My mission as a teacher is to enable my students to learn joyfully, read carefully, think clearly, and write well.

Teaching

My experience is that college students are usually great at ingesting facts and regurgitating them. Usually this is all that high school and college courses ask. However, developing a deep understanding of a subject requires much more. Students need to cultivate their creativity along with their critical thinking. To focus my teaching efforts, I have identified four skills I want to facilitate in my students:

Learn Joyfully I knew this was a key part of the educational process, but it took me a while to pin down what this meant and how to teach it. My research convinced me that helping students find their mission, develop their skills, and manage their anxiety would help them share the "pleasure of finding things out" that physicist Richard Feynman described.

Read Carefully While most begin to learn to read early in our lives, I would contend that careful reading is a skill that can be developed over the course of our entire lives.

Think Clearly There are so many different ways to think about a problem. Learning a variety of approaches and developing intuitions about when to use each is life long project.

Write Well The traditional method of teaching writing is essentially deductive. Students are encouraged to begin with a thesis, look for supporting arguments, and then collect supporting evidence. I teach a seven-step inductive writing process that I contend is more efficient are results in arguments with greater support and coherence.

Substantive Teaching Areas

The specific domains that I am currently pursuing my teaching mission in are:

Political Science 100M Political Psychology