Teaching and Mentoring

One area that I am very passionate about is teaching the next generation. As an Educational Researcher, I feel strongly about playing a role in connecting the findings from rigorous scientific research to teaching in classrooms. As such, my teaching is highly informed by best practices coming from my own and other researchers' findings. 

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Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy has three components to it, all of which derive from principles of learning. 

1. Encourage students to develop connections between new information and prior knowledge

2. Help students develop general skills to learn more deeply that can be applied beyond my classroom

3. Allow students to foster internal motivation by offering choices

To address the first component, I develop activities that scaffold students' basic understanding and probe students to think about how their new understanding of the material relates to other concepts they already know. Students have had extremely positive feedback for the activities I have developed for my classes and have explained that these activities help solidify concepts in their minds.

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To address the second component, I model different ways in which students can process the information we are learning about in class and spend time talking about the benefits of processing information in those specific ways. For example, I have students think about ways in which they have experienced different memory errors in their own lives then explain how this strategy can help them remember the different types of memory errors through elaborative rehearsal. Students always reported being excited to learn new learning strategies in my class that help them in their future classes. 

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To address the third component, I recognize that motivation is a vital part of students' learning. As such, I build in flexibility into my classes that allow students to focus on individual areas of interest within the scope of the class in order to encourage internal motivation. For example, for the weekly reflection projects in my cognitive psychology course, I allow students to pick which topic we covered that week to focus on in their reflection. Other than having to answer a couple specific questions, students are free to structure their reflection in any way that makes sense for them. 

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List of Courses Taught: Cognitive Psychology, Laboratory in Advanced Research Methods, Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods in Psychological and Brain Sciences, Statistical Methods in Psychological and Brain Sciences, Educational Psychology

Mentoring is something that I enjoy greatly and find to be one of the most important components of a students' success in academics and life. As such, I have focused my time and energy on a couple different areas of mentoring. 

1. Mentoring to Reduce Inequity in Education

2. Mentoring to Prepare Students for Teaching

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One of the mentoring areas that I focus a lot of time and energy on is trying to reduce inequity in academia. My main focus here has been on increasing the diversity of students applying to graduate school. I have been involved with several programs aimed at helping prepare students, specifically those from under represented groups, for applying and succeeding in graduate programs. I have been a Learning Strategist for Preparing Undergraduates for Graduate School, in which I helped students with strategies for taking the GRE. I have also been a mentor for Access Grads, a program designed to connect graduate and undergraduate students to make the process of applying to graduate school less mysterious, and Women In Science and Engineering, a program designed to connect graduate and undergraduate students who identify as women in STEM programs to build support networks.

The other area of mentoring that I am passionate about it helping prepare students, particularly graduate students, to teach their own courses. As an expert in learning, I believe it is my responsibility to try to ensure that the strategies I study are used by a wide range of instructors. I have been involved in several different programs that aim to provide graduate students with the tools and skills to be effective teachers. I have been involved in the Certificate in College and University Teaching Program, a program designed to prepare graduate students to teach at a university level, Summer Teaching Institute for Associates, a certificate program aimed at preparing graduate students to be instructor of record during summer term, and Instructional Development as a Teaching Assistant Pedagogical Advisor, in which I provided one-on-one consultations with graduate student instructors to discuss their course and ways they can improve their teaching and workshops that graduate students could attend to learn more about different components of teaching.