Teaching

My teaching goals are to cultivate students’ interest in – and mastery of – the course material, improve their critical thinking skills, and help them to become intelligent consumers of scientific information. I think that an important goal of undergraduate courses should be to push students to discover the holes in our collective knowledge about human nature. This sparks curiosity and a push to discover: the very essence of (psychological) science. To accomplish these goals in my courses, I assist and challenge students to master content, I develop and vary my pedagogy, and I empathize with my students as individuals.

I enjoy teaching many different courses. At the University of Texas, I taught a Research Methods lab for over three years and delighted in seeing students who entered the course as relatively naïve consumers of psychological science become budding experimenters and scientific writers. I have taught large sections of over 100 students and I have taught seminars of fewer than 15 students, and many courses in between. I am prepared to teach Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods, Statistics, Cognitive Psychology, Learning and Cognition, Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Mating, and Animal Behavior. I am also interested in teaching Judgment and Decision-Making and I look forward to gaining experience teaching other psychology courses.