Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers May 7, 2018

Wholeness and Hope in Education: This is What a Professor Looks Like

It was 2003. I was a first-year doctoral student attending my first research conference. I remember her as if it was yesterday. Except her findings. I was too consumed by the way she looked; her skin color, her tone, the way she looked at her students. At the end of her presentation I waited for my turn to speak to her – although I did not know what I wanted to say. All that came out was “Hi, I’m a student here. Thank you”, as tears ran down my face.

Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Undergraduate Teachers March 19, 2018

What Does A Professor Look Like?

As a child of poor immigrants from rural Philippines, I often heard about how my parents grew up without running water and limited electricity. They told my brothers and me stories about the things that they didn’t have while growing up, and how they overcame traumas of war and poverty. These anecdotes made me feel equally grateful and guilty, while also motivating me to strive for success. In fact, it is through these stories that I learned the importance of attaining a college education as a way of fulfilling our parents’ American dreams and somehow compensating for the historical trauma that my family had overcome for centuries.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, High School Students, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Students January 1, 2018

Looking back at 2017: A Year In Review from the Psych Learning Curve.

2017 was a great year for the blog. We highlighted psychologists doing great work, a series on how to get into graduate school and featured many articles on the application of psychology in schools.

As a wrap up to 2017, I’d like to share with you our most popular posts and articles for the year. We look forward to bringing you more great stories from psychology and education in 2018. Thank you for all your support and feedback in our second year!

Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Teachers December 3, 2017

Help Your Students Believe in Themselves: Self-Efficacy in the Classroom

In his pioneering work, Albert Bandura characterised self-efficacy as the individual’s belief in his capacity to execute behaviours necessary to produce specific performance attainments. It reflects confidence in the ability to exert control over one’s own motivation, behaviour, and social environment. As teachers, this is an important element of human behaviour that can be harnessed to optimise students’ learning experience.

A host of research has already demonstrated that self-efficacy appears to be an important variable because it impacts students’ motivation and learning. But what are the factors that teachers should bear in mind to ensure that self-efficacy flourishes in the classroom?

Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers November 6, 2017

Avoiding the “I’m So Busy” Trap

Anyone who has had the chance to work in more than one psychology department – either as undergraduate, graduate, or faculty member – comes to realize that every workplace is different. There are different norms, different dress codes, different colleagues, and different leadership styles. But whatever work setting you end up in, you are guaranteed to find one strong commonality:

everyone is so busy.

And you will find this commonality immediately because everyone will want to tell you how busy they are.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, High School Students, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers August 28, 2017

But…We Do Learn from People We Don’t Like

In a quite popular Ted Talk, Every Kid Needs A Champion, Dr. Rita Pierson says many great things about relationships and education.  I have no doubt she was an incredible educator and mentor to students and teachers.  You can see it and feel it in the way she delivers her talk; she’s got it.  I believe this quote best summarizes her talk:

Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Teachers July 17, 2017

Learning Myths vs. Learning Facts

Unless you’ve been under a rock, avoiding the most infamous jargon of education, you’ve heard the term ‘learning styles’. It has become quite the buzzword in the last decade or so and is almost said with a cringe today. In what can be described as a neuromyth, learning styles have taken a beating by recent research and should be laid to rest with other famous falsehoods of psychology and education. Shockingly enough, though, its proliferation still exists.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers December 19, 2016

Review of “Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do”

Author: Claude M. Steele, PhD
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Copyright year: 2011
ISBN: 978-0393339727

Since “Whistling Vivaldi” was first published in 2010, it’s likely you’ve read it or at least browsed through it at a bookstore. If not, it’s worth a read, both for its important content on the impact of stigma on the stigmatized and its accessible description of a two-decade research process. I’ve been aware of and have taught about the phenomenon of stereotype threat for some time, but I learned a lot about the pervasiveness of the phenomenon and also about the author, one of my favorite social psychologists, by reading this book.