Teaching
- New mediaI have taught conceptual classes in this area on the relationship between new media and democracy as well as skills classes on visual communication design and advanced web design. My web design teaching includes a course I created from scratch on HTML and CSS hand coding and user-centered design principles. Students love this class because they often come in lacking any confidence they can learn to code, but end the semester with a fairly complete toolkit consisting of best practices for current web design, along with the confidence to keep up with this quickly changing skillset on their own.
- Political communicationI have taught political communication as both a graduate seminar (syllabus) and an upper-level undergraduate class (syllabus). In both classes, I focus on effects that illustrate dysfunctions in our national discussion.
- Organizational communicationDrawing on my professional experience as a software manager as well as my knowledge of relevant research in social psychology, I have taught a large lecture introductory course on organizational communication four times (syllabus), incrementally developing it to focus more on bottom-up communication processes and democratic organizations. I have also taught an upper-level undergraduate course on Communication in Decision-Making (syllabus), which connected well with my interests in small group process research in social psychology.
Teaching philosophy: Expression as learning
Even in large lecture classes, I try to incorporate expressive activities about the most important or difficult concepts because I believe trying to apply a concept in one's own words is the best way to learn it. Creating opportunities for expressive learning does not have to increase the workload for grading. For instance, in my large lectures, instead of taking attendance I have written activities that ask difficult conceptual questions but are simply recorded for attendance, not graded for correctness. Students always seem to do well on exam questions related to the concepts in these activities.
Teaching philosophy: Motivating students
The "carrot and the stick" of grades often seems to motivate only a subset of students, and only superficially to pass the test instead of to really understand the content. The research on human motivations summarized in the video below has strongly influenced my teaching style, shifting my attention to three other motivations I try to foster:
A wonderful, brief lecture by Dan Pink on motivations
- Purpose a deeper belief that the content is useful and worth knowing. This requires a sales effort before, during, and after teaching each concept. I find that I'm only really persuasive about this when I really believe it myself, so I have become very self-critical in selecting content to teach that I really believe is worth learning.
- Mastery the motivation that comes from getting better at something. This requires incrementally building skills or conceptual tools in ways that allow students to see their own improvement. For example, asking students to answer the same question both before and after learning conceptual tools that make the question easier to think about.
- Autonomy the motivation that comes from choosing for oneself what to focus on. This can be created by simply providing choices in assignments, readings, and exams (e.g. answer any two of these four questions).
Recent teaching evaluations
| Year | Course | Course type | Evaluations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Advanced Web Design | Undergrad lab | 5.0 / 5.0 comments |
| 2016 | Public Opinion | Graduate seminar | 4.3 / 5.0 |
| 2015 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.5 / 5.0 |
| 2015 | Research methods (graduate) | Graduate methods | 4.2 / 5.0 |
| 2015 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.3 / 5.0 |
| 2015 | Advanced Web Design (graduate) | Graduate lab | 4.6 / 5.0 |
| 2014 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.3 / 5.0 |
| 2014 | Advanced Web Design | Undergrad lab | 4.6 / 5.0 |
| 2014 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.3 / 5.0 |
| 2014 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.3 / 5.0 |
| 2013 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 4.7 / 5.0 |
| 2013 | Visual Communication | Undergrad lab | 3.8 / 5.0 |
| 2013 | Political Communication | Upper-level undergrad | 4.8 / 5.0 comments |
| 2013 | New Media & Democracy | Upper-level undergrad | 4.3 / 5.0 comments |
| 2012 | User-Centered Communication Design | Upper-level undergrad lab | 4.9 / 5.0 comments |
| 2012 | Introduction to Organizational Communication | Large lecture undergrad | 4.4 / 5.0 comments |
| 2012 | Political Communication | Upper level undergrad | 4.6 / 5.0 comments |
| 2012 | Introduction to Organizational Communication | Large lecture undergrad | 4.3 / 5.0 comments |
| 2011 | Political Communication Seminar | Graduate seminar | 5.0 / 5.0 comments |
| 2011 | Communication in Decision-Making | Upper level undergrad | 4.8 / 5.0 |
| 2011 | Political Communication | Upper level undergrad | 4.4 / 5.0 |
| 2011 | Introduction to Organizational Communication | Large lecture undergrad | 4.1 / 5.0 |