TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

One popular metaphor for teaching is the transfer of information from one head to another, like copying data from a desktop computer to a flash drive. The instructor’s role, by analogy, is simply to ensure that students walk away with the correct set of files. Although intuitively appealing, this idea fails to capture the significant role the learner must play in their own development, and the responsibility of the teacher to motivate the desire to learn. My own approach to pedagogy is founded on two complementary principles that aim to address these issues. First, I make every effort to convey my own enthusiasm for the material I am teaching, using humor, narrative, and relevant real world examples and analogies to keep students interested and engaged. That these methods have been shown to enhance student learning outcomes ties directly into my second principle: whenever possible, I use empirical evidence to inform my teaching and curriculum design.

Overall, I prefer to think about teaching not as a transfer of digital content, but as a performance and a conversation. A powerful performance can inspire both excitement and curiosity, and a good performer serves as a model that the audience can emulate in any number of ways. So, too, with teaching: a good instructor can ignite student interest and demonstrate (rather than dictate) novel modes of critical thinking. Studies suggest that students learn best when they are actively seeking (and generating) their own answers, and my classes are designed with this in mind. I encourage students to ask questions, challenge ideas, and bring in outside knowledge to contribute to the discussion. In this way, teaching is more like an extended conversation than a monologue. This resonates with my research program, which is organized around the view that active engagement in the world affords opportunities for learning and cognitive development.

COURSES OFFERED

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
This course offers students an overview of the history, current status, and promise of scientific and applied psychology - the science of behavior, experience, and mind. We will address empirical and theoretical approaches to the basic physiological, cognitive, and social mechanisms underlying behavior. Topics include learning and conditioning; sensation and perception; memory, thinking, and language; psychological development; social processes; and personality and psychopathology.
LANGUAGE & THOUGHT
In this class we will explore the complex interrelationships between language and thought. How does language offer a window into the human mind? Can subtle differences in the language we are exposed to affect how we make important decisions or remember events? Do people who speak different languages think about and even perceive the world differently? Are some thoughts unthinkable without language or are the effects of language on thought more benign? Through what mechanisms might language influence other cognitive processes? These are the sorts of questions we will tackle in this course through reading, discussing, and writing about the relevant scientific literature, as well as engaging in a variety of hands-on activities and experiments.
SENSING & KNOWING IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, & THE ARTS 
Anthropology, psychology, and the arts can be considered, in part, disciplines that explore the complex and varied domains of human experience. Thinking about them together in this way brings into relief their common subject matter; namely the phenomena of sensing and knowing that, as this course will demonstrate, entangle bodies, objects, and worlds. What happens when we perceive, feel, and think? When we organize our experiences according to these categories, what theory of mind and body, and their relationship to the world, do we invoke? How might we otherwise organize experience? How have people in different historical periods and cultures organized experience? (co-taught with Jason Pine)
LEARNING & MEMORY
Theater critic John Lehr once said, “Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.” Indeed, other than that which is genetically coded, everything we know and everything we can do reflects a lifetime of learning and a memory for our past. This course provides an introduction to the science of learning and memory. We will consider the cognitive and neural organization of memory, mechanisms of learning, remembering, and forgetting, and the nature of false memories. Psychological theory and behavioral evidence will be integrated with data from patient studies and neuroscience.
RESEARCH METHODS 1: STATISTICS & DESIGN
This course will cover the nature of scientific knowledge, how to design and run a psychology experiment, research ethics, and basic statistics. Most importantly, this class will give you powerful new tools for thinking critically about psychological research, and the practical skills needed to scientifically investigate human behavior and the world around you. You will gain hands on experience with data management and statistics software, and you will learn what bags of candy can teach us about probability. 
PSYCHOLOGY SENIOR SEMINAR
This is the required professional seminar for senior psychology majors working on their senior thesis projects. We will help students work on ideas and project planning, review statistical methods and experimental design, discuss career planning and graduate school, and serve as a general support system for psychology seniors. Every student will give one presentation during the semester on their senior project.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
How are you understanding this question as you read it?  How are you perceiving these sets of words?  How do you remember what you just read?  Together, we will discuss how these questions are addressed in the areas of memory, language, perception, reasoning, judgment and decision-making. The goals of this course are to examine these questions and to introduce the theories and empirical findings in the field of cognitive psychology.