Joel G. Thomas
Teaching Statement
My teaching approach is drawn from two pedagogical theories, which have significantly influenced the way that I approach the classroom and the kind of relationship I aim to develop with students.
The first is the work of the psychologist Carl Rogers who described the core conditions of genuineness, empathy, and unconditional positive regard as central to psychological growth and self-actualization. Inspired by Rogers writings on counseling and education, I have come to view teaching as a relationship that emerges from a genuine encounter with my students as active, engaged learners who have the capacity for self-direction. Central to this relationship is the attention I pay to the personal meaning that the material has for my students as I facilitate ongoing experiential discovery.
Second is the work of Paulo Freire who critiques the “banking” form of education in which students are viewed as empty accounts to be filled with “bills” of knowledge to be cashed in on exams. He noted that this form of education, “Transforms students into receiving objects …attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (Freire, 1970, p. 77). By contrast, my approach is to embrace Freire’s “problem-posing” educational model—one in which the classroom becomes a collaborative learning space where students can think about and tackle social problems that have direct relevance to their lives.
To date, I have taught Introductory Psychology: Development, Social Behavior, & Individual Differences, Social Psychology: Global Perspectives, Research Design and Methods, Psychopathology & Problems in Living (formerly Abnormal Psychology), both Research and Internship Capstones in Psychology, and Principles and Techniques of Counseling (graduate clinical mental health counseling course).
Teaching undergraduate and graduate courses of varying size and student make-up has exposed me to the importance of developing a flexible pedagogical style. I value the opportunity and challenge to tailor my teaching to the developmental stage of my students and in a way that attends to a diversity of learning styles in the room. Through this process I have identified four themes that exemplify my teaching philosophy.
Teaching Themes –
1. The foundation: An alive, creative interchange
2. Facilitating a direct, personal encounter
3. Providing a scaffold for the learning experience
4. Overarching goal: Prizing the learner’s feelings, opinions, and personhood
The foundation: An alive, creative interchange
The most fundamental aspect of the classroom that I seek to cultivate is a space in which the natural curiosity of students is drawn out and utilized to drive our discussion. For instance, on the first day of Psychopathology & Problems in Living, I address each student by name as we consider the question on the board: “What is abnormal?” We watch a video clip of a group of teenagers who are trying to jump on a skateboard while it is held on a moving treadmill, and our Socratic dialogue begins. I use the first volunteers to open a safe space of inquiry, “Michaela, I appreciate your willingness to take a risk on the first day in sharing your reflections with our class.” I aim to reflect responses in a manner that creates student-to-student interaction: “Li says, ‘this is normal because all the teenagers are laughing,’ and Sonya responds, ‘this is abnormal because you shouldn’t be laughing when you are falling off a treadmill and hurting yourself’—both identified the same behavior but came to different conclusions. Who can formulate a principle, that both Li and Sonya would agree with, for the conditions under which laughing may be a sign of psychological distress?” I find that well-planned exercises such as this facilitate student-driven discovery of course concepts, leading to better knowledge retention and continued engagement compared to rote presentation.
My goal is to implement an exercise of this kind in every class period, and often the flow of the exchange has a momentum of its own. Students frequently provide feedback that our classroom discussions have a spontaneous and productive quality to them, leading me to trust that this experience is mutual.
A developmental milestone for me in implementing this approach was my experience designing the first Principles and Techniques of Counseling course for the new Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. I valued the textbook and role play sessions I had in my own principles and techniques course when I was a graduate student, however, I felt that the experiential nature of the learning could be enhanced through a more robust set of embodied pedagogical activities. With this goal in mind, I designed the course at Agnes to further involve videos of master practitioners that model ways to approach each technique, weekly student-led presentations on intersectionality as a lived experience in counseling practice, in-class activities with small groups which require skill demonstration, and the inclusion of personal vignettes from my counseling practice. Based on evaluations, this level of intention to the embodied aspect of pedagogy has paid off with students describing the class as “very active and stimulating” and “exciting, engaging, and very educational.” Another student writes, “To have my intellect stretched in such a way that my compassion was simultaneously expanded, made for a truly enriching experience.”
Facilitating a direct, personal encounter
I find that an authentic interchange is much more likely to develop when the students and I are relating to each other, and the course material, in terms of our own subjectivities. Although I sometimes model this by connecting course content to examples from my own life, my primary focus is the lived experience of each student. For example, I developed a lesson aimed at cultivating an empathic understanding of the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. The exercise involved each student writing down their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors when in the presence of a friend, parent, and professor. In small groups, students then discussed follow-up questions such as “who is the real you?” and “if one of these ‘yous’ is more ‘you,’ how did the others form?” Students were then asked to “give each self a name.” When engaging my students as a large group, I was amazed by the shift of tone in the room as students began to talk about how malleable they are with different people. When asked, “How would you know which one of these is the real you?” several students indicated “I can be weird with my friends, that is the real me.” This led to a discussion of what it means to not filter one’s-self, and what it feels like to share with another when we are not afraid of what others might think. This intimate exercise led students to better understand themselves. This is the kind of learning (i.e., self-reflective education in the humanistic sense) that I aim to cultivate throughout my courses.
I have found that implementing this approach requires being willing to take risks in creatively delivering material. Most recently, I took a creative risk by developing a “culture lab” component of my Social Psychology: Global Perspectives course, which addresses controversial social issues around the world. For instance, students engage in a group activity in which they analyze and respond to a 7-minute debate on the Russia-Ukraine conflict between Barbara Smith (co-founder of the Black feminist organization Combahee River Collective who is in support of military funding to Ukraine) and Medea Benjamin (co-founder of antiwar group CodePink who is against military support of the war). The problem-posing aspect of the class discussion is not around who “wins” this debate, but rather how the students use social psychological principles from the course to evaluate the relative merits and weaknesses of each position.
These kinds of “creative risks” are often inspired by my experiences learning from other faculty at the annual teaching symposium organized by Dr. Hughes at the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA) conference. It is wonderful to present alongside psychology department colleagues and soak up wisdom from others who describe activities that have enlivened and enriched their own classes. I am also appreciative that my current preparation in leading a Global Journeys: Puerto Rico course next semester involves this kind of inter-faculty exchange. Dr. Laird has designed a faculty training program that truly brings out the value and fun of working with each other to enhance our pedagogical aptitudes and skills.
Providing a scaffold for the learning experience
I view learning as a process that requires appropriate “scaffolding” in terms of guidance and tools that meet students at their developmental level. Accordingly, one of the cornerstones of my Socratic approach in the classroom is the use of Bloom’s taxonomy, a learning theory that I believe can facilitate the educational mission of teaching in a manner that involves students with diverse abilities and experiences. Bloom’s cognitive domain informs the questions I directly ask students throughout a class period. This is the case particularly in courses such as Introductory Psychology: Development, Social Behavior, & Individual Differences and Research Design and Methods, which often involve understanding the inter-relatedness of concepts and their quantitative applications.
For instance, when teaching about internal/external validity in Research Design and Methods I intentionally start with recall/recognition (“I’d like one person to start us off with the definition of internal and external validity”), progress to comprehension (“Great, next, who can describe the relationship between internal and external validity in a research study?”), and application/evaluation (“Wonderful, so how does the trade-off between internal and external validity map on to the spectrum of studies we have been discussing—from observational, to correlational, to experimental?”), and eventually land in analyzing/creation (“So in what instances would an experimental study be worth doing?”) and integration/synthesis (“What would you say to a friend who says, ‘Tell me what the best type of study design is!’”). I find that by being sensitive to each student’s current learning edge, it is possible to “teach to the middle” while remaining inclusive of a range of student expertise and degree of comfort speaking in class. The most exciting moments are when students begin to help each other, showcasing their knowledge and supporting our group learning at the same time.
Another way in which I scaffold the learning experience is through the logistics and design of course assignments. For example, based on my initial student evaluations at Agnes, I have been intentional about improving the content and structure of the rubrics I use on Canvas so that students have a clear sense of what skills they are developing in the process of completing assignments. Given the findings in cognitive science that learners retain information better when receiving and being tested in “chunks,” I have moved towards shorter but more frequent quizzes rather than long, infrequent tests. For papers in my 300-level courses, I have adopted a method from Dr. Perdue of having students develop their papers in stages, from an individual literature review to group paper introductions, group research study proposals, and group presentations. By spending time in class devoted to each step in the process, students can refine their skills while learning from each other, which typically leads to a more sophisticated and richer final product.
After noticing that students in my upper-level courses sometimes struggle with advanced writing skills, I have begun to implement teaching strategies that scaffold these skills. For example, in my Psychopathology & Problems in Living course last year, used an essay “submission form” which directs students on how to answer various components of the paper in 8-12 sentence paragraphs. The final paper submission then requires students to add transition sentences and remove submission form headings such that they arrive at a well-structured and comprehensive essay. An additional change I have made to my teaching over the past year is to provide detailed feedback on papers using google doc “suggestions” and “comments” functions. By editing student papers in this way, I can provide students with direct examples of how to write in a cogent and fluid style that has more impact on the reader. Although simply “accepting” these changes may seem to be a passive means of editing a paper, I am finding that students’ subsequent writing in my courses appears to be improving in these dimensions. This leads me to trust that these strategies are fruitful ways of teaching advanced writing skills in my upper-level courses.
Overarching goal: Prizing the learner’s feelings, opinions, and personhood
A final theme that captures my approach to teaching is the development of pedagogical spaces in which students can bring their whole selves to the learning process. In concrete terms, this involves opportunities for students to share their feelings, opinions, and values in the process of engaging with classroom content.
I have found that an important means of creating such a space is by modeling this in the design of the course itself. For example, I initiated a change in course name of Abnormal Psychology to Psychopathology & Problems in Living. This shift towards terms that reflect the universality and diversity of human problems is also more consistent with contemporary psychological science, which sees distress as on a spectrum and irreducible to “abnormality.” Along with this change, I have designed the course using primary sources and memoirs of individuals suffering from mental health struggles rather than using a textbook. Based on written feedback, students have stated that aspects of the class such as the memoirs, discussions of the experience of classmates, and the small group reflections have been the most engaging, memorable, and useful aspects of the course. Several have indicated that these activities cut through the labeling and stigma often associated with diagnosis and help them better relate to the lived experience of individuals in recovery and on their healing journey.
Future directions
I am excited to develop new and evolving pedagogical spaces in which this attention to “whole self” learning is emphasized. In this vein, I have initiated the use of discussion boards in both my Research Capstone course and in my Journeys Puerto Rico course this coming semester. These are intended to give students a forum to reflect on readings prior to engagement in class and to respond to classmates’ posts. The intention is to not only motivate reading and reflecting outside of class, but to build a community feel around the learning. In the Journeys course, I am also piloting team-based learning exercises and experiential activities, which ask students to share and examine their feelings, opinions, and values in the context of engaging in intercultural exploration. I am preparing to teach Research Statistics next year, which is a departmental need and a course that am excited to make fun and less intimidating for Agnes students. More specifically, I will be working over the summer with Dr. James to design a course that helps combat “stereotype threat” which may be hampering our students’ confidence in quantitative skills and that integrates software (R studio) that will give them a competitive edge when they apply to work in professional settings. Finally, I am looking forward to team-teaching collaborations. One potential opportunity is to work with Dr. Thorsrud to create a team-taught existentialism course that invites students to engage in the question: “What does it mean to be human?” By approaching this question through the lens of existentialism, humanism, and the limits of artificial intelligence, the intent is to create a course that offers students an opportunity for self-exploration grounded in the nexus between the humanities and social sciences. I see this type of cross-disciplinary innovation in teaching as hallmark of the kind of work I wish to continue in the years to come.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (MB Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum.