As a graduate teacher-scholar, my teaching development has been intertwined with my development as a researcher. In particular, I have learned about the ways in which effective research and teaching do not come from “eureka” moments of intellectual brilliance, but, instead, depend on thoughtful planning and structures that support success from the bottom up. Just as rigorous study design and statistical analysis are necessary to answer a research question, positive early experiences and supportive course structures are necessary for students to enter a discipline and thrive within it. I focus on designing and teaching introductory classes, where I can inspire new students to study psychology and scientific computing. In those classes, I implement accessible course policies to sustain student success throughout the semester. Finally, I maintain comprehensive course materials to standardize my pedagogy and share those materials to support my peers’ teaching.

I strive to nurture novice scientists’ critical thinking skills in introductory courses. Intro-level instructors have the privilege and responsibility of serving as the welcome committee for students entering a new academic discipline. Psychology in particular can serve as a gateway to STEM for students curious about human behavior, and as a core college STEM experience for students fulfilling breadth requirements. I am committed to balancing the needs of these two groups of students through intro psych classes that are rigorous yet accessible. For example, I collaborated with Dr. Caroline Marvin in developing a new team-based introductory psychology course taught for the first time in Spring 2021, and which I taught as instructor of record after graduation in Summer 2022. I helped select readings, develop lesson plans, and draft assignments, paying special attention to craft learning objectives that were simultaneously appropriate for prospective psychology/neuroscience majors and for general-education students. For instance, I wrote the course objective “Evaluate the accuracy of popular news reports about empirical research and the appropriateness of graphs and other visualizations of data” with an eye towards the fact that all students, irrespective of major, would encounter science and data in the news, and would thus benefit from learning to evaluate such reports. By the end of the class, many of our students reported being inspired to consider a psychology major, while others reflected positively on the skills and content they planned to apply back to their work in other majors.

Going beyond content, I build accessibility into my course policies to sustain student success. For example, students juggle work from multiple classes along with demands from outside the classroom. Students making a good-faith effort should not have to choose between well-being and submitting assignments on time if they have to choose between finishing a paper and studying for an exam that are due on the same day, or they get sick, or they encounter any other unexpected obstacle. As a teaching assistant, I have proposed and developed late assignment policies that allow students flexibility in managing their own deadlines, without burdening the teaching team. For example, as TA for Intro to Programming in R in the Columbia Business School in spring 2019, I designed a two-tiered deadline system where each homework assignment had an on-time deadline and a late submission deadline one week later. A student’s first late assignment would be graded equivalent to an on-time submission, and subsequent late submissions would be marked with a small deduction increasing with the number of late submissions (5%, 10%, …). I designed this structure to allow students one penalty-free late submission to take at their convenience, without having to seek approval from the teaching team. At the same time, the late submission deadline allowed me to structure my grading schedule knowing that all submissions for a given assignment would be ready to grade by a set date. Students reported that they appreciated the built-in flexibility–from what they told me, some students used their late submission for illness, some for emergency travel, and some for conflicting assignment deadlines. Further, students entering the course with no programming experience were able to use the two-tiered deadline system for extra time and assistance on assignments to help them stay on top of course concepts. In this way, I was able to leverage course logistics to support student learning, especially for a quantitative course where students might bring insecurity about their own abilities into the classroom.

Finally, in order to codify effective teaching practices and make them repeatable across semesters and instructors, I create and refine detailed teaching materials that persist and evolve after my involvement with a course. For example, as a section leader for research methods in the psychology department in fall 2018 and fall 2019, I created new lesson plan documents and homework assignments for a crash course in R taught over the first two labs of the semester. For subsequent labs in the semester, I also expanded existing bullet-pointed lab outlines into full lesson plans and slide decks with detailed instructions, recommended module timing, and pedagogical tips for first-time section leaders. Many of those teaching tips came from discussions in weekly teaching team meetings that I recorded to ensure that we (and subsequent teaching teams) wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every semester. Indeed, more recent research methods section leaders have reported that those lesson plans saved them time in lesson prep and supported their success as first-time section leaders.

In summary, I work to make the discipline I love interesting and accessible to students through introductory psychology courses, research methods courses, and introductory programming workshops. I design those classes not only to inspire students through content but to set them up for success through supportive course policies. In those courses, I support my own and my peers’ future teaching by creating, maintaining, and documenting teaching materials that save time, keep record of successful teaching strategies, and support future innovation.