School name:  Creighton University

Type of school: Private, Jesuit, research university.

School locale (including state and country): Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A.

Is your role mostly in-person, hybrid, online (synchronous or asynchronous)?  Mostly in-person

How many years have you taught psychology?  20 (yikes…how did that happen?!?)

Classes you teach:  I routinely teach courses in cognition, development, cognitive neuroscience, introduction to psychological science, research methods and statistics.

Specialization (if applicable): Cognition, development, and applying cognitive science to pedagogical practice.

What size classes do you teach?  I teach classes ranging in enrollment from 10 to 65 students.

What’s the best advice about teaching you’ve ever received?  

I have received many wonderful pieces of advice about teaching. One thing that has really stuck with me is to remember that students and teachers are all people. We are unique but, at the same time, have many things in common no matter our ages and backgrounds. So, don’t be scared of them, and they won’t be scared of you.

Another, more pragmatic piece of advice is that it takes 3 times to teach a subject/topic/class before you really feel like you have it down. So, do your best, but know that you will get better with practice and experience.

What is a book, article, research, or author/researcher that you would recommend that new teachers check out? 

As a teacher engaged in research aimed to improve pedagogical practice, I keep up with new developments by engaging with the retrieval practice community. Pooja Agarwal, PhD (Berklee College of Music) coordinates a lot of the activity within this community. She curated an array of resources to help educators use what we know from cognitive science to improve their teaching – check it out at http://www.retrieval practice.org

What do you know now about teaching that you wish you knew when you were starting?

I wish I knew earlier that I should try to get to know each of my students better and to feel comfortable letting them get to know me. I was told in my teacher training program (I was as a high school science teacher with Teach for America) to try to separate myself from my students to maintain my authority. Perhaps that was good advice for a 22-year-old woman learning to teach 16–18-year-olds, but it is not the best approach for teaching university students. Now I find that the more that I get to know my students, the more I can shape my instruction to meet their needs. The more my students get to know me, the more they understand how to communicate with me about their needs. In addition, the more we get to know each other, the more we see that we all have multifaceted and dynamic lives, and this allows us to have more grace with one another.

Briefly tell us about your favorite lecture topic or course to teach.  

Occasionally, I am able to teach courses that cover cognitive development and language development, in-depth. My favorite topics are language acquisition and reading acquisition. I also like to examine how brain development relates to the acquisition of cognitive skills and the things that babies, toddlers, and children can do throughout development.

What’s your dream course if you had the time and resources to teach it?

I wish I had a course every semester on cognitive development and/or language and reading development. That is a little more specialized than what is typically offered in an undergraduate psychological science major. I have offered a course like this as our Honors Seminar course, and it was a blast.

What are three words that best describe your teaching style? 

Supportive, rigorous, dynamic (i.e., ever-changing)

What is your teaching philosophy in 8 words or fewer?

A teacher’s excitement for a topic is contagious.

What’s your workspace like? 

Traditional – I have a department of 12 colleagues, we each have office space as well as lab space and traditional classrooms.

Tell us about a teaching disaster (or embarrassment) you’ve had and how you dealt with the situation.

I commute to work by bike. Once I forgot to bring a change of clothes and shoes. I was in a hurry and rushed out of my house without packing the outfit that I had set aside to bring. When I got to work, I was panicked, but realized there wasn’t much I could do about it. So, I just went with it. I wore my biking gear to class, and we all thought it was funny.

Tell us about a teaching “win” you’ve had and the context in which it happened.

About 8 years ago, I had a student in cognitive neuroscience who was really struggling with the material. I knew this student well because she had taken classes with me before. We met several times to discuss study strategies (e.g., retrieval practice and distributed practice, etc.) and to discuss any questions she had about course material. She changed the way she was studying based on these strategies, and she improved her grade in the course from a D to an A! She went on to collaborate with me on research projects. She is now in a graduate program in cognitive aging, and we still text one another.

What is something you are currently focused on improving or changing in your teaching?

I am currently trying to be more collaborative with students in my classes. I would like them to help create content to support their study habits (e.g., create practice quizzes, study guides, etc.). This is not just to reduce my workload but to help them see that they can create opportunities for practice testing, retrieval practice, and distributed learning for themselves. I want them to be active learners.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?

People who don’t know me are initially surprised to learn that I have triplet daughters. However, most students know that about me even before we have class together – word of the triplet-mom spreads fast. On the other hand, most students do not know that I used to have a very pronounced southern accent. I grew up in Southern Oklahoma. I will share my former accent with them when we discuss variations in accents and dialects in units on psycholinguistics.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

I am in a book club. We are currently reading, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro.

What tech tool could you not live without?

For teaching, I rely heavily on Canvas, OneDrive, and GoogleDocs. For my research, I could not live without my experiment-design programs - Eprime and Chronos.