School name: Hope College

Type of school: liberal arts, residential

School locale: Holland, MI, USA

Is your role mostly in-person, hybrid, online? Mostly in person. I have taught online and hybrid.

For how many years have you taught psychology? 13 years

Classes you teach: Mostly now I’m teaching Life Span Development / Developmental Psychology and Global Child Flourishing (I have taught research methods, child development, adolescent development and senior capstone and graduate level developmental psychology)

What size classes do you teach? 20-35

What is a book, article, research, or author/researcher that you would recommend that new teachers check out?  I’ve enjoyed Parker Palmer’s work. I’ve reflected a lot on “you teach who you are.” I recently gave one of my graduating seniors the book On the Brink of Everything.” It is never to early to think about aging gracefully and purposefully.  Paulo Freire has heavily influenced my view of education (Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope) and my research about hope as an existential imperative. I believe teaching is an act of hope.

What’s your dream course if you had the time and resources to teach it?  I finally get to teach a class I developed called Global Child Flourishing. It’s an upper-level class with fewer than 20 students. We read applied developmental research from outside the USA and discuss sustainable interventions and community development.

What are three words that best describe your teaching style?  Joyful, challenging, purposeful

What’s your workspace like? Messy. Circular coffee rings on my desk, stacks of papers, open books layered on top of each other, a water bottle, post-it notes, snacks…  I’m not proud of it, and I think I’d work better with a clean desk. But work is imperfect, and my desk shows it.

What is something you are currently focused on improving or changing in your teaching?  Teaching fewer concepts in a more memorable way. I’ve slowly trimmed more and more content and added more and more examples/stories/activities.

What is something your students would be surprised to learn about you?  I used to plan lectures out verbatim and practice. Now I speak with a lot of ease at the front of the classroom, and I have so many examples and stories and connections to all topics. But I used to teach a very rehearsed class with only 1 example per topic. I wanted to welcome questions, but I was saying everything I knew, and I worried I’d have no additional information if a student asked a question. Now I see questions as a marker of student confidence/trust in me.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?  Now all my pleasure reading is out loud to my kids. It’s been such a joy to enter this season of parenting with chapter books like the Boxcar Children, Chronicles of Narnia, and Amelia Bedelia. Some of these I knew as kids, some I’m learning for the first time.

What tech tool could you not live without?  White board and dry erase marker