HOW I TEACH

My primary goal in teaching is to develop the analytical skills required for understanding, practicing, and benefiting from scientific research. The ability to critically evaluate the assumptions and implications of research is a critical skill within any field. In order to master this skill it is important for students to understand psychology and education sciences as a process rather than a result.

 

So many students enter university with a view of science as established fact and of education as memorizing those facts.

 

In my courses, I balance discussion of what we know with exploration of how we know it. Rather than explaining individual theories of a given domain, I aim to present competing theories. I emphasize the motivations, assumptions, and predictions of a theory, as well as its relationship to data, both in terms of the findings that support it and in terms of the ways it could be tested or disproved. The goal is to help students understand the fundamental role of theory in organizing our knowledge and directing further research, and to give them the skills to evaluate the evidence that support those theories, and the strong and weak points of those theories.

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WHAT I TEACH

I teach several courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.

 

For example, for the last 2015 years I've been teaching General Psychology (About 250 students/semester for 72 hours MPSI/04 in Italian) in the Department of Philosophy, Social, Human and Educational Sciences at The University of Perugia. This 12 credit survey course covers an introduction to modern psychology, modern neuroscience, as well as evolutionary psychology. During this course, students are divided into groups of about 10 students, these groups are designed to not only help the students get to know each other at a much intimate level as students complete self-guided experiments that test principles learned in the class.

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In this course, I make a point of not presenting the conclusion, but first starting with the data and encouraging the class to try to draw their own conclusions. This is a useful exercise in analytical reasoning since students can come up with alternative explanations. I believe this demystified the process by which theories had been developed and encouraged them that they could contribute to scientific knowledge. 

 

Those same principles have been applied to the teaching of Educational Psychology (36 hours MPSI/04 in Italian), Cognitive Development Psychology (36 hours MPSI/04 in Italian), Psychology of Prevention and Psychosocial Problems (36 hours MPSI/04 in Italian).  Typically, each academic year I advise about 5-6 students for their dissertation, and another 5-6 students complete their required internship with me.

 

At Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore a Milano I've been teaching PhD/graduate students since 2008 to doctoral students in the Psychology Department, since 2016 I've been working as an Affiliated Professor for the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation and as an instructor for for the Post-graduate Training and Research Partnership Office.

 

For the Psychology Department, I teach a 24-hour course, 8 meetings 3 hours each over 8 months - Scientific Communication 2.0: Telling Great Science Stories While Leveraging Your Research. This course follows an active learning approach, e.g, flipped classroom and peer instruction by having students create content that teaches and informs. This course is built on the premise that if you do science and nobody knows about it, it might as well not have been done. Every experiment can tell a great story. Every scientist is heroic. Every scientist attempts to achieve something of value for themselves and for society at large. The thrill of discovery and knowing the unknown, battling obstacles, and the great payoff of making your discoveries known to all is a story worth telling and when told well it will pay dividends.

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As an Affiliated Faculty member at the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, I train students in internationalization of higher education on all matters related to the completion of their PhD - from research design, to data analysis to oral and written communication. In addition, I advise PhD students, i.e., Ravi Ammigan, Associate Deputy Provost for International Programs at University of Delaware, completed his PhD with Elspeth Jones and I, in 2018, Dolly Predovic, Founder and CEO of Career Paths, will complete her PhD with Elspeth Jones and I in early 2021,  and David Killick and I are John Binkley's tutor.

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