasing), “I can’t believe I just took an entire semester of graduate statistics and never wrote down a single number.” This was always intentional: the numbers are what you get when you clicky the buttons or input the proper code. If you don’t know what they represent and what to do with them, they’re totally meaningless. I didn’t care if students could write down numbers (I mean, they computed lots of stuff in the SPSS lab…). What I cared about was that they knew the logic and limitations of the statistics, when to use them, and how to interpret them.

Advanced Research Design and Analysis (PSYC 621)

I’ve taught three versions of this class. First, I taught it to a mix of clinical psychology doctoral students and I-O Master’s students. Then I taught it to just I-O students. Now I teach it to just clinical students. The thing with understanding and communicating research is that the way we think and talk about it has to evolve. More critically, we have to think of our audience. I’ve had to think about my “audience” in terms of my students, but what’s become more and more clear to me, as I taught the specialized groups, is that we also need to be thinking about the consumers of our research. Research can’t just be navel-gazing. We have the chance, and the responsibility, to ask questions that matter. We need to do better at communicating our work to people outside our disciplines. Psychology is a fascinating science, but if nobody outside a university ever knows what we’ve found out, what the heck are we doing?