Teaching Statement

[Version Date: August 2026… see also New Teaching Statement (is a Draft, of course). See Teaching Statement Variations for versions written 2016 and earlier, which have benefited from many iterations. What’s written previously is still true, but you may sense the way I’ve shifted priorities from 2016 to today.]

We teach who we are. – Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

I pursue transformative growth as a way of life. Formal education has long been a source of inspiration for such growth, offering encounters with teacher-guides whose wisdom, compassion, and commitment have influenced my ways in the world. Studying social psychology illuminated new lenses to see the world, and acculturated me into a scientific study of humans in relationship with self and others. I stay open to the call to learn and grow in all areas of my life. Sometimes those calls have been abrupt and uncomfortable, like when teaching students in those heart-wrenching and technologically-mediated pandemic days, and when grappling with my relative privilege as a white descendent of settlers on unceded land. Sometimes those calls have been intentionally expansive, like when trying creative disciplines like drawing and pottery, when on pilgrimage, and when learning qualitative research methods. As these links show, I reflect deeply on what various lived experiences mean for my teaching practice, which is how I enact the lifework of scholarly teaching (Brookfield, 2017; Palmer, 2007).

In all my classrooms, I strive to bring my best and most authentic self possible at that moment. I urge students similarly, through reminders to “do the best you can under your circumstances.” Student feedback has long attested to my enthusiasm and interest in their learning, that the positive and energetic manner in which I show up inspires them to learn. Students also value my compassion for them as fellow humans, which includes reacting with care to their sharing, transparent decision-making, responsiveness, and modelling my own self-care through boundaries.

The courses I teach most can be dreaded by students: research methods and introductory statistics for psychology majors. Along with my enthusiasm and compassion, I have long invited students into learning this potentially difficult and dull material by grounding all my course designs in the Self-Determination Theory of motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2020), and students notice. SDT posits that we are most intrinsically motivated when activities support our needs for autonomy, belonging, and competence. For example, I support autonomy by empowering students to choose among learning assessments and their relative weighting (Rideout, 2018). I support belonging by affirming daily that everyone belongs here, by sharing the load of some interpersonal awkwardness and introducing students to each other, and structuring peer-to-peer learning discussions every class (Hogan & Sathy, 2022). I support competence by scaffolding low-stakes assessments in ways that build toward bigger projects, facilitating class activities as safe and relevant practice, and increasingly leveraging specifications grading approaches to improve transparency of expectations and encourage critical self-assessment of performance (Nilson & Packowski, 2026).

Increasingly, I strive to (re-)design courses to offer students opportunities for deeper meaning-making and potential transformative growth (find all syllabi here). My Research Methods course now offers all students awareness of how positionality can impact research (Jamieson, Govaart, & Pownall, 2023), critical engagement with racism and colonial impacts in psychological science, and situating post-positivism among Indigenous and qualitative ways of knowing (Wilson, 2008). I invite all students to reflect on their positionality and development as researchers conducting their first psychological experiment. Students who opt in to a Researcher Identity Integration paper further analyze their own written reflections, revealing evidence of personal growth in confidence, intellectual humility, and resilience. In my Career Exploration using Psychology course, students are invited to engage in iterative cycles of reflection and exploration using quantitative and qualitative case study approaches. Students deepen self-knowledge throughout the course to develop personally-meaningful life direction. In my introductory statistics course, I am imagining ways to offer transformative options for students seeking such depth. I will build from past feedback suggesting students experience transformation in the form of enhanced belief in their own abilities. Overall, I aim to invite students into framing their education journey as potentially personally transformative. Because I am, right beside them.

References

Brookfield, S. D. (2017). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. (2nd Ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Hogan, K. A., & Sathy, V. (2022). Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press.

Jamieson, M. K., Govaart, G. H., Pownall, M. (2023). Reflexivity in Quantitative Research: A rationale and beginner’s guide. Social Personality Psychology Compass, 17: e12735, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12735

Nilson, L. B., & Packowski, J. A. (2026). Specifications grading 2.0: Restoring rigor, motivating students, saving faculty time, and developing career competencies (2nd Ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003559658

Palmer, P. J. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life (10^th Anniversary Ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Rideout, C. A. (2018). Students’ choices and achievement in large undergraduate classes using a novel flexible assessment approach. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43, 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1294144

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860

Wilson. S. (2008). Research is Ceremony. Fernwood Publishing.

List of Linked Scholarly Blog Posts

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