Teacher Spotlight on Colleen Seifert

As the Indigo Girls wrote, “There's more than one answer to these questions.”

I am overly prepared, but still never certain about how the lesson will emerge during class.

“Study in an Hour,” a methods exercise for psychology classes. Students work in groups to define a research question they can answer solely through observation, run off to collect data, and draw a conclusion from their findings. My joy lies in their excitement at realizing they can do it.

I live for the moments when someone says, “I never thought about it that way.” Often, the person who changes their thinking through class interaction is me.

Many! Michael Shafto taught my cognitive psychology class in college. Though only three students enrolled, he threatened to grade us on a curve. He changed my life path.

Standing in the auditorium one morning, I waited to start my Introduction to Psychology lecture. It was September 11, 2001. Many students still hadn’t heard what was happening, so I shared what I knew with them. I canceled class so they could gather with others, call home, and watch the news reports. We remain together in a shared “flashbulb memory” for the moment.

Be you. Don’t try to imitate what works for someone else; instead, be genuine in the classroom. Let students see you do not know the answer. True education starts when students begin to think of questions rather than answers.

I am certainly not at the top of the list of “great teachers,” so to me, this award acknowledges that genuinely caring—perhaps too much—about my students and their learning experiences is valued. I am filled with gratitude to them and my colleagues in STP.