I have taught 391 undergraduates in two courses over twelve semesters as sole instructor of record: Psychology of Personality (six semesters, 252 students total) and Psychopathology Advanced Lab: Clinical Psychological Science (six semesters, 139 students total). 

R workshops

I design all of my courses independently with the goal of creating an accessible learning environment that is responsive to students’ needs. In my Advanced Lab course, I require students to design and code a reproducible data analysis using R, the field-standard data analysis software in clinical science. Because many of my students in this course have no prior programming experience, I developed my own beginner-friendly R tutorials as RMarkdown files that teach basic programming principles, data manipulation using the tidyverse, linear modeling, and data visualization.

Interested in my R workshops? Drop me a line! I would be happy to send you the latest versions (I tweak them every semester), and you can use and share them freely with credit.

Inclusive representation in course content

I make it a priority in my classes to center the voices of individuals and communities historically marginalized by psychological science – including people of color, people of marginalized genders and sexual orientations, disabled and neurodivergent people, and people in larger bodies. I have found the following resources helpful:

Beyond decolonization: Anticolonial methodologies for Indigenous futurity in psychological research by Jillian Fish, PhD and Joseph P. Gone, PhD

Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing by Jennifer Grenz, PhD

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang

The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America by Eric Cervini

Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became A Black Disease by Jonathan Metzl

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, PhD

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

Feminine psychology and Karen Horney’s response to Freud (Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences)

Mamie Phipps Clark, PhD and how her research on racial identity development in Black children helped overturn school segregation (Smithsonian Magazine)

The lies and dangers of efforts to change sexual orientation or gender identity (Human Rights Campaign)

Teaching without grades

I haven’t graded an assignment since 2022 – instead, I use an “all feedback no grades” approach in my smaller courses and a labor-based grading approach in my larger courses. More resources below:

Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop by Jesse Stommel

Getting rid of grades by Laura Gibbs

Ungrading to build equity and trust in our classrooms by Anthony Lince

Ungrading explained: What I’m telling my students this fall by Monica Heilman

I no longer grade my students’ work – and I wish I had stopped sooner by Elisabeth Gruner

Ungrading: Shifting the classroom focus back to learning by Chloe Bolyard

Five steps to create a progressive, student-centered classroom by Mark Barnes

Other recommended reading

The Banking Concept of Education by Paulo Freire

Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD

The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber

Non-Directive Teaching by Carl Rogers