My Teaching Journey

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I connect theory and practice across psychology courses. 

Teaching psychology courses.

I have been teaching various psychology courses such as experimental psychology, statistical analysis for the behavioral sciences laboratory portion, general psychology, cognitive psychology, and research methods at different schools within the City University of New York (CUNY) system. 

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Psychology course content.

Throughout the years' different courses required me to teach different content. However, there was cohesiveness in the content across the courses taught. For instance, I have been teaching domain-specific topics such as memory, attention, perception in cognitive psychology, and how to conduct a research study: research design, implementation, data collection, and statistical analysis in experimental psychology laboratory portion and research methods courses. I focused on using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and conducting manual calculations to link the theoretical and practical views in the statistical analysis for the social sciences laboratory portion. Although each course emphasized different aspects of psychology and focused on specific topics, all these courses enabled my students to think critically, solve problems using out-of-the-box thinking, and ask "how," "why," and "what" questions in psychology. 

 

I help instructors teach in an interactive process. 

Teaching is an interactive process.

Teaching is an interactive process that both my students and I are actively involved in. I explain class content by showing the big picture first and breaking down the content into small pieces in each class. I show a corresponding video in each class, ask fill-in-the-blank questions or multiple-choice questions, and boost students' motivation to engage the class interactively. Preparing student-friendly slides, assisting my students in their learning journey, providing targeted feedback, and mentoring each student individually helped me improve my teaching and counseling skills.

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Consulting with my colleagues.

My teaching experience was not only limited to teaching various college-level psychology courses at CUNY. I also served as a quantitative reasoning fellow at the Center for Teaching at Brooklyn College. I consulted with faculty who used different teaching approaches to increase students' quantitative skills. I created educational workshops (e.g., worked with clickers, designed gamified learning environments, taught various courses by introducing infographics), and made presentations to faculty. 

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I use scientific research to teach more effectively.

Conducting scientific research studies to serve our students better.

Throughout the years receiving feedback from my students and faculty evaluation feedback on my teaching style has helped me adjust my teaching style. This also convinced me to invest more time to improve my teaching skills and seek solutions for my students' problems. For instance, while teaching the laboratory portion of the statistics class, I noticed that some of my students had a fear of statistics and low motivation at the beginning of the semester. I encountered similar patterns in consecutive semesters. I have already obtained the Designing Gamified Learning Environments Course certificate via Online Learning Consortium. Therefore, I decided to lead a research project titled "How to gamify statistics labs" that examined the association between gamified learning environments and the psychology statistics students' intrinsic motivation. My colleagues and I published the results in a journal to share takeaways from the research with other colleagues. Along with this project, I had a chance to attend the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) meeting in Georgia. My colleagues and I also presented posters regarding our research at the Annual Meetings of the Northeast Conference for Teachers of Psychology.

     

I improve learning through teaching remotely during COVID-19.

Embracing new situations.

As schools initiated distance learning programs due to COVID-19, I converted all in-person class content to an online format in the Blackboard Learning Management System. The student-centered teaching approach played a key role while structuring my online class. I taught each course synchronously. Therefore, I was able to answer each student's instant questions. I also recorded each session for the students who could not watch the session on the lecture day. This process enabled the students to follow the class meetings asynchronously. Concerning the online test, prior to administering the first test to the students, I administered a mock trial and a post-exam survey to the students to receive their feedback about the types of questions and their experience with the online platform. Based on their feedback, I structured the first test. Incorporating students' input into creating study materials and exams ensured iteration of each component of a course which is crucial to engaging them.

 

During summer 2020, I attended the LaGuardia Community College Teaching for Distance Learning Training to improve my digital learning skills and transfer emergency remote teaching to online learning. 

 

Embracing digital tools and actively using them.

As technology facilitates the delivery of information to my students, I must ask myself how to use technology to provide the most engaging materials to my students to enable them to maximally benefit from my classes. I use Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, and Google Apps for Education to communicate with my students. I teach my online courses both synchronously and asynchronously.

 

The synchronous teaching mode consists of two sessions within one class time: lecture and laboratory. In the first session (lecture), I explain each topic by providing core concepts, case studies, and hypothetical examples via storytelling. I present related short animation videos and provide fill-in-the-blank questions via www.mentimeter.com. Students answer the questions interactively. At the end of the first session, students and I play a quiz game to review the material. In the second session (laboratory), I provide in-class group assignments. I break a large group into small groups on Blackboard Collaborate Ultra or www.miro.com. This process enables my students to discuss the assignment with each other and ask any assignment-related questions to me.

 

The asynchronous teaching mode comprises 10-minute micro lecture videos and related questions. Students can watch the videos and answer questions at their own pace and time. I assign short weekly gamified group projects by incorporating game elements such as rewards, points, storytelling, rapid feedback, freedom to choose that students can collaborate on to complete the tasks and feel less isolated. Students also take quizzes weekly. Quizzes make them understand the course content more thoroughly and help them remember the material for the long term. 

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I'm looking forward to meeting my new students and helping them learn psychology which will benefit them in daily life.

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