Teaching

Teaching Experience

As a clinical psychologist and global mental health scholar, I approach teaching as a collaborative endeavor rooted in the integration of theory, experience, and practical skill-building. My instructional experience has included designing and serving as instructor of record for a project-based community psychology course for undergraduates, running graduate statistics and data science labs, conducting discussion sections for an undergraduate psychopathology course, supervision of practicum experiences. I have also run brief psychotherapy trainings, supported data science workshops, and given guest lectures on various topics related to psychological intervention and global mental health.

I hope to teach in academic medical, public health, and psychology settings on topics spanning research methods, psychopathology, clinical interventions, and the role of culture and context in mental health. As part of my commitment to learning and continuing to develop as a teacher, I completed the Certificate in College Teaching at Duke. The following sections outline and illustrate my pedagogical philosophy using examples from across clinical and classroom settings.

Teaching Philosophy

Frame learning around a flexible theoretical structure. I place my courses’ primary learning outcomes in a larger framework: a set of principles, a core skill, or a central tension in the field. This framework orients students to the overall course objectives, empowers them to engage critically with the material, and helps them make connections across disparate topics. To ensure this framework is helpful, I seek out integrative theoreties, compare other similar syllabi, consult pedagogical literature, use my own disciplinary expertise, and experiment with what is most effective with learners.

• Early in my doctoral program, I had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for a graduate statistics class. I researched effective pedagogy and worked with the primary instructor to develop lab materials that emphasize the core framework of the General Linear Model. Students provided positive feedback about the way the class helped them see continuity between techniques and develop an intuition that would serve them in learning further statistical methods.

• In my final year as a doctoral student, I designed and taught a project-based learning course called Strengthening Families Across Contexts. I structured the course syllabus around nine principles of community psychology. These principles served as guides for assignments and touchpoints for student reflections throughout the course.

• As a supervisor for psychotherapy practicum students, I emphasize the core process of case conceptualization. Using these conceptualizations as a central framework allows me to support supervisees as they plan treatments for a variety of problems, articulate their clinical decisions, and learn new intervention processes. 

Start from experience. I try to ground learning in experience, whether students’ existing knowledge or in experiences curated through the course. This positions students as collaborators in the learning process and encourages curiosity. It also emphasizes continuity between everyday and academic learning, helping students value intuition and practical knowledge alongside critical thinking. Since groups of learners often have an array of diverse experiences, I do my best to include a variety of perspectives in course materials while tailoring the overall learning to fit the particular context of the course. 

• When teaching research skills, I try to avoid using made up datasets. In virtual labs with graduate students during the pandemic, I used daily COVID-19 case counts but, when I taught a data science workshop in Kenya during a recession, I used country-wide maize price data. In both cases, students began with their own compelling hypotheses and were genuinely interested in our analyses.

• Throughout my graduate training, I have been collecting narrative accounts of mental illness expressed in compelling visual, audio, or written formats. I hope to use these in a future Global Mental Health course where lived experience is used to contextualize traditional assigned readings on epidemiology and intervention.

Emphasize skilled practice. Learning is not the transmission of knowledge but is an embodied process, a structured apprenticeship in a way of engaging with the world. As a teacher I try to ask myself what ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting students need to learn this particular subject: What skills do they need to practice? My role is to guide students. I set a path by curating experiences through assignments that require productive struggle. Then I walk alongside them observing, assessing, and supporting their learning. This creates consistent opportunities for formative assessment and ensures learners emerge from their learning with a sense of capability and agency.

• Since statistical programming is a consistent part of modern statistical learning, I redeveloped graduate statistics labs to center the practical skill of coding in R. I developed introductory resources for learning R, coded live during lectures, provided students with guided notes to follow along, and structured labs around supporting students in their learning. Learning to do this effectively has led me to invest further time in pedagogical training for data science instructors.

• In the two-semester course I developed, a distinct challenge was the range of prior experience with research and psychology content. I therefore met with each student to identify specific learning objectives, identify areas of growth for them, and select roles on project teams that would support this learning.

• As a clinical supervisor, students are often thrust into practice and struggle to bridge theory and intuitive sense. I encourage students to bring examples from real cases, engage in role playing, and structure active reflection on their development as a clinician.