TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

When thinking back to my favorite teachers as a high school and undergraduate student, they had three things in common: 1. They were all passionate about their subject and determined to engage students in the material. 2. They advocated that the role of the student was to be a researcher and to be a critical learner. 3. They strongly believed that the best way to learn was through self-reflection and peer review.  In my own teaching of psychology courses, I aim to follow in these footsteps to create a positive and successful learning environment.

My primary goal is to engage my students with the material. Students will not be motivated to learn unless they find the material interesting or the instructor a captivating lecturer. First of all, by creating a class structure in which one class a week was dedicated to lecturing on a topic in developmental psychology while the other was dedicated to class discussion, I reduced the amount of time students had to sit in their seats and listen to someone else talk. Instead, students were asked to be active participants and learners. Furthermore, I made sure that my lectures were dispersed with short videos demonstrating the phenomena in infant cognition that we were studying. For example, in our lecture on infant motor development, I started off by showing them a video of infants learning how to crawl and some of the obstacles they face in this process such as development depth perception. I used this video to engage them in a discussion about the specificity of learning: can children translate what they learn from one skill (crawling) to another (ie. walking)? At the end of our discussion I then showed them another video of some researchers that had conducted experiments on this topic, to show them how others in this field had attempted to answer some of these questions. Not only did my videos break up the lecture, it provided the tools for a stimulating in-class discussion and also allowed them to get a sense of how experts in the field are approaching some of the more difficult questions in child development.

Secondly, a fundamental goal in my infancy class was not just for students to memorize developmental theories related to infancy, but I wanted them to become experts at reading research papers and dissecting the information presented. I emphasized this goal in my syllabus by making it one of my 3 course objectives and allocating a relatively large percentage of their final grade to this. Also, by setting up a class structure in which one class a week was dedicated to reviewing research articles, I hoped to show students that this was equally important to lectures. To make the in-class discussions as fruitful as possible I had students prepare by reading the two research articles and posting at least one discussion questions in our online discussion board the day prior to our discussion class. Firstly, it helped me identify parts of the research papers students struggled to understand. Secondly, it gave me a sense of what most interested students about the papers. I then used some of these discussion board questions to structure our discussion class, both by going over parts of the papers that confused students and by posing some of the discussions questions to the class to talk through together.

Lastly, I believe strongly that peer feedback is one the best ways to learn and so I wanted to provide my students with an assignment that would encourage working as a group. Since I taught a higher-level psychology class and most students in my class were upperclassmen I felt it was important to give my students some hands-on experience with the research process that went beyond reading research papers. Therefore, I created a group assignment in which students were asked to analyze data and present the findings to the class. To do this, I provided students with a fake dataset, some basic information on how the study had been conducted along with some research articles pertaining to the topic of their study. After providing them with the basics of how to analyze data, I gave them a few weeks to look over their data and come up with a story for their findings. Since this was such a novel type of assignment and none of them had analyzed data before, I hoped this would create a setting in which students would have to work together and give one another feedback to create a coherent presentation. I was very impressed with the final presentations, although students found this assignment quite difficult, it was clear from their presentations that they had worked together to try to form a coherent story for their data. Furthermore, this assignment allowed students to showcase what they learned in lectures and apply that to a project that they had become invested in.

Beyond the goals that I have for my students, another important aspect of teaching is to constantly be adapting your teaching style to meet your students’ needs. One way to achieve this is through student-teacher feedback. When teaching my first course on Infancy, after a few weeks of class, students were asked to fill out an anonymous survey to provide feedback on how discussion classes which I felt were not as successful as they could be. It was clear from the students that they wanted more opportunities to talk in small groups rather than as one large group. Therefore, I changed the discussion class structure such that students were initially given some opportunities to discuss the research articles in small groups, before we came together as a class. I found that this structure not only encouraged many more students to participate, but it helped students learn from one another. This invaluable feedback from the students resulted in whole class discussions that were more thoughtful.

Many different instructors have helped me develop my teaching philosophy but my first opportunity to teach my own course really motivated me to become a better educator and mentor. Through my teaching, I hope not only to teach students about important concepts in psychology, but also to make them critical consumers of information, and to motivate them to learn from one another.