PIES (Psychological Interventions in Educational Settings)

Bridgette Hard, PhD, Associate Professor of the Practice and the Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University

Teach and Discover with Stealthy Pedagogical Research

Abstract:  Like many of my colleagues, I pursued a doctoral degree in psychology because I wanted to be both a scientist and ateacher: I wanted to make new discoveries about the human mind and behavior and share my knowledge with students. But in the early years of my career, I treated these two valued roles of scientist and teacher as separate, as having little in common besides some overlapping content. I certainly did not consider teaching as a scientific endeavor or myself as “experimenting” with pedagogy. Today, my perspective on science and teaching could not be more different. In this presentation, I will share how my teaching evolved into a stealthy pedagogical research program that is both theoretical and practical, integrated with instruction, and useful to students, teachers, and scholars. Along the way, I will describe various tools in my pedagogical research “toolkit” as well as several findings that have emerged from my classroom “laboratory” that have helped me improve my teaching as well as strengthen our collective knowledge about effective pedagogy. I will offer practical advice for helping instructors build pedagogical research into their own courses.