Teaching and Learning

My overall objective as an educator is to create learning opportunities that are engaging, meaningful, and motivating to students from diverse backgrounds. Training the next generation of PBS scholars is important not only so that students are prepared for careers and graduate school, but also so that they can become wise consumers of science in their daily lives and utilize their knowledge to solve problems in their communities. My course design and pedagogical choices reflect these teaching values. 

Structured Peer Review

I infuse structured peer review activities in all of my courses that help students understand how knowledge is created and used in Psychology and Neuroscience. 

Research Methods: Sample Writing & Peer Review Prompt This activity fosters students’ understanding of scientific thinking, trains them to think critically about data and evidence, and encourages them to extend these skills to their daily lives. 

Woods, V., Safronova, M., Adler-Kassner, L. (2020) Creating Scaffolding to Affirm Students as Active Learners

Sinervo, A. & Woods, V. (2020) ELI Review Showcase Across Disciplines: Psychology ELI Review Showcase

Inclusive Class Environment

I strive to make my courses a welcoming place for all students, where they can challenge themselves and each other to understand how we create knowledge in Psychology. I enact this via:  (1) targeted communication to make large classes feel small, and to make students feel that their professor notices and cares about their effort, work, and life (Psychology Teaching Network Article), (2) including explicit welcome messages in my syllabus and initial lectures, and (3) modeling inclusive language and discourse. 

Cross, V.  & Woods, V (2021) Mustering and Maintaining Student Morale

Demystifying Office Hours Handout For Students

In an effort to promote student use of office hours we recommend that instructors are explicit about the value of office hours. You can demystify hidden structure by explaining what to do in office hours and by providing sample questions and/or reasons they should come to office hours (Office Hours Infographic). It is also a good idea to normalize struggle as part of the learning process, and make sure students understand all questions are good questions. If you are interested in learning more about the SEISMIC Office Hours Project led by Lalo Gonzalez please check out this website. 

Teacher Training

Graduate TA Training

I worked very closely with the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and Instructional Development to co develop an Essentials of Teaching Assistant Training. I teach the graduate course Psy 590A/B Teaching of Psychology and help to guide the first year graduate students in our department in developing their teaching values and philosophy, as well as their teaching practice. 

Annual UC Teaching Conference 

As we all adjusted to pandemic rapid remote teaching our UC Teaching Professors in Psychology collaboration (7 teaching professors: Albada, Geller, Cross, DItta, Pilegard, Paquette-Smith, Woods)  took on creating a virtual conference to share best practices for remote learning. The recordings from the conference are available on the conference website: UC Teaching Professors Psychology Teaching and Learning Virtual Conference 2020

Course Resources

Research Methods

Research Methods PSY 10A (lower division with a laboratory section): This course introduces the basics of research methods in Psychology. Student's gain an understanding of the basics of design and measurement as well as develop their skills reading & effectively communicating information from primary research articles. The students learn the correct statistical test given a design, and this class fosters their development as wise consumers of research by working with hypotheses, results, evidence, claims, and conclusions. Students are scaffolded in laboratory section and through writing activities to design an APA style research proposal on a Psychology topic of their choice. PSY 10A Syllabus

Woods V.E. (5/27/2020) Understanding and Developing a Rationale and Hypotheses for an Experiment. APA Project Assessment. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/activities-books/rationale-hypotheses-experiment

Woods, V.E., Geller, E, & Cross, V. (2021) An Adventure in Remote Instruction: Research Methods in Psychology. Online Teaching ebook published by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

Advanced Research Methods Laboratory PSY 120L (upper division): The emphasis of the course is on developing a deeper understanding of psychology research methods in practice. Students learn how to conduct research, including how to design a study, collect data, interpret results, as well as present a poster and paper. Students design, run (via Qualtrics) and analyze data (using R) in group led independent research projects. They present their research at a poster session and write an APA style paper on their project. As students learn to be an effective researchers they also learn how to be  good consumers of research. PSY 120L Syllabus

Lecture materials based on threshold and bottleneck concepts in Research Methods 

Woods, V.E. (2019). Threshold concepts and Research Methods. In Baker, S. & Scherschel, H. (Eds.), Teaching tips: A compendium of conference presentations on teaching, Section XIX Research Methods, p 207, Society for the Teaching of Psychology. https://teachpsych.org/ebooks/teachingtips

120L Advanced Research Methods Laboratory Shared Teaching Materials

American Psychological Association Committee on Associate and Baccalaureate Education Teaching Resource award (2018) Understanding and Developing a Rationale and Hypotheses for an Experiment

Behavioral Neuroscience

Behavioral Neuroscience PSY 111: This course is aimed at introducing the basics concepts of behavioral neuroscience. The goals are to help the student describe the physiological relationships between nervous system anatomy, electrochemical, and pharmacological activity from a physiological perspective and an emphasis on behavior. The students explore the relationship between brain and behavior in both health and disease states. The students discuss primary research after lectures that layout the background knowledge and methods discussions to critically analyze primary literature. PSY 111 Syllabus