Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

We should foster learning through student-centered teaching, where the instructor acts more as a mentor and facilitator than as a lecturer. In my opinion, the best learning, be it at the undergraduate or graduate level, takes place through active learning as students work on projects tailored to their own interests.

That said, it has been a challenge to implement this kind of learning in the large modules (courses in the US and Canada) that I have often taught (i.e., 100-300 students). Nonetheless, it was fairly easy to do in the lab sections of my statistics modules at Texas A&M. In small groups, my students would develop their own surveys in Google Forms, collect data, and then analyse it for their individual IMRaD papers (see here for a description of the labs in my most recent syllabus for that module). Student-centered learning is also difficult to implement in statistics modules in general, where students often need explicit instructor help in order to understand the material. But carefully planned small-group projects go a long way in centering the student in the module.

Teaching Experience

I have a good deal of experience teaching various subjects, but what energizes me most nowadays is teaching statistics and research methods in higher education. As you can see from my formal education , I did not take the direct route to this point.

In February 2024 I was hired as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University in Nottingham, United Kingdom.

At NTU I have taught several modules (click here to see a list, or just go to the Home tab above). I have also supervised several third-year student projects. So far, I have learned much more about the teaching ecosystem in the UK than I have about classroom teaching itself (which is ultimately similar to classroom teaching in the US).

I was also the module leader for two modules (where modules are usually taught by multiple lecturers at NTU).

Finally, I am the year-one tutor for the general pathway. This is a position with the course team. Towards the beginning of the year, the bulk of the work was working with student access statements. Towards the end of the year, the workload is shifted to consulting with students who have missed assessments. The year-one tutor also participates in the year-one Exam Board at the end of the year, where decisions are made about whether students have completed all their assessments and move on to year 2, and if not, how they might do so during the referral period, or be allowed to trail work into year 2, or be required to repeat year one.

In 2016 I was hired as an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University. There, the vast majority of my responsibilities comprised teaching undergraduate statistics, graduate statistics, and undergraduate research methods. But I also taught Developmental Psychology and Psychology of Language.

To be honest, I was rather surprised at how enthusiastic I became in teaching statistics and research methods. The module I taught most frequently, by far, was Elementary Statistics for Psychology, a large module (usually about 100 students each), with multiple labs that also required that each student write an IMRaD paper. It was here that I implemented most of my innovations, including most notably, the following:

Open educational resources

I incorporated exclusively open educational resources into the module. Doing so reduces the financial burden on students, thereby helping not only to reduce their overall stress levels, but also (by extension) to maximize their learning potential. Specifically, I did the following:

Reducing student anxiety

I transferred the mathematical calculations traditionally required on exams to for-credit, but repeatable homework assignments. This involved setting up math-based problems using the exams package in R. Some of those assignments can be found here.

After obtaining my PhD, I was hired in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta. I usually taught modules related to my PhD expertise (e.g., Psychology of Language, Introduction to Linguistics, Child Language Acquisition).

But I was also heavily engaged in research at the time, learning a great deal not only about new research methodologies, but also about more modern approaches to statistical analysis, like mixed-effects modeling. This became important to my teaching later.

At the same time, I was mentoring many, many graduate and undergraduate students in how to design and run behavioural, eyetracking and ERP experiments.

After seven years at the University of Alberta, I resigned in 2012 in order to take care of a family member in desperate need. Since academia is far too competitive to be able to accommodate cases like mine, that career hiatus ultimately spelled the end of my research trajectory.