Education and professional experience
My psych nerdiness began when I completely lost track of time reading my AP psych textbook for homework in high school (shout out to David Myers). I couldn’t help it—it was my first time learning about psychology and it was fascinating! This flow state would become a recurring experience as I majored in psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill. With every course, my passion for the subject grew deeper. I received a master’s degree in teaching from UNC to combine my passion for psychology with my desire to make a positive impact on young people’s lives through education.
I began teaching AP psychology in the fall of 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was creating psychology lesson plans for the first time and adapting my instruction to fit remote, hybrid, and in-person models. As the only psychology teacher at my school, I didn’t (yet!) have psychology teacher friends to bounce teaching ideas off of—I searched online for resources to help improve my teaching practices and found a wealth of wonderful ideas in the TOPSS lesson plans. That first year, I fell in love with finding ways to make the study of psychological science relevant and engaging for my students while fostering a classroom community of care and curiosity. I knew that I had found my dream job—teaching high school psychology.
Through building partnerships with local psychologists, I love creating authentic learning opportunities that help my students develop research skills and an understanding of how psychological science can be used to understand and improve communities. For example, I collaborated with a developmental psychologist at NC State University to design and implement a program we call Ready Through Research, in which my students design and conduct their own school-based research projects with guidance from community research mentors during class-based workshops. Student teams plan, conduct, analyze, and present original psychological research to our school community at a culminating Research Expo. This partnership connected me to another local psychologist, Dr. Byrd, who sought my students’ input for the redesign of her School Racial Climate Measure used for psychological research involving middle and high school students. Students reflected on their own experiences of school racial climate—their perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in school—and examined prior research on the role of school racial climate on psychological well-being and academic outcomes. Using their understanding of research methods and reflections on their lived experiences, my students met with Dr. Byrd to recommend new and edited items for her revised measure.
In another recent partnership with a psychologist/community science mentor at UNC, my students served as “young reviewers” for the Frontiers for Young Minds journal. They engaged in the scientific publishing and peer review process by providing valuable feedback on a psychology research manuscript. I think it is an opportunity that more high school psychology classes should get involved in because it helps students learn about the peer review process experientially. I would love to share this activity more broadly and help high school psychology teachers connect their own classrooms to in-person or virtual science mentors.
In addition to these partnerships, TOPSS has helped me grow tremendously as a teacher through providing opportunities to form relationships with a network of psychology educators. I am particularly grateful for two TOPSS professional development experiences: the APA Clark and APA Oregon State University workshops. Learning from highly skilled and passionate psychology educators (shoutout to Jeanne, Michael, Sejal, Terry, Liz, and Regan) at these workshops helped me to learn and experience best practices in the teaching of psychological science. Since then, I’ve encouraged every psychology teacher I meet to apply for these professional development opportunities.