Teaching Statement
During the six years in which I have been teaching, I have tried to develop a complete and overarching philosophy of pedagogy. In this time I have taught classes with as few as 4 students and as many as 126; I have taught lecture courses and instructed individual students one-on-one, led research seminars, graduate seminars, and statistics labs. Each situation requires a different approach, but all are bound together by a common goal: to teach students as effectively as possible and draw from them their best efforts. Teaching is a partnership between instructors and students. It is the instructor's responsibility to make it possible for each and every student to succeed and learn, and the individual student's job to put in the time and effort in order to achieve the available success. I judge my own success in the classroom partially by the performance of my students. If they show a great deal of thought, effort, creativity, and learning, then I am doing my job properly. If any of my students is not succeeding in my classes, I make every effort to change my approach in order to help them. My thoughts on teaching derive from two primary kinds of experience: that of being a student and that of being a teacher. I have drawn on my experiences as a student to find the most effective teaching methods while maintaining a consciousness of what it is like to be an undergraduate. In designing courses, I try to envision them from the student's perspective and work to ensure that they treat each individual fairly while encouraging everyone to learn at a maximal level. I also constantly work to improve my instruction: Every opportunity to teach is also an opportunity to learn how to be a better teacher.
My philosophy is based on a few simple principles that I try to put into practice within the classroom, during individual meetings with students, and in the laboratory as well. First, I think it is important to remember that whatever a student learns within the university setting is only as important as what they carry with them after they leave and how it affects their quality of life and their contribution to society. This means that it is crucial to teach students how to think creatively and critically in difficult situations, as well as to supply them with knowledge to draw on in these circumstances. In many of my classes, even large lectures, I insist on students producing written assignments and exams which ask them to take opinions based on readings, argue convincingly for them by referencing existing studies, and propose potential ways to test their hypotheses. Instead of asking students to simply recall information, I require that they synthesize materials and think beyond the settled issues.
The second principle is that every individual has a unique and important perspective and ability to reason. It is the job of a professor to teach students how to develop their own rational and well-reasoned opinions, how to argue for them, how to listen to others' views, and how to question and reconsider their beliefs. I intentionally say "how" here, because teaching these skills is about teaching students new ways of thinking and developing, rather than teaching them specific thoughts or ideas. This means instructing students to understand the existing knowledge in a field, and also what it implies, how it came to be known, and how to integrate it with their existing viewpoints and other knowledge.
The third principle is that the form of teaching must vary in order to help students learn. One system of teaching does not work for all students, nor does it work in all situations. The method of teaching should not be chosen dogmatically, but instead should be based on what is effective. This means varying teaching methods for different kinds of courses, and also varying methods for different students within a course. What is important is that students learn, not that a predetermined method be followed strictly. If this means figuring out alternative assignments or ways of conveying information to illuminate the subject to students and to augment what they take from the class, then it is my responsibility to do so. I also emphasize to students that their grades are not based on an arbitrary scale or on their ability to come up with a set of predetermined right answers, but instead based on how they can show me that they are thinking about the material in a deep and developed way. I treat all of my students as colleagues, attempting to give them the tools they need to succeed within my classes and helping them develop the facilities that they will benefit from after classes are through.
My teaching in lecture courses and seminars tends to be divided into three closely connected subsections: covering historical foundations, teaching students how to think about cutting edge or unsolved problems, and encouraging students to find new ways of connecting pieces of knowledge. Carefully explaining the history of a field from its early foundations to the present day gives students the strong base they need to process new information and come up with educated theories to answer new questions. Understanding history is a necessary prerequisite to appreciating a problem in its entirety. Focusing on unsolved problems in a field teaches students to recognize that they are important members of the active scientific community and not just learning about an abstract domain that has finished its progress. Finally, drawing explicit connections between different domains helps students place their new information into a more comprehensive and expansive schema. This allows them to bring in experience from other fields to help them learn, and enables them to see the importance of the subject in connection to what they already know. This interdisciplinary approach, integrating multiple fields, is probably one of the most important directions that science is headed in the future, and teaching students to think about these connections is a critical skill.
Orthogonal to these organizational issues is how I combine different types of materials and methods in my teaching. My lectures always offer a mixture of factual information, much of which student would not otherwise have access to in textbooks, with discussions of different ways to interpret these facts. While data and existing results are not debatable, the interpretation of them often is, and it is here that I focus much of my courses. I try not only to teach students what is known, but also to show them that there are at least two sides to every debate. To ensure they grasp these different positions, I include interactive demonstrations and brief media clips that let students see theories in action first hand, and often hear an argument from the lips of prominent scholars. This structure sets up interesting and enlightening class discussions where I push students to offer well-reasoned arguments and think about how we might scientifically test out different theories. I stress the importance of class participation because it teaches students how to think quickly and present their ideas in an organized and convincing manner, but I do not limit participation to the classroom. Since not all students are comfortable speaking in front of large groups, I encourage all of my pupils to communicate with me in whatever way they feel most comfortable, through class discussions, private meetings, emails, or elsewhere.
Finally, I always focus on teaching students to consider the complexity of the field they are learning. Psychology is the science of complex minds, and straightforward explanations, while often appealingly elegant, are just as often oversimplified and misleading. Instead of looking for the simplest story, I encourage my students to look at the convolution of the information and develop multifaceted but well reasoned analyses. Focusing in this way on complexity helps students learn to take difficult challenges seriously and realize that hard problems often involve complicated solutions.
One aspect of my teaching that I have not yet discussed is the place of assignments and exams in the learning experience. My view here is quite simple: Assignments are chances to do more teaching and are ways of promoting more learning. If a student does not discover more by doing an assignment, then that assignment has no place in academia. All of my assignments, regardless of the kind of course they are for, require careful and creative thought and writing. I explain to my students that part of grading papers is mind reading; the reader must use what is written on the page to try and determine what was in the mind of the writer when they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. This makes it clear to a student that the burden of writing is to be clear enough and complete enough in their text to allow the reader to see the complexity of their thoughts. Imposing length limits on papers requires students to write carefully, edit thoroughly, and be concise and complete in their arguments. In teaching a Laboratory in Development and Learning course, where students designed and performed a developmental psychology study, I encouraged students to attempt to write a full paper on their experiment before they ever involved a single child. The purpose was to force students to analyze whether they had carefully designed their study, whether they knew how they would analyze their data, and whether they understood how they would interpret their results. It is in this writing that many of my students discovered potential confounds in their designs, holes in their logic, or problems with their plans. Careful writing is another tool to help students learn to think more completely and critically.
Although my teaching abilities have developed significantly over the past six years, I continually seek to improve further. In light of this I regularly assess my own teaching, seek out new methods, and ask students for verbal or written feedback on what they like and dislike in my courses, assignments, and discussions. It has been quite rewarding to see my teaching evaluations improve over the past few years, and reach levels that place me as one of the top instructors in my department, and one of the favorite teachers at the University. As a reflection of my success in teaching, I have seen a course I started 2 years ago, Animal Minds, grow from 67 students in 2005, to 85 students in 2006, and 126 students this year. This course is an elective, and has grown through word of mouth alone; another sign to me that my teaching style and academic philosophy are growing in effectiveness.
As I look to my future in teaching, I see myself at an undergraduate centered institution which shares my focus on student development and on treating students as valuable individuals and members of society. While I love the excitement of teaching large lectures, I also thrive on teaching small classes and having individual interactions with students where I can devote even more of my time and energy to their success and development. I hope to improve my teaching especially in expanding the variety of courses I have taught, and in learning how to turn some of my larger lecture courses into smaller and advanced seminars. I also have an interest in applying new and varied methods to teaching diverse and alternative populaces, as I feel that my system of using primary readings and written responses would scale well to other groups and mediums. Finally, I look forward to further involving students in research, as this is one more place for students to learn about a field. Research offers the best chance for students to get hands-on knowledge of how a discipline functions and also to develop a deeper understanding of a single domain and their place in it. I deeply love teaching and its ability to help students grow into more complete and thoughtful human beings and look forward to furthering my own education in how to educate.