School name:  University of California, Riverside

Type of school:  Public, large-enrollment, research-focused (R1), Hispanic- and Asian American & Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (HSI & AANAPISI)

School locale (including state and country):  Riverside, California, USA

Is your role mostly in-person, hybrid, online (synchronous or asynchronous)?  In-person (though most of my classes are offered hybrid as well, and I occasionally teach an asynchronous course in the summer)

How many years have you taught psychology?  10 total, 8 as instructor of record

Classes you teach:  Introduction to Psychology, Psychological Methods: Statistical Procedures, Perception, Psychology of Creativity, Introduction to Quantitative Methods in Psychology (graduate level), Professional Development for Graduate Students (aka “how to get a job”)

Specialization (if applicable): e.g. clinical, cognitive, teaching, etc.
Cognitive, Teaching

What size classes do you teach?  Smallest: 10-15 PhD students; Largest: 585 undergraduates; & everything in between!

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?  It takes about 3 times teaching the class before you’re remotely “satisfied” with it. So just let it ride and see how things go the first couple of times—you can (and will!) always revise your class to be better in the future!

What is a book, article, research, or author/researcher that you would recommend that new teachers check out?  Desirable difficulties in theory and in practice (Bjork & Bjork, 2020). There is reference to earlier work on desirable difficulties that I recommend reading as well!  

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475-479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.09.003

What do you know now about teaching that you wish you knew when you were starting?  That it’s okay to not implement everything you know about effective teaching right away! It’s great to aspire to all of these great ideas we read about and see our colleagues implementing, but they take a HUGE amount of work to create and implement effectively. It’s okay to take things slow—you’ll get your class there.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.  I think my favorite course to teach is statistics, since students often approach it with a sense of apprehension and dread. I like to convince them that it’s not so bad after all, and is a desirable skill to have regardless of where they go after their time in undergraduate.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.  I’ve done an activity I found online a few times related to sampling distributions of the mean. I have students bring in a handful of coins and we create a distribution of the years on each coin (usually a lot of more recent coins, but with a long tail toward much older coins). We then calculate the averages of each student’s set of coins and graph those averages to start building a sampling distribution of the mean. This shows students what this theoretical distribution is in a more tangible way and helps them understand the difference between a sample distribution and a sampling distribution (though it’s still quite a confusing concept!).

What’s your dream course if you had the time and resources to teach it?  I am planning this course right now--a Teaching of Psychology course for PhD students looking to be instructor of record for their own class.

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?  I use the acronym CREATE to describe my teaching philosophy—I could explain much more about each one, but in the spirit of the prompt, I’ll leave them as they are:

Collaborative, Relatable, Engaging, Assess (appropriately), Test (often), Encouraging

What’s your workspace like?  Organized chaos. Everything is in its place (which makes things easy to find), but the places that things are in are perhaps not the most organized or optimized. I have dreams of fixing up my office (and home office) to be neater and more aesthetically pleasing, but I can’t motivate myself to do it until things are disastrously messy.

What is something you are currently focused on improving or changing in your teaching?  I am currently trying to find ways to effectively implement alternative grading (e.g., specifications grading, ungrading) in large lecture classes. I am motivated to understand whether it can be done effectively, and whether the effort is worth it in terms of improving students’ achievement of learning outcomes and their overall experience in the course.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.  When I tried specifications grading in statistics, I set the specifications for the final exam a bit too high, and ended up with many students who would have earned grades far lower than is typical. There were a bunch of (justifiably) angry emails when I released the scores! But I took in the feedback, admitted that I had made a mistake (professors are humans too, after all!) and adjusted the cutoff and final grades accordingly. As a sidenote: happy to chat and share my experiences (good and bad) with anyone who is interested in trying out specs grading—it’s not for the faint of heart!

Tell us about a teaching “win” you’ve had and the context in which it happened.  When I implemented an ungrading approach in Perception, I had students submit final portfolios of their work where they could demonstrate their achievement of the course learning objectives. They also answered reflective questions about their experience in the course, what new things they learned, whether they shared those things with friends/family, etc. Seeing them demonstrate their learning in this way allowed me a much more intimate peek than I typically get with typical exams. It was so inspiring to see them relate the content to their lives and be excited about sharing their newfound knowledge with others.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?  I hold a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?  I am re-reading the first four books of The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson in anticipation of book 5 (Wind and Truth) coming out at the end of the year.

What tech tool could you not live without?  Email on my phone. I know, I know, it facilitates poor work-life balance… but I have to know if someone has tried to reach me!