UW-Superior
Teaching Assistant Professor
Psychology
I am delighted to be in my third year teaching at UW-Superior as part of the Psychology program in the Human Behavior, Justice, and Diversity department. I spend most of my time teaching classes related to our Behavioral Neuroscience minor. I also spend some time advising for the minor, as well as beginning research in Scholarship of Teaching & Learning.
TEACHING AND LEARNING PHILOSOPHY
The most important thing I have learned in my first couple years of experience is that my teaching philosophy is always changing. While I make a concerted effort to include activities and discussions in class, whenever I revisit my materials I inevitably think “This piece of lecture should have been an activity! How did I not see that?” So every semester, I try to make my classes more of a back-and-forth with students they were the semester before. I also try to implement exams based on application over memorization, use real-life examples in class and online, and design assignments to reinforce broadly-applicable skills. Even more recently, the core values of open educational resources and scholarship of teaching and learning have significantly shaped my philosophy as I add more of these into courses and have started some SOTL work. Most importantly, I believe that a (carefully) curated list of Wikipedia articles and YouTube videos could provide most of the information students are going to get from my classes – which makes it my job to make class something more than that! So ultimately, my goal is to provide a learning experience that is more than the sum of its parts.