School name: Florida State University

Type of school: Public, R1 University

School locale: Tallahassee, Florida

Classes you teach: General Psychology, Social Psychology, Psychology of Personality, Child Psychology, Research Methods, and Industrial-Organizational Psychology

Average class size: About 100, but I’ve taught classes from as small as 19 to as large as 250.

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?  To be as honest and transparent with my students as possible. I can think of two different ways this has been helpful.

As a graduate student, I was particularly nervous about what to do when students asked questions that I didn’t immediately know the answer to, but it was such a relief to know that I could simply say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” Since then, with most of my students having their smart phones with them in class, this has morphed into, “I don’t know, but let’s find out!”

Furthermore, I think that students appreciate when a teacher will take risks in the classroom, but this occasionally means that sometimes things won’t work out as planned. When this happens, rather than pretend that the activity went great, I admit that I was trying something new and that it could be improved, so I ask my students what they did/did not like about the activity and how it could be adjusted for future classes.

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? 

This book isn’t about teaching, specifically, but the first book that comes to mind is Quiet by Susan Caine. As a lifelong extrovert, it was easy for me to forget that a large proportion of my students looked at the world in a very different way than I do, and that these students probably have much different preferences in the classroom, as well. Since reading Quiet, I’ve tried to be much more mindful about whether incorporating groupwork truly enhances my class activity/assignment or not. I’ve also been giving my students extra time to brainstorm on their own before asking students to share their thoughts on a given topic. Some students will always be eager hand-raisers (me, for example), but it’s been great to see how other students are clearly more comfortable and willing to sharing their thoughts once they’ve had time to reflect.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.  

My favorite course to teach is Social Psychology. This was one of the courses that first drew me into the field of psychology as a student, because I enjoyed how applicable its theories and lessons are to real life. Although I like teaching most lessons in this course, one of the lectures I find most interesting is about social identity. It’s fun to open students’ eyes to the ways in which we enhance our self-image and relate to others, as well as the multitude of ways that culture shapes the ways that we view ourselves. In this class, I’m able to use examples that most students relate to (such as “basking in reflected glory" when our football team is doing well vs “cutting off reflected failure” when the team is struggling). After introducing the topic with these initial examples, I can also integrate in discussions of more serious topics that some students might shy away from initially like race, religion, and politics.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.  

When I teach personality, I have my students think about and list some of their more dominant traits, and then I ask them to think about how these traits can be both strengths and weaknesses in their lives. To get the discussion going, I’ll highlight how students who are more introverted possess strengths that I do not, and that sometimes my high level of extroversion can present problems (again, you can see the impact from when I read Quiet in this example). I especially like this activity because I’ve had many students tell me afterwards that they’ve never considered how some of their “less desirable” traits can indeed be strengths.

What teaching and learning techniques work best for you?

If you ask my students, I think they would say that I will provide them with examples, then more examples, then more examples after that. I know that not every student is going to pursue a career in psychology, so I really try to make the material as accessible as I can by describing the concepts from class in ways that students can relate to. Then, when students ask how they can study for my exams, I encourage them to practice coming up with their own examples as well!

What’s your workspace like? Let’s just say that my typical office layout might bother people who are especially high in neuroticism or conscientiousness. (But I’m working on it).

Three words that best describe your teaching style.  Enthusiastic, challenging, and encouraging

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

High expectations don’t mean you can’t have fun.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

When I was younger, I would occasionally pull the “sit in a desk on the first day and pretend to be a student” trick. It would typically work well enough, letting my students know that this class might challenge their notion of what common sense is, but one semester…it backfired. Specifically, this innocent deception led one of my students to constantly question whether was I telling the truth. This problem culminated one day when the student raised his hand and asked whether I’d “told the girl sitting in front of him to spend the entire class playing on her cell phone because it was very distracting.” Needless to say, I had not, and the other student who’d been on her phone was mortified. I had to announce that I would unequivocally no longer be using any deception in that class, and I haven’t pulled the prank since.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

I’m pretty open in the classroom, but I do think that students are often surprised to learn that I didn’t always know I was going to be a psychology professor. Sometimes, I think students feel tremendous pressure to know exactly what they should do or what their future should look like as soon as they get to college. It can also seem like everyone else is much more confident in their futures than you are, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. When I share my experience about changing majors as a junior, I also ask other students in the class to raise their hands if they’ve changed majors during their time at school, and it never fails that a large proportion of the class raises their hand as well. I think students appreciate when I share this about myself, as it reassures them that they still have time to figure things out.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I just finished reading Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan. If you’re familiar with this comedian, you likely already know that he is a parent of FIVE young children. I’ve always enjoyed his comedy, but as a new dad, myself, this was the perfect book to help me see the humor in topics like sleep deprivation and self-doubt that most parents deal with from time to time.

What tech tool could you not live without?

Youtube! This isn’t the only way to share video content into my classroom, of course (e.g. Databrary, TED Talks, etc.), but it’s hard to imagine not using videos in my classes. Videos are a great way to illustrate concepts, to show both classic and contemporary experimental designs, and to include a greater range of diverse perspectives in my courses. Sometimes I have to be careful not to overdo it (it would be easy to show too many cute baby videos in Child Psychology, for example), but if I’m ever developing a lesson where it’s apparent that I’ll be talking for too long, finding a good video resource is always my first step to liven things up.

What is your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

I’ll chat about just about anything, honestly, but most recently, the topic of conversation almost always turns to my son who was born in March. It’s been an exciting and challenging transition, and he’ll definitely be included in lots of new examples when I teach Child Psychology in the fall!

School name: St. Edward’s University

Type of college/university (e.g., R1, community college, small liberal arts school, high school): a Masters-granting liberal arts institution. St. Edward’s has a total enrollment of about 5,000 students, with about 3,800 undergraduates. The Department of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience is the largest on campus, enrolling 320 Psychology majors and another 125 Behavioral Neuroscience majors, or about 450 students total. We currently have 13 full-time tenure-track faculty and several visiting, one-year, or adjunct positions

School locale (e.g., small town, rural area, city, country/region): Austin, TX 

Classes you teach: 
My duties as department chair have limited the amount and variety of courses I teach, but I routinely teach Statistics to sections of about 20-25 students, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology to similarly sized classes. At various points I’ve taught Social Psychology (my area of specialization), Research Methods, Introductory Psychology, History and Systems, Cognitive Psychology, Advanced Research Methods, Psychometrics, and a few one-shot courses here and there.

Average class size: 20-25 students

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received? 
I’ve been fortunate to have associated with really great mentors over my career, and their guidance, from many different perspectives, has strangely shown a great deal of consistency. For example, my undergraduate mentor, the late Maureen O’Sullivan, advised me explicitly through our research collaborations and implicitly through her style and approach to teaching. Similarly, I was fortunate to be a teaching assistant for the late Dev Singh during my graduate school career. I was fascinated by the way he strolled into a classroom carrying nothing whatsoever – no notes, no chalk, no gimmicks – yet held the attention of everyone in the room as he wove compelling stories of science. The secret of his success was that he invited his students to join him on a journey of intellectual exploration, investing them with a stake in the learning process as he guided their discoveries.  Finally, my dissertation advisor, Dan Gilbert, and my former brother-in-law, the late Dan Wegner, showed me that great researchers also can be great teachers, and vice versa. Both Dans are renowned for their pathbreaking contributions to the science of psychology, but fewer people may know that they’re also really great instructors in the classroom. I’m sure all these people, at one point or another, gave me some specific teaching advice, but really they “advised” me more through their actions than their words.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.
With no small amount of perversity, I’d say Statistics is my favorite course to teach, but that’s possibly only because I’ve now taught about 100 sections of it. Most instructors wouldn’t gravitate toward a class that students don’t want to take, that many students think they can’t or won’t understand, and that promises such a high degree of fear and loathing from its audience. Yet those moments – and there have been many of them – when the proverbial light bulbs illuminate over students’ heads, and the “this is easier than I thought” comments flow freely, make it all worthwhile.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.
Also perversely, I’m not sure I’ve got a favorite activity or assignment. The oddity here is that I’ve enjoyed a multi-decade association with Pearson Education and other publishers, creating instructor's manuals, online content, study guides, test banks, textbook content, and yes, even transparency masters back in the day, but I use almost none of it myself. I guess I’m good at thinking up clever activities for other people to use, but you’d think that with a storehouse of suggestions that large, I’d draw from it myself a little more often!

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?Active engagement in material, peppered with liberal doses of humor – the smart kind, not “Dad jokes” or goofy asides – seems to do the trick. I’d much rather have students talking and thinking, even if they’re getting the wrong answers, than sitting around waiting to be told what to think or what to do.

What’s your workspace like?
My workspace, aka “office,” tends to be an organized jumble of curiosities (see photograph). My other workspace – the classroom – tends to be a high-energy modernist/minimalist affair.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.
Interactive. Encouraging. Hilarious.

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?
Make students smarter than they were before. 

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.
Fortunately I haven’t had real disasters or embarrassments in the classroom, of the “did you know your zipper’s been down?” variety or delivering, say, a personality lecture to a social psychology class and never realizing it (I’m not naming names, but it’s happened). Two related events do come to mind, though. First, every fall semester, like clockwork, I’d lose my voice for a few days. I was never sick, but allergies or strain or whatever caused my main “teaching instrument” to conk out. So more than once I delivered the day’s lecture via writing on an overhead projector or (more recently) typing in a document projected onscreen. The bizarreness of students silently reading and writing, but occasionally asking a question that received my nonverbal answer, was strangely calming. To counteract my hoarseness, I eventually wised up and started bringing a glass of water to each lecture. That worked well until, during one final exam, I promptly spilled the entire glass over the entire stack of exams, minutes before I distributed them. I got even wiser and started bringing a cappedcontainer of water to class…

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?
Students might be surprised to learn that I’m a big record collector. In these days of downloaded music, I cling to having the actual vinyl article in hand, but decidedly not in any hipster-come-lately sense. Trolling thrift stores for elusive finds leads to amassing some 6,000 LPs, but I still see that as “small” compared to the real fanatics. Students might or might not be surprised to learn that I play the drums and guitar, and dabble in bass, synthesizer, and Theremin, yet I can’t play a harmonica to save my soul. And putting all that together, they’d be really surprised to learn that my first paying gig was playing drums with a Lithuanian polka band in San Francisco.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?
I tend to read books by and about musicians. I just finished Jorma Kaukonen’s autobiography, Been So Long. (Jorma was the guitarist with Jefferson Airplane and is the guitarist with Hot Tuna.) I’ve read almost everything by or about the Ramones. A Tom Petty biography is next on the list.

What tech tool could you not live without?
I could live without almost any tech tool. Does a turntable count?

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?
I’m very lucky to be surrounded by supportive, agreeable colleagues who are passionate about what they do, and that characterizes both the psychology crowd and my colleagues in other departments. We certainly chat about business – that tends to come with the chair gig – but we talk a lot about food, family, fun…the kinds of things that make Austin a great place to live and that energize people in their daily lives.

School name: The University of Memphis

Type of college/university (e.g., R1, community college, small liberal arts school, high school): Public research university offering bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and doctoral degrees

School locale (e.g., small town, rural area, city, country/region): Urban community of Memphis, TN

Classes you teach: Introductory psychology, abnormal psychology, and introduction to clinical psychology (co-taught with my graduate mentor) all at the undergraduate level

Average class size: 35

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received? 

The best advice about teaching I have ever received was that “research is teaching and teaching is research.” I received that advice from a great teacher I had as an undergraduate student, John Norcross. He taught me a lot about how teaching and research are two professional activities that can (and should!) coexist in productive harmony.

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher?

Several articles and books have shaped my work as a psychology teacher. I regularly read articles from journals like Teaching of Psychology, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Psychology of Learning & Teaching. A few books that I incorporate are entitled What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain), McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, and An Evidence-Based Guide to College and University Teaching (Richmond, Boysen, & Gurung).

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

My favorite course to teach is abnormal psychology. It’s a course with a lot of inherently interesting material. I feel lucky to teach that course because students are curious and interested in the material from day one. Their curiosity raises a lot of questions and leads to interesting discussions about human behavior. I do not need to exert any extra effort as a professor to enhance students' interest. 

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

In introduction to clinical psychology, I teach students fundamental clinical interviewing skills – open-ended questions, closed-ended questions, reflective listening, etc. Students pair up and role play interviewer and interviewee for increasingly longer periods of time during the semester. While the students are role playing, I walk around the classroom, listen to interviews, and offer tips to guide their interviews. Students typically feel anxious to conduct interviews at the beginning of the semester, but many of them say how much they learned after we continue to practice.

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?

I find that using a variety of teaching/learning techniques works best for me. My number one rule is not to lecture for great lengths of time because students become bored or distracted. In class, I use several semi-flipped classroom approaches, discussions, some video clips, and iClickers (they are a great tool for showing me when I was not effective in explaining a topic!). I also use a mix of weekly quizzes and writing assignments in my courses.

What’s your workspace like?
My current workspace is shared with three other graduate students. Usually there is less clutter on my desk (mine has the photo of the dog) but I am in the process of wrapping up my dissertation before heading off to internship. And yes, there is a large tin of cookies as well as two lint rollers in my workspace.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

Active, organized, enthusiastic

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Meet students where they are and facilitate learning

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

One embarrassment (that I’m willing to share!) readily comes to mind. In an introductory psychology class, I tripped over a small garbage can and fell to the floor while I was teaching. My students and I all laughed hysterically when they saw I was not hurt.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

They might be surprised to learn that I initially did not intend to pursue psychology as a major when I was an undergraduate student. I started as a computer science major but quickly learned it was not for me. Then, I spent some time as a philosophy major while enrolled in some psychology classes. I did not think I would pursue psychology until I took a careers in psychology class during my junior year. That’s when I “caught the fever!”

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I am embarrassed to write that I am not currently reading anything for pleasure. There has not been much time for extra curricular reading as a graduate student… Typically I enjoy reading books about science that are from academic disciplines outside of psychology.

What tech tool could you not live without?

My personal computer. I own a small netbook that is easy to carry with me.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

I primarily talk to other students (graduate and undergraduate) about our ongoing research projects. We also talk a lot about music, sports, and our pets.

School Name: University of Roehampton London – Online & University of the People - Online

Type of School: Public Universities. Both universities have a diverse student body that represents the six continents – Asia, Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Australia.

Classes you Teach: Undergraduate and Graduate psychology courses including Research Project (Master’s Thesis) Supervision

Average Class size: In undergraduate courses, class size ranges from 15 to 40 students. While in the graduate courses, class size ranges from 15 to 25 students. Supervision of master’s thesis varies from 4 to 15 students. 

Tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

Out of all the psychology, undergraduate and graduate courses - psychopathology, personality, and health psychology are the courses that I enjoy teaching as I found that most students someway and somehow relate to the topics with their personal experiences, and at times discovers something new about themselves. As much as I love teaching these courses, I like organizing and presenting the materials in a way that makes it easier for the students to understand which can stimulate discussions that foster learning and engage the students in active learning.

These courses that I enjoy teaching are aligned with my research interest which reflects on the student’s masters thesis that I am supervising that has an emphasis on how adverse environmental experiences (stress, trauma, social disadvantages, alter development processes) shapes emotional, cognitive and neurobiological development throughout childhood and adolescence that predicts the increased risk for psychopathology, particularly in adulthood.

What are three words that best describe your teaching style? Interactive, Engaging, and Supportive.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you? I am a licensed clinical psychologist and currently in active psychological practice. I amfrom Houston, Texas but presently residing in Alberta, Canada. Psychology is not my first undergraduate studies, but Business Administration.

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

Teaching using a learning platform can be challenging compared to teaching in a classroom as being familiarized with the different learning software is vital in facilitating the course/class, engaging the students to participate in activities must be sustained and students tend to need more support. Because of this, flexibility, adaptability, and communication are imperative.

The best advice that I learned from my professors and mentors are keeping it simple even if the course material is difficult as it enables the students to learn the material and knowing after the course is over that they have learned what should be is the rewarding part of teaching.

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? I love the books that are authored by Oliver Sacks in particular, The Case of the Colorblind Painter as it clearly displays the relationship between cognitive processing and behavior. 

Briefly describe a favorite assignment.

Writing a research proposal is my favorite assignment as it demonstrates the student’s subject of interest, why it interests them, and showcase their writing skills. Based on the students’ feedback, they find this assignment challenging, but they are also excited in doing an activity that they have not done before.

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you? Active learning is my teaching/learning style which allows inclusion of the different learning styles and motivates students to be engaged learners.

What’s your workspace like? Tons of paper all over my workspace. It is evident that the semester term is over when all the paper disappears, and everything is organized.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

When I was new on teaching online, I announced the date and time of the synchronous class and realized the day before the scheduled date that some of my students are geographically located in places wherein the date is a day ahead of North America. Luckily, that day I managed to show up although I was ten minutes late and good enough some of my students are still online waiting. I ended up facilitating the class though slightly disorganized. Because of this error, I ended up giving two synchronous class instead of one and sending emails that contains some materials and resources that I did not manage to cover during the synchronous class.

At the time that I made this mistake, all I can do is go with the flow though I was really flustered. Now, when I look back, it always brings a smile on my face. 

What are you currently reading for pleasure? Recently, I became enthused about the holistic approach such as meditation that I ended up reading Aware, the science and practice of presence.

What tech tool could you not live without? Collaboration app is essential in teaching and communicating with students, and the use of SPSS to validate the students’ statistics work.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school?)

In the faculty lounge forum, the discussion between faculty members tends to be more suggestive as the topics that are most talked about pertains to student’s situations or circumstances such as academic integrity or inappropriate/unusual behaviors. In some instances, a faculty member might discuss an activity that they intend to introduce or already presented in class that is out of the ordinary that usually creates a lot of buzz.

School name: Columbia College

Type of school: Small liberal arts school

School locale: Columbia, MO

Classes you teach: General Psychology, Lifespan Development, Research Methods, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Capstone Research, and Writing for the Social Sciences.

Average class size: 20-30 students

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

In one of the first courses I TA’ed as a graduate student, the major professor gave me a Louis Pasteur quote about “chance favoring only the prepared mind.” The quote confused me at first, but I quickly realized how fast things moved inside the classroom and how quality-teaching moments were products of being prepared when students asked difficult questions.

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher?

Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. I read this when I started teaching and have aspired to implement these practices ever since.  

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

General Psychology is one of my favorites. It’s the doorway to the rest of the major and because it has so many topics, I never get bored. I bring a lot of passion and enthusiasm into this course and love hearing students say they took a psychology course to satisfy a requirement but enjoyed it so much that they signed up for more. 

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

Whenever I lecture on Latané and Darley’s (1970) decision making model for helping behavior, I always recruit a student to help me create a scene at the beginning of class (e.g., falling down, spilling a stack of papers, dropping a cup, etc.). I try something different every year and I’m amazed by students’ reactions. It makes for a great talking point later in the lecture when I post an image of my student accomplice and ask why so few of their classmates got out of their seats to help (diffusion of responsibility!).

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?

Retrieval practices! I read Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s, Make it Stick, and was immediately convinced I should implement low-stakes retrieval practice activities in all of my courses. Now, I can’t go more than a few days without engaging students in some type of retrieval practice. 

What’s your workspace like?

Most of the time, my office is relatively clean. However, this is not always the case around the middle and end of the semester (see attached photo for proof).

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

Energetic. Active. Fun.

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Always have fun with the material. 

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

At one point during my first year as a faculty member, the power went out in my building 15 minutes before I had to teach. My course was in a windowless, basement classroom and I had to think fast if I still wanted to lecture about attachment theory. Instead of canceling class, students illuminated their cell phones and I taught the entire lecture by getting students to role-play Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Task. The class got a kick out of the tall student athlete from the football team playing the role of the baby. (The guy did a great job!) Every semester since, I incorporate some element of role-play when discussing this topic.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

I was quite the runner in college and graduate school, completing 10K’s, half-marathons, marathons, as well as an Ironman triathlon. Exercising helped me manage all the stress that came with school.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I attended a Supreme Court session last summer and got hooked on all things Supreme Court. I started listening to Radiolab’s podcast, More Perfect, and even bought Justice Sotomayor’s autobiography, My Beloved World, in the Court’s bookstore. I get in a few chapters whenever I have “free time” during my breaks.

What tech tool could you not live without?

ZipGrade completely changed how I administer and score exams. Since adopting this tool, I haven’t looked back.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

Mostly, my conversations are teaching focused. My colleagues do amazing work and I’m always fascinated to learn more about their approaches to teaching. Their stories inspire me to continue dreaming big in my own courses. 

School name: Duke University

Type of school: R1

School locale: Suburban meets small hipster city

Classes you teach: My primary focus is on teaching our large (250 student) Introductory Psychology course, but I am also teaching a first-year seminar called The Psychology of Student Success, and I teach seminars on teaching and on doing classroom research.

Average class size: My class size is bimodally distributed. J Classes are either huge (230-250) or small (<18)

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

I think probably the simplest, most impactful advice I received was just to be “intentional.” Instead of just doing my best impersonation of my own college professors, or trying to shove as much content into my class as possible, my teaching choices should intentionally reflect my goals for my students. This seems so obvious to me now, but as graduate student teaching for the first time, it wasn’t obvious at all. I really thought of teaching as more of a performance than as a project with desired outcomes. This advice came indirectly from two of my colleagues at Stanford: James Gross and Kelly McGonigal, who are two of the best teachers I know. They talked about teaching in this way, and it really changed the way I thought about it.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

Over the years I’ve really tried to find a way to fall in love with each and every topic I teach. I have to discover something—a story, a particular study, a theme—that makes me really eager to share that topic with students. If I can’t connect with its meaning or purpose, then why am I covering it? As a result, I truly love all the topics I get to teach. If I had to pick a single favorite, I think I’d choose Sensation and Perception. Visual illusions illustrate at a very basic level how the mind constructs reality. The active role of the mind in shaping our experiences is one of the most powerful lessons that a psychology course can teach a person and this all begins with how we interpret information coming through our senses.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

For years, I have been illustrating the reconstructive nature of memory in my introductory psychology course by planting a false memory about the first day of class. This idea was originally conceived in collaboration with my former colleague at Stanford, Greg Walton. In a lecture on the brain, I describe the function of the cerebellum and offer a joke: “this part of the brain wasn’t working very well for me when I spilled my water bottle the first day of class.”

Several days later, I give students a survey that they can complete for modest extra credit (a single point on an exam). The survey contains a number of questions related to memory, including questions asking students to recall details about events from the first day of class. The false event from the first day of class—me spilling my water bottle—is listed alongside three to four true events.

Although most students report not remembering this false event, anywhere from 20-35% of my students do, and most will confabulate details of the incident, including the color of the bottle, where I was when I spilled it, the noise it made, what I said, the fact that students laughed, etc. I then use student quotes describing the false event in my lecture on memory. After sharing some of Elizabeth Loftus’ and others’ classic research on false memory, I reveal students’ own data illustrating their false memories.

Critically, we discuss the ethics of the demonstration. I explain how much I value honesty in the classroom, and don’t use deception without careful consideration. I further explain that I want students to experience the vulnerability of their memory in a safe setting, where the worst thing that can happen is that they feel mildly embarrassed that their anonymous description ended up on my PowerPoint slide. Students overwhelmingly think the demonstration is worth the mild deception, and appreciate the lengths I’m willing to go to help them understand psychology.

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?

I have two favorite teaching techniques. First, I love telling stories as a pedagogical tool. Listening to a story has always been one of my favorite ways to learn, and I think that creating a compelling narrative is a strength of mine. My lectures are structured to be story-like, and I use specific stories to illustrate important concepts and to describe a classic experiment. Telling a successful story forces me to take my students’ perspective: What do they already know? What will they care about? What will surprise them? Anger them? Inspire them? I’m always collecting new stories by listening to wonderful podcasts that feature psychologists and their work. My favorites are This American Life, Invisibilia, Hidden Brain, Radiolab, and the Ted Radio Hour.

Second, I love a good discussion. I like to pose a good question and really listen to and build on what students have to say. I used to think that teaching was all about “talking,” until I observed some brilliant friends and colleagues who were skilled at facilitating discussions. They knew how to pose thought-provoking questions and then just listen, really listen, to what students had to say. With intense listening, they would easily come up with a great follow-up question or comment that would inspire other students to join in and create a true conversation. I’ve really enjoyed developing this skill myself because it forces me to be in the moment with my students, learning along with them.

What’s your workspace like?

When I’m getting down to the business of lesson planning or grading, my workspace is just me and my computer, because everything is digital. I have a sit-to-stand desk so that I can get up on my feet. I like to have multiple screens for lesson planning, because I’m usually doing a mix of reading, writing, and building slides all at once. I also think a lot about teaching when I’m walking and driving. While driving, I prep for class by listening to previously recorded lectures from my own classes or to podcasts that have stories I want to share with students. While walking, I sometimes use “retrieval practice” and mentally walk through the lesson I have planned for the day.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

theatrical, empathetic, meticulous

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Always start from a place of empathy.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

I’ve made so many mistakes over the years, most small, but occasionally a bigger one. Probably my worst teaching disaster was when I was in graduate school, teaching a summer session course that I helped to design on “The Psychology of Mind Reading” (really a course about social cognition). This was one of my first real teaching experiences. At the last minute, I’d decided to add a description of a recently published study to my lecture plan. When it came time to explain the study in class, my mind went completely blank. I just could NOT remember the details of the study and just stood there, looking blankly at my slides for a long time. Eventually I gave up, tried my best to laugh about it, and explained that I would “study up” before our next class session. I think my students gave me the benefit of the doubt because they’d seen how prepared I’d been for our previous classes, and they knew I cared. By the next class we seemed back on track. Ever since, I’ve been extra careful to make sure I understand the studies I plan to cover in class, taking time to check out the original article and make sure I have a grasp of the methods, partly to make sure I can explain it, but also to be prepared for interesting questions students may ask.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

Most of my students are surprised to learn that I’m also a group exercise instructor who likes to choreograph fitness routines to music. I love to exercise and have been teaching exercise since my first year of graduate school. Occasionally one of my students stumbles into my exercise class on campus and then takes a few minutes to recognize me because I look pretty different decked out in my workout gear.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I don’t have very “elevated” book selections—I love fantasy fiction written for young adults because I can read it before bedtime without having to strain my brain too hard at the end of the day. I most recently read Sabaa Tahir’s Reaper at the Gates which is part of her Ember in the Ashes Series. I haven’t picked a new book yet. I love audio books because I can listen while walking or driving.

What tech tool could you not live without?

I could not live without Google image search. My lecture style is very visual. I don’t like a lot of words on my slides and Google’s image searching capability makes it so easy for me to find the perfect picture to compliment whatever I am trying to say.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

I definitely ask my colleagues about how their teaching is going this term. Because I’m at an R1, I don’t think faculty talk as much about their teaching, so I try to start that conversation. We also talk a lot about our kids. I have two daughters, aged 7 and 10, and they are always up to something fun that I like to share.

PSYCHSESSIONS UPDATE: Listen to Bridgette Martin Hard talk with Garth about connections between teaching psychology and storytelling, theater, and improvisation!

https://psychsessionspodcast.libsyn.com/e015-bridgette-martin-hard-the-artistry-and-craft-of-teaching

School name: Delta State University

Type of school: Regional State University

School locale: Small town, in the Delta of Mississippi (the heart of the blues!)

Classes you teach: General Psychology, Lifespan Development, Educational Psychology, Human Sexuality, and Statistics

Average class size: 20-30

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

My biggest fear when I first starting teaching in graduate school was that my students would see right through me. I had a fear that a student would ask me a puzzling question that I would not know the answer to and I would be caught as a fake, the ol’ impostor syndrome at work. I mentioned this fear to my advisor and he told me that there was no way I was going to know everything, and that’s Okay. He told me to not make up some answer just because you feel like you have to, that students will respect you more if you reply with, “I actually don’t know the answer to that, let me write that down, research it, and I’ll get back to you next class,” and MAKE SURE to get back to them. The relief that came with that piece of advice helped me relax into my teaching and let my passion and enthusiasm come through.

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? 

It’s a hard choice between John Dewey’s Experience and Education and Ryan and Deci’s (2000) “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” but ultimately I have to go with Experience and Education. Dewey’s description of education and its importance in being a transformative experience instead of just a means to an end constantly reminds me to keep perspective while I am teaching, because at the end of the day what is that I want my students to take away from my class? Concepts, content, and lectures will fade, but opening a student’s mind to critical thinking and the beautiful world of understanding human behavior and thought through psychology is truly transformative.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

I absolutely adore teaching Statistics. It’s such a weird mixture of conceptual and procedural learning, and I just love surprising my students with how relevant it is to their everyday lives. So many students come into statistics with math anxiety and a fear of failure. They set such low expectations of themselves and the class and that motivates me to show them that the course really is not so scary. It also continually challenges me to think of different ways to describe complex ideas. Standard deviation may feel like second nature to me now, but I am constantly needing to remind myself of my very first interaction with these topics. It is like learning a new language that can make you lots of money if you get really good at it! Honestly I get so jazzed about statistics I would not be surprised if sometime down the road I get a statistics related tattoo.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

My favorite assignment is one I actually borrowed from the Transformative Experience literature (see Pugh, 2011 and Heddy & Sinatra 2013). It’s called “Use Change Value” or “UCV” responses. I do this about 8-ish times a semester where I ask students to describe how they have seen the course content in their everyday life through three prompts:

1) Discuss how you saw an example of course content in your everyday life.
2) Discuss how seeing that content in your real life experience has changed how you see that topic.
3) Discuss why that experience was/is valuable to you.

I give my students autonomy in letting them choose any course content, and given that psychology is the study of human behavior/cognition and we are all humans, they have a plethora of options to choose from. I find that this assignment is great for facilitating self-relevance so the material usually sticks better, and I get to know more about my students through these prompts. They’re also only 300 words, so it doesn’t become too burdensome for myself or my students.

What’s your workspace like?

I think my office is a reflection of my interests and sense of humor as well as my affinity for psychology. My psych side shows through my skulls, brains, and psych memes on display, but I also have a poster of one of my favorite movies (Army of Darkness) framed above my desk, and a mounted taxidermy bob cat head that I inherited from a bar I worked in during grad school. I spend a lot of time in my office and so I wanted it to be a place that brought me joy as well as a space that didn’t feel as threatening to my students. As a student, walking into offices with a multitude of bookshelves felt so daunting. It was if the bookshelves represented the vast knowledge of my professors that could come crashing down on my little brain at any minute. I keep one bookshelf of what I find to be absolutely essential texts, and the rest reside at home.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

Enthusiastic, Relevant, Eclectic

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Each student has a unique perspective, address it.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

In graduate school one of my mentors asked me to teach about operant conditioning and shaping in her class so she could observe my teaching and give me feedback. I decided to do an in-class activity on shaping where someone in the class would be sent out into the hall while the rest of the class decided on a behavior they wanted them to do when they returned. Upon returning, using M&Ms, I would reward the student as they performed behaviors that got closer and closer to the desired behavior until they finally performed it. The class chose jumping jacks, which was great and should be easy I figured. It was not. My volunteer just did not get the idea that they had to try different movements in order to be rewarded. Maybe I did not explain the activity well enough, maybe they were shy, but we stood there for 5 awkward minutes while my volunteer made little gyrations and the M&Ms melted in my hand. Finally my mentor saved me and told me that we got the idea and to just move on. I ended up carrying out the rest of the lecture with only a mild amount of sweat and shaking, and it was a very valuable lesson in how your in-class demonstrations may not always make the point you want them to and how you may need to switch things up to get things to work.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I am a big horror genre fan, so I am currently reading through some of Stephen King’s more popular titles, and at the moment am on Pet Semetary.

What tech tool could you not live without?

Honestly my LMS, which is currently Canvas. I love the organization, accessibility, and ease of communication. I’m constantly finding new ways to engage with it in meaningful ways with my students.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

Usually it revolves around campus news and activities, but Cleveland is also a very small town, so we will also chat about upcoming social events or trips to bigger cities as well.

School name: City of Medicine Academy

Type of school: CMA is an urban magnet high school, a small school of 350 that’s 44% African-American and 42% Hispanic, and 82% female. We have a wide range of students who are interested in pursuing a career in the medical field, so they take extra health and medicine electives. Our students can graduate from high school with their CNA license or as certified EMTs.

School locale: Durham, NC – the Bull City!

Classes you teach: AP Psychology, Civics & Economics (and numerous other social studies courses over the years)

Average class size: 20 (has ranged from 5-30)

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

In 2008 I worked closely with a fellow social studies teacher, who, like me, had spent several years out of the classroom before returning to teaching. She’d worked a lot with beginning teachers, and one day when we were talking about teaching she said, “Look, it’s not that hard – just teach every class period from bell to bell.” She was a great colleague and she of course knew that teaching was always a hard job, but that reminder has always stuck with me. I only have a small amount of time with my students every day, and it’s vital that I use that time wisely every period.  

 

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? 

Like a lot of high school teachers, I was a social studies teacher by training, and it was a surprise when I was first asked to teach psychology. One of the most important books at that time was Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. I was taken in by Sacks’ use of rich language to describe his patients and I became just as fascinated as he was as to what motivated them (and all of us) to think and behave in certain ways. In terms of teaching, the book Make It Stick has greatly changed my thinking about how learning happens.  

 

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.  

There’s not one specific topic, but one general idea, which is encouraging students to use the principles of psychology to influence the behavior of others. I don’t mean this in a manipulative way, but when I teach about methods of persuasion or reinforcement principles, I truly encourage students to go out in the real world and try out these methods in small ways. It’s always fun to have them come back and say that their parents were more likely to allow them to have a later curfew, or a friend is acting more warmly to them, because of the principles they used. What could be more enticing to teenagers than to show them the tools for improving their world a little bit?

 

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.  

“Silly snakes!” This is the activity developed by Janet Simons and Don Irwin (Bolt resources manual, 1996) in which students are asked to listen to 20 strange sentences (“The crafty surgeon won the daily double”) and write down their ratings for each sentence. Each student rates the sentences according to the instructions on their rating sheets, and unbeknownst to them, there are two different rating systems: one asks them to rate the sentences according to how well they could pronounce the words, and the other asks them to rate them on how well they can create a vivid mental picture of the sentence. I then ask the students to turn over the rating sheet, number from 1 to 20, and then I start asking them questions based on the sentences (“Who won the daily double?”) I love this because I’ve done it dozens of times and it works every time! The “vivid mental picture” group always scores higher, and it leads to a conversation about the power of visual images when trying to create memories. I collect the scores by having them raise their hands (“how many got all 20 right?” etc.) and it’s just fascinating observing the “pronounce” group respond so emotionally because they have done poorly, and cannot imagine how someone else could have done so well. I once did this in a meeting with our faculty, and principal, who was in the “pronounce” group, got very angry as I read off the questions, even slamming down her pencil in frustration at one point!

 

What teaching and learning techniques work best for you?

Unlike most AP Psychology teachers, I have only one semester to teach the whole course, so I have to carefully structure every unit to maximize what I can help my students learn. I introduce every unit with a calendar that lists the page numbers of the reading and major concepts for that day. I regretfully jettison fun activities and projects that I’ve done successfully in the past, but I justify it because my focus is on students doing their best on the exam and gaining college credit. I can often be found in the front of the room, but I view it more as an interactive coaching style than lecturing; the students have already done the reading, so I focus on ways to help them learn the concepts more effectively, by using probing questions, mnemonics, concrete examples, activities, demonstrations, and images to promote dual coding. I also use frequent quizzes to make use of the testing effect, and the unit calendar helps to reinforce the idea of spaced effort over time instead of cramming. (Can you tell I’m a big fan of incorporating cognitive learning principles?)

 

What’s your workspace like?

Organic – that’s a positive way to say messy, right? Clutter has always been my hallmark, which of course leads me to seek out those research studies that link creativity and messiness.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.  

Relevant, responsive, and reflective.

 

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

“Teaching is performance. Art.”  I wish I had written this, but a while back I saw this comment from fellow high school psych teacher Charlie Blair-Broeker and it just clicked with me. Like performance art, teaching may seem on the surface to be easy or simple, but as we all know there’s so much work and thought behind every class period that students never see.

 

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

I know this sounds like a cliché, but it really happened. Several years ago when I was teaching memory I was proudly showing my students the mnemonic I had just learned for keeping proactive and retroactive interference straight. For years I had struggled with a quick and effective way to delineate the two, and someone shared with me this idea: you can teach students that “Proactive is when Old interferes, while Retroactive is when New interferes” by focusing on the word formed by the first letters of those capitalized words. So yes, in the midst of me proudly writing PORN on the board and boasting how effective this was for remembering interference, my new principal walked in for a little mini-observation. The debriefing after the visit wasn’t as bad as I had feared, and my students really did perfectly remember the difference!

 

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you? Okay, this is completely a lie, since I always manage to work it in to my AP Psych classes, but my other students wouldn’t know that I have had five crossword puzzles published in the New York Times. I still love solving them daily, but never seem to have enough free time to construct new puzzles any more. When I teach cognition I always do a mini-unit on solving puzzles by comparing solving methods between crosswords and cryptoquotes, two puzzles that most students have rarely done and seem to enjoy learning how solve. By the end, I can convince some to do extra credit in which they create crossword puzzle clues of varying difficulty or even complete a partially filled grid with their own letters.   

 

What are you currently reading for pleasure? Scandinavian crime fiction – my favorites include Jo Nesbø, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Camilla Läckberg, Lars Kepler, and Karin Fossum. I love the combination of the snowy bleakness, the clever twists, and the miserable detectives always trying to redeem themselves by breaking the big case.

 

What tech tool could you not live without?

I’m known in my own head as the “Sue Frantz of high school teachers,” so it’s impossible to choose just one. The one that gives me the most peace of mind is Dropbox, because I never have to worry about having my files on the wrong computer or a flash drive I can’t find. It’s also a lifesaver when I realize I’ve just inadvertently saved the wrong version of a file, and I can use Dropbox to download the version I’d saved the day before. Zipgrade has been great for quickly grading multiple choice using a method that gives far more data analysis and speed than the old Scantrons I once used. I’ve done lots of online quiz programs, like Socrative and Kahoot!, but my absolute favorite in the past few years is Quizizz. I can create quizzes in minutes, assign them to students, and get mountains of data back before the end of class. One of my favorite parts is giving students the option to re-take the quiz at home (using a laptop or phone) in “homework mode” so they get more practice with the questions and they can earn extra points by doing so. Oh, also I’ve been an Apple fanboy since 1984.   

 

What is your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

We’re a super small school – again, just 350 – so we get to know students much better than the average high school faculty. Most of us get to teach students in more than one class – I’ve taught one poor student four times! Our hallway chatter thus becomes conversations about our students – how’s he doing in your class, she seems sad – know what’s happening, what schools is she applying to, etc. One of our school’s goals is personalization, so having this close network of teachers who know the students well helps us all to be more responsive to the needs of the students.  

School name: University of Maine at Farmington

Type of school: public liberal arts college (~1700 students)

School locale: small town in rural Maine

Classes you teach: Child and Adolescent Development, Research Methods, Sophomore Seminar

Average class size: 15-30

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

My teaching mentor in grad school, Dr. David Zola, modeled “ways of being” in the classroom that have shaped my teaching practices. One of the things he believed was that students learn best when they are active. Even in large lectures, Dr. Zola would have students discuss and apply concepts with each other. The lecture hall would roar with the noise of many conversations and he would smile knowingly at his teaching assistants as if to say, “This is learning. This is the way you teach!”

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? 

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown is a book that has shaped how I live in and out of the classroom. The premise is that vulnerability, although often viewed as weakness, cultivates so many positive things in our lives. Putting yourself in front of a group of students in an authentic, open way can be a vulnerable position. But, the reward of seeing students grow and growing as a teacher makes the risk worth it.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

My favorite course to teach is Research Methods. Every semester, the 15 students each develop their own research project. The questions they seek to answer are always very interesting. The course is different every semester because the projects the students choose are unique to them. Although the main content of research methods stays the same, the way we work to apply the concepts to each individual project changes and keeps the course exciting.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

In Child Development, during the prenatal portion of the class, we read and talk about innovations in conception and genetics. Each semester there are current events and news articles related to beginning of life issues. This semester we read about the 3-person embryo technique and about how scientists can create egg cells from stem cells. The new science is always changing and students seem very interested in keeping up to date.

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?

I focus on how students can apply abstract concepts or theories to something in their own life. This is easy to do in a course like Child and Adolescent Development, where all students have direct experience with many of the ideas. I also try to have students apply information to their future personal or career lives (i.e., Why might a parent need to know about this theory? How might a teacher use this concept in a 3^rd grade class?).

What’s your workspace like?

The psychology building at UMF is an old church, complete with a steeple. The 8 psychology faculty are the only ones housed in this building, which also includes a small classroom and psychology student lounge. When I arrived 5 years ago, I was given the opportunity to choose a paint color for my office. I chose purple; the space feels warm and cozy. My large desk serves as both a workspace and a small group meeting space for my students and myself.

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

Goal-oriented, Collaborative, Relational

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Create learning goals. Develop relationships. Revise. Repeat.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

One day deep into the spring semester I walked into my Sophomore Seminar class and saw 12 exhausted faces staring at me. The goal for the day was to discuss and apply some of the theory from the reading about procrastination to our everyday lives. The irony of the topic (procrastination) was not lost on any of us. The semester had been full of short days (literally, Maine has less daylight in the winter), cold weather, and rampant flu-like illness. My students were exhausted, and I’d guess many of them hadn’t completed the reading. None of them looked energized for discussion. I tentatively began my planned class. Within 2 minutes, I could tell we weren’t in a learning frame of mind. I paused and considered how to correct our course. I acknowledged the exhaustion. I recognized the “human” in all of us. Then I made the suggestion that we walk the 3 blocks to downtown and grab some coffee. They were over the moon. We went downtown, got coffee at Dunkin’, and sat in the downtown gazebo casually discussing the reading for class. The biggest lessons I acquired: Learning doesn’t always happened as planned. Learning doesn’t always happen in the classroom. Cultivating relationships pays big dividends.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

My students might be surprised to learn that I’m an introvert at heart. Teaching is often an extroverted job. Whether I am enthusiastically getting up in front of groups of students or working to make individual connections in office hours, much of what I do at work revolves around social interactions. I think my students might be surprised to know that these interactions are not what “charges my battery.” Instead, I draw energy from lingering over a warm cup of tea with a book. Or, I find calm in my newest hobby-- sewing and quilting.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I commute 2 hours each day and so my “reading” for pleasure often comes in the form of audiobooks in my car. I vacillate between listening to fun popular fiction books (currently Crazy Rich Asians) and podcasts (like Psych Sessions Podcast co-hosted by Neufeld & Landrum).

What tech tool could you not live without?

I’m wracking my brain and habits on this one. The truth is I could live, and probably live better, without most of them. Many of the tech tools that we use on a daily basis actually facilitate our disconnection with others in the “real world.”

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

Many of my colleagues are regularly in their office with doors open. We pop into each other’s spaces and discuss the hits and misses of our latest class. We talk about challenging moments or funny missteps in and out of the classroom. And more often, we discuss the latest news headline or the most recent tweet.

School name: Missouri State University

Type of school: 4-year public institution, with Master’s degrees, and professional doctorates

School locale: Springfield, MO

Classes you teach:

Introductory Psychology
Abnormal Psychology
Psychopathology (graduate)
Clinical Communication Skills (graduate)

Average class size:

330 for Intro Psyc
30-40 for Abnormal Psyc
9 for graduate classes

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?

I’ve received a lot of great advice over the years! Coming to understand that “covering content” is not what teaching is all about and not what students are going to remember from my course was very liberating. Over the past decade, I have seen my role change from “content provider” to “designer of the learning environment.” This role is so much more fun and one where I believe my SoTL skills can be put to good use. 

Some other advice that really promoted a paradigm shift for me came from Carol Twigg and Carolyn Jarmon from the National Center for Academic Transformation during the early stages of our course redesign of Introductory Psychology. They taught me to consider the financial costs associated with teaching and to use that information to determine how my time is best spent. Since we now teach 330 students as a team (faculty member, graduate assistant, and 6 undergraduate learning assistants) it doesn’t make sense for me to spend my time entering grades on Blackboard. Instead, I use my time to analyze the class homework data and tailor our upcoming class accordingly. Every class is interactive (even with 330 students) and recognizing that the ability to have that type of class emerged from a financial analysis years ago is pretty cool!

What book or article has shaped your work as a psychology teacher? 

What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain). I also attended one of Ken’s workshops in 2010, which was career-changing for me.   

How Learning Works (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, Norman)

Make it Stick (Brown, Roediger, McDaniel)

And of course, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology and Teaching of Psychology journals.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.

I love all the courses I teach. But Intro Psyc is probably my favorite. My favorite classes are the ones where we have all 330 students participating in an activity – The Human Neuron for the Bio chapter, Shallow vs Deep Processing Experiment for Memory, or Classically Conditioning them with Fun-Dip in the Learning chapter.

Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity.

In addition to the ones I mentioned above, I also hold a special “study skills” class for all the undergrad courses I teach. I wait to do this until after the first exam (you probably know why) and love the opportunity to provide them with evidence-based strategies and some of the rationale about why they work and why the typical study strategies students often use aren’t generally very effective.

What teaching or learning techniques work best for you?

I try to practice what I preach. So, I attempt to model “best-practices” for teaching and learning during my classes. I use just-in-time teaching to plan the class for the day, the students answer numerous clicker questions throughout the class, I use peer-instruction, and interactive activities to help the students elaborate on the concepts. I’m also trying to do a better job of making the connections between the various topics/chapter more explicit. Intro Psyc is a survey of the field, but it is not 16 distinct topics. My goal is for students to start to see some of those “Big Ideas” running throughout the course and develop an appreciation for the science.

What’s your workspace like?

My workspace is generally pretty tidy and organized. It can get out of control briefly but then I have to clean things up before moving on to the next task. Our building was just renovated and I moved into my office in August – I’m taking a minimalist approach because our offices are so small now. What I’ve realized is I really don’t need much more than a computer these days!

Three words that best describe your teaching style.

Energetic, Warm, and Data-driven

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

Appreciating psychological science while learning how to learn.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

The year was 2008….my babies were 16 months and 5 months (yes, they are 11 months apart and I did not sleep for over 2 years!) I was teaching 150 Intro Psyc students and about halfway through the lecture I scratched my shoulder. I felt something strange and had the slow realization that what I was feeling was the inside seam of my shirt. I had been wearing my shirt inside-out all day and no one had said anything to me. I ended up finishing class 30 minutes early because I just couldn’t go on!

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

I’m originally from Vancouver, Canada and I’m still Canadian. I completed my undergraduate degree in Vancouver and then moved to Baton Rouge, LA to attend LSU for graduate school. There was some definite culture shock! But, I loved it and still cheer on the LSU tigers. I also met my best friend (Brooke Whisenhunt) in grad school. We have that one-in-a-million situation where we both got jobs at Missouri State University and have worked side-by-side for the past 15 years. It has been a dream come true.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I honestly don’t have much time for pleasure reading. But, the next on my list is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I saw him speak at APA this past summer and it was amazing!

What tech tool could you not live without?

Definitely my iPhone. I wish I could say I would be able to function without it, but I believe my entire life is contained in that little device.

What’s your hallway chatter like? What do you talk to colleagues about most (whether or not it is related to teaching/school)?

Honestly, we talk most about improving our teaching to better help students. Our Intro Psyc teaching team of faculty is very close and we are always looking for new interventions to try and new ways to measure learning. Most of us are also moms so we talk a lot about the ups and downs of raising children.

PSYCHSESSIONS UPDATE: Listen to this 2018 conversation between Danae,  Garth, Eric, and Brooke about an exciting intro. psych redesign project. You can hear the "origin story" of their intro. psych publishing project (a digital-first publishing idea based on learning science principles!)