Statement of Teaching Philosophy and Interests

 

Jon Frederick, Ph.D.

 

 

I think most educators, at least at the college level, agree that our job is not to tell students what to believe as much as to provide them with the tools they need to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions. Most of us are passionate about at least some controversial points of view in our field, and it can be challenging to avoid being dogmatic. However, I consider myself very fortunate to have majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, because my understanding of the structure of knowledge and the nature of argumentation has given me a good foundation for how I approach teaching. I not only allow this philosophy to guide my didactic practices, but I even devote one lecture to philosophy of science early in most of my classes, to provide a framework for students to organize the more factual information presented for the remainder of the course. I start by explaining how all arguments include premises which themselves remain unproven. Further arguments can prove these premises, but not without further premises which themselves remain unproven. I then go on to illustrate how science (induction) is actually logic (deduction) in reverse, because the theories are the premises which logically entail empirical observations, not the other way around. The fact that no theory is ever proven comes as a surprise to some students, especially some introductory-level students who just want to know which theory is the right one. I try to emphasize that theories are neither true nor false in the strictest sense, but merely have a limited range of phenomena for which they are parsimonious. From the fact that even the most powerful theories are just assumptions hanging in the air waiting for one anomalous fact to come along, it follows that there is no value-free knowledge, or for that matter, "basic" research. Thinking critically involves stripping away the layers of inference until we get to fundamental assumptions and ask, why are we so emotionally attached to them?

 

As a psychologist, my teaching is also influenced by my formal understanding of learning and memory. Cognitive science has established that we learn best when we connect information to our existing knowledge and generate information actively. While teaching inevitably involves a certain amount of reciting facts that students are required to memorize for exams, providing a framework for them to actively participate in their education allows them to process the material at a deeper level. Therefore, I encourage discussion and emphasize demonstrations during class. I prefer long-answer exams to multiple choice questions because this provides students practice and feedback on their writing and critical thinking. When possible, I structure courses to include projects so that students can take ownership of topics that interest them. I also tend to heavily emphasize research methods, because understanding the process of creating knowledge facilitates critical thinking and provides a structure for integrating facts.

 

When I think about one of my favorite teachers, I particularly remember how successful he was in emotionally connecting with students. He never missed an opportunity to praise students for their positive contributions and achievements. I remember his putting a gold star on my exam (this was in graduate school, by the way, not first grade), and writing, "Best Job In Class To Date!" I later became his TA and watched him using the same techniques on his undergraduates. At times, I felt his style was ingratiating, but the point wasn't lost on me. In clinical psychology, the largest factor contributing to success in therapy (a form of learning) is the alliance between the patient and the therapist. We cannot neglect the importance of this factor in the relationship between teacher and student. I believe that merely attending to this dimension in situations where it may not be explicit, often provides opportunities to create a positive attitude in students that will make them enjoy taking responsibility for their learning process.

 

Students come with widely varying abilities and learning styles, so it is appropriate to provide lectures, exercises, and evaluations that work on more than one level whenever possible. While the higher performing students may be easier to work with, lower-performing students are also entitled to learning experiences that engage and reward them on their level, because they are human beings, democratic citizens, or at the very least, paying customers. Unfortunately, you sometimes have to accept that there are students who need to show more responsibility. Finding that happy medium between upholding academic standards while at the same time providing a compassionate service requires experience, at least as much as having the right philosophy. I gained some basic teaching experiences as a TA in Introductory, Biological, and Abnormal Psychology, Research Methods, Behavioral Statistics, and Animal Behavior at the University of Tennessee and the University of Michigan. I have recently been tapped to develop an online version of Research Methods for the University of Houston starting January 2007. I'd be happy to pick up a section of Intro, and I'm very much looking forward to designing graduate seminars in topics related to my research. I have an interest in learning and memory, perception, cognition, psychopathology, statistics and psychometrics, and all aspects of biopsychology. I would also enjoy developing a liberal education course on Great Books in popular science.

 

One of my most challenging and rewarding experiences have come with teaching my own courses in Physiological Psychology at the University of Houston and the University of Minnesota. I have now taught four live sections and five online sections of this course. This experience has taught me the discipline of preparing for lectures; how to balance being “deep” and cutting-edge with many students’ interest in just passing the test; how to respond to or avoid situations with difficult personalities in the classroom, and a variety of things under the category of “mistakes not to make.”

 

This year, I have started getting experience in what might be the most rewarding dimension of being a teacher, which is mentoring individual students. I hired one of my former biopsychology students as a research assistant, to manage my lab and run participants in my EEG state discrimination experiment. He is a continuing education student with a bachelor’s degree in economics, who is building credentials to get into a neuroscience-oriented graduate program. While he already had a good basic understanding of the brain and the EEG, he was thrilled to get intensive practical training in EEG technology and methods, data analysis and software, and general research methodology. While he had some classroom experience programming in JAVA, he has become proficient in maintaining and editing my PERL and C++ applications. His current reading assignment is one chapter/week from Learning PERL for Win32 Systems. He co-authored a research presentation for a conference (see Viebrock and Frederick, 2006), which earned him a $250 scholarship to attend the conference. For a first research assistant experience, I think he’s got a great deal, and so have I. We spend many hours at adjacent desks, talking shop while revising code or analyzing data. (Actually, he does most of the work because, technically, I’m getting paid to work on the Twin Family Study, which occupies most of my time.) This has been an extraordinary experience for me, because I have managed to get a great deal of research productivity from this student, and while he has been very appreciative of the experience. Another student has now started as a Directed Study student in the same project this fall. The opportunity to play a role in the development of great scholars and future teachers is undeniably one of the great rewards of teaching.