My statement of teaching competency is to state skills that I have developed to fulfill the objectives that I have in my teaching philosophy. These are:
- Convey the concepts of each topic in a clear and concise manner
- Relate the material to everyday life experiences
- Provide a safe environment for students to discuss ideas and materials presented
- Incorporate current research using real journal articles to link concepts to testable hypotheses
- Gain insight by asking students what they want to get out of the course
1. Convey the concepts of each topic in a clear and concise manner
In my courses, the format of the class is mainly lecture. The lectures are presented with PowerPoint slides with pictures and not too many words so that the students can have visuals to go along with my verbal lectures. Another way that I convey the material is through the textbook. I am careful to choose a textbook that goes in depth with the material, but will not overwelm students. The textbook allows students to read about the material before class. Along with the reinforcing reading the textbook, I use online quizzes. Online quizzing allows students to come to class with specific questions about the material. The online quizzes usually are made up of multiple choice questions on various topics from their reading. I am then able to examine which questions many of the students answered wrong, so that I can tailor the class to devoting more classtime to that topic for their better understanding.
I am able to see that these techniques are working because in my course evaluations for presenting the material effectively. For Introduction to Psychology my mean evaluation scores were 4.12 and 4.25. For Psychobiology, my mean evaluation score was 4.16 and for Statistics in Psychology the mean was 3.90.
2. Relate the material to everyday life experiences
As a student, I had a hard time connecting what I learned in class to myself and my own experiences. I use many short video clips and longer video of people from all different cultures experiencing the topic material to help students to realize that the material does really pertain to them. One particular example for Introduction to Psychology is when I talk about observational learning. I first introduce a classic psychological study by Albert Bandora about the Bobo Doll. In this experiment, Bandura has children observe their parents playing with a Bobo doll and some kids observed nice behaviors and other kids were exposed to violent behaviors. The kids then had time alone with the Bobo doll and Bandura found that the kids who had watched more violent doll interactions, were also more violent to the doll and their behavior escalated even above what they had seen. I relate this study to current studies on watching television and violence so that we could discuss the relevance of Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll study to related topics of today.
Another great resource to show students about new techology in psychology are a set of videos from Scientific American. There is a consistent narrator throughout the series who is the “test subject” for the different technologies. For example there is an episode where virtual reality therapy for people who have phobias and they show what the virtual world looks like.
3. Provide a safe environment for students to discuss ideas and materials presented
In Introduction to Psychology and Psychobiology, students write article analyses which I comment on. This is where they can discuss their opinions about a topic or a study. This allows the students to be able to ask questions and discuss their opinions in “private conversations” with me. That way if they are uncomfortable talking about something out loud to the entire class, they have a more private way of doing so.
In Introduction to Psychology, they also complete discussion questions that we talk about in class so that they can both have their questions answered by someone who might have different experiences but it is also an opportunity for them to ask any questions they might have about the material. For some class periods, I have them work in groups so that they can get to know each other and hopefully feel comfortable talking and sharing their experiences and thoughts.
One concept that I go over on the first day, is that students should be respective of each others thoughts and opinions even if they aren’t their own. I want them to both verbally and in writing discuss the issues of psychology using knowledge gained in class, along with their own knowledge to form good arguments.
- Incorporate current research
For Introduction to Psychology and Psychobiology, article analyses and essay assignments were used to relate famous studies to more current research. All of the articles they are required to read are no more than five years old. For Introduction to Psychology, some of the article analyses I even had them find current studies that relate to the particular article. For example, they read an article called, Thanks for the Memories which is about Elizabeth Loftus’s eye-witness testimony and leading questions research. They are to respond to the article but also find a peer-reviewed article that was not mentioned in the study and relate it to theirs.
In Psychobiology, students read three current research articles/reviews on a “hot topic.” I then pose a question to them and they use those articles to write a two-page essay integrating the articles to answer the questions. One example was, What is addiction?
I also relate topics in the book to the research that I am doing. In many of the chapters, I talk about research with rats and how you can microinject them with drugs or create lesions that can effect emotion, attention, learning and memory. I tell them about the different areas of the brain and what happens when each is either activated or destroyed.
- Gain insight by asking students what they want to get out of the course
I ask the students how they would like to be tested on the material for their exams. They have a pretty good idea of how and what should be included from a particular chapter. They choose the format of the exam. They create their final exam by getting into groups and creating questions related to their assigned chapter. For Introduction to Psychology – My evaluations show that I have a mean of 4.71 for the Fall 2008 and 4.55 for the Spring 2009 for grading in a fair manner. This means that the students feel that their grades are based on what they are learning in the class.
Jacqueline Short, Ph.D. 