School name: Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Type of school: regional, 4-year public university
School locale: Illinois, USA
Is your role mostly in-person, hybrid, online (synchronous or asynchronous)? In person, with some asynchronous teaching
For how many years have you taught psychology? I have been teaching Psychology for 4 years.
Classes you teach: Intro to Psych, Careers in Psychology, Lifespan Development, Social Psychology, Psychology of Gender, Statistics, Research Methods
Specialization: Social Development
What size classes do you teach? Typically 40 students or less
What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received? You don’t have to know everything, and it’s okay to tell students if you don’t know something. This can sometimes be daunting, especially as a junior faculty member when you want to appear like you have all the knowledge and know everything you are discussing. I felt this pressure to have every potential question answered ahead of the class, but this turned out to be impossible for multiple reasons. First, students would ask questions I didn’t prepare for, so I didn’t have the answer. Second, by not knowing an answer, it gave me a chance to further connect with students that we could go look it up together or research it on our own to discuss in the next class. The discussions we had in class after these moments were very inquisitive and thought-provoking because the students got to add in their experiences or their own research to the questions. Once I got over this hurdle of feeling like I had to know everything, I was able to be more flexible and open-minded in the classroom.
Briefly describe a favorite assignment or in-class activity. I really enjoy teaching Lifespan Development, specifically when we get to the peer relations chapter. I give students the opportunity to practice sociometric research with peer nominations for popularity. I find this is an engaging and fun way to teach them about how we conduct research and how we learn about different forms of status in adolescence. I use Harry Potter characters, and students tend to get really passionate about who is popular and who is not, or who is nice and who is not.
What’s your dream course if you had the time and resources to teach it? I’d love to teach (and take) the Psychology of Taylor Swift! My undergraduate institution (Texas Christian University) created a course like this, and I would love to replicate it one day. In addition, I’d love to teach a class on social development – a seminar-based class to discuss different topics and areas specific to adolescence and emerging adulthood.
What are three words that best describe your teaching style? Active, Application, Engagement
What’s your workspace like? My workspace is relatively organized and clean – I have two monitors that allows me to get more work done. I recently invested in a walking treadmill for under my desk to allow me to walk while doing work!
Tell us about a teaching “win” you’ve had and the context in which it happened. A general “win” is when a student has the “aha” moment. They connect the dots of something I have said in the classroom to something in their own life or something else in the class, and you can see the excitement in their eyes that they got this concept. It is a feeling that sticks with me for a few classes afterwards!
What is something you are currently focused on improving or changing in your teaching? Currently in my stats class, I am trying to make sure that students are actually practicing the work we do in class. I incorporate white boards into the classroom where students have to hold up their answers to questions I put on the board, and in order to “exit,” they have to show me the correct answer. This allows me to see if students are following the work we have done so far in class and/or if we need to spend more time on this topic in the next class. I really want to improve how I help students in the classroom before they go practice on their own to help with their understanding of the material.
What tech tool could you not live without? “Scheduled send” on email – often times I respond to emails in the evening, but I don’t want students to know I check email after business hours, so I set up the emails to send in the morning. This then allows me to get research and prep work done in the mornings instead of sending emails. The scheduled send feature has been so incredibly helpful for me.
