The first ad emphasizes our commitment to supporting better learning through writing. Too often, we default to multiple choices tests because they are quick and easy. SAGrader supports more writing without the additional workload.

The second ad is geared toward instructors who already offer writing, but struggle to keep up with the grading load. Assessment should be a part of every teacher’s job, but tools like SAGrader can help support this process.

Our users tell us that SAGrader doesn’t replace the teacher, it extends their influence even further.

Here are some additional quotes from the latter half of the manifesto that I found particularly interesting. Check them out and let me know what you think!

(I’ve edited many of these excerpts for length. Please refer to the original source for the full quotes. The numbers accompanying each excerpt refer to the section number.)

On factory output:

School is a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff. These students are trained to dream small dreams. (#60)

On why:

No, the problem isn’t that we haven’t spent enough hours memorizing the map. The problem is that we don’t want to. Teachers aren’t given the time or the resources or, most important, the expectation that they should sell students on why. (#70)

On craftsmanship:

What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate. (#74)

On two steps to school:

We act as if there are only two steps to school:

(1) Get kids to behave
(2) Fill them with facts and technique

Apparently, if you take enough of each, enough behavior and enough technique, then suddenly, as if springing from verdant soil, passion arrives. I’m not seeing it. (#88)

On writing:

Writing is organized, permanent talking, it is the brave way to express an idea. Talk comes with evasion and deniability and vagueness. Writing, though, leaves no room to wriggle. The effective writer in the connected revolution can see her ideas spread to a hundred or a million people. Writing (whether in public, now that everyone has a platform, or in private, within organizations) is the tool we use to spread ideas. Writing activates the most sophisticated part of our brains and forces us to organize our thoughts.

Teach a kid to write without fear and you have given her a powerful tool for the rest of her life. Teach a kid to write boring book reports and standard drivel and you’ve taken something precious away from a student who deserves better. (#90)

On being usefully wrong:

If the training we give people in public school or college is designed to help them memorize something that someone else could look up, it’s time wasted. Time that should have been spent teaching students how to be wrong. How to be usefully wrong. That’s a skill we need along with the dreaming. (#97)

On caring:

One thing a student can’t possibly learn from a video lecture is that the teacher cares. Not just about the topic—that part is easy. No, the student can’t learn that the teacher cares about him. And being cared about, connected with, and pushed is the platform we need to do the emotional heavy lifting of committing to learn. (#108)

On Legos:

Give me a motivated block builder with a jumbled box of Legos over a memorizing drone any day. If we can’t (or won’t, or don’t want to) win the race to the bottom, perhaps we could seriously invest in the race to the top. (#112)

On figuring it out:

The puzzles of math and physics are among the most perfect in the world. They are golden opportunities to start young adults down the path of lifelong learning. The act of actually figuring something out, of taking responsibility for finding an answer and then proving that you are right—this is at the heart of what it means to be educated in a technical society. But we don’t do that any longer. There’s no time and there’s no support. Parents don’t ask their kids, “what did you figure out today?” (#113)

On higher education:

If there’s a part of the educational system that should be easier to fix, it’s higher education…Colleges have an opportunity to dramatically shift what it means to be educated, but they won’t be able to do this while acting as a finishing school for those who have a high school diploma. College can’t merely be high school, but louder. (#124)

On learning, leading and teaching:

The common school is going to take a generation to fix, and we mustn’t let up the pressure until it is fixed. But in the meantime, go. Learn and lead and teach. If enough of us do this, school will have no choice but to listen, emulate, and rush to catch up. (#131)

He also served in other leadership positions including Chair of the Division of Social and Administrative Sciences, Co-chair of the Higher Learning Commission re-accreditation self-study committee, Faculty Senate President, and Freshmen Coordinator.

Andrew has been working with us since 2009 to develop a robust set of introductory psychology writing assignments based on the immensely popular David G. Myers Psychology textbook.

Andrew recently told us about his experience using SAGrader in this informal Q&A:

Why did you decide to use SAGrader in your class?

I have consistently been interested in both writing across the curriculum and the automation of pedagogical processes. I have also been involved in rubric creation, implementation, and training largely through my participation in the Educational Testing Services’ Advanced Placement Psychology Examination scoring. These experiences sensitized me to the topics of developing and applying systems to scoring open-response questions.

A colleague in the department shared the potential of SAGrader with me and I was excited to bring in technology to automate scoring of student responses.

How has your class improved since you started using SAGrader?

I use SAGrader not only to reinforce and improve student writing, but also to help a segment of students who are challenging to reach — the underprepared students. Writing skills only improve with writing practice and formative feedback.

Using SAGrader allows the skilled student to quickly address the questions while providing the important formative feedback and opportunities to resubmit for the student with developing expressive skills. My skilled students have reported that they like the immediate feedback with the opportunity to resubmit. SAGrader has given them more control over their scores and they like that.

My students have also admitted that answering the questions have forced them to open their textbooks and to read the material. My less skill–developed students have reported frustration at the onset of using SAGrader, and have reported that the writing gets easier and they have to submit fewer times across the semester.

I’ve also observed that their responses over the semester are becoming more concise yet more dense/meaningful. Students have also reported that their writing in other classes has improved and knowledge/skill transference is important in education.

What are your favorite features or benefits of the program?

The biggest benefit of using SAGrader rests with improving student writing and thinking. Writing for a computer requires a skill set to not only express key concepts in a direct and specific manner, but also to take another perspective and write to it. The SAGrader system adapts to the student and gives the less prepared student more learning opportunities without taxing the instructor.

I like the automated scoring and immediate feedback adapted to the students’ schedule.

Thanks Ande!

The manifesto — available free online in a number of formats — is engaging and thought-provoking. Anyone with a stake in our education system (i.e. everyone) should give it a read.

I’m about a third of the way through it and wanted to highlight a few passages I found particularly challenging. I plan to post additional excepts from the latter half of the manifesto in separate posts.

(I’ve edited many of these excerpts for length. Please refer to the original source for the full quotes. The numbers accompanying each excerpt refer to the section number.)

On revolution:

School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. (#6)

On the industrial solution:

Now that we’ve built an industrial solution to teaching in bulk, we’ve seduced ourselves into believing that the only thing that can be taught is the way to get high SAT scores.

We shouldn’t be buying this.

We can teach people to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, and to innovate. (#12)

On moving beyond factory workers:

It’s easier than ever to open a school, to bring new technology into school, and to change how we teach. But if all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow. (#17)

On restless leadership:

That’s the new job of school. Not to hand a map to those willing to follow it, but to inculcate leadership and restlessness into a new generation. (#20)

On change:

School belongs to parents and their kids, the ones who are paying for it, the ones it was designed for. It belongs to the community, too, the adults who are going to be living and working beside the graduates the school churns out.

Too often, all these constituents are told to treat school like an autonomous organism, a pre-programmed automaton, too big to change and too important to mess with.

Well, the world changed first. Now it’s time for school to follow along. (#21)

On fear and passion:

There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic.

The other tool is passion. A kid in love with dinosaurs or baseball or earth science is going to learn it on her own. She’s going to push hard for ever more information, and better still, master the thinking behind it.

Passion can overcome fear—the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed. (#29)

On teaching doubt:

The industrial structure of school demands that we teach things for certain. Testable things. Things beyond question.

Our new civic and scientific and professional life, though, is all about doubt. About questioning the status quo, questioning marketing or political claims, and most of all, questioning what’s next.

The obligation of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. (#31)

On getting off the hook:

Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility.

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.

If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault.

That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. “I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.”

Too many competent workers, not enough tasks. (#35)

On testing:

In the industrial age, scientific management is obvious when you think about it: record how long it takes to make something, change the way you do it, see if you can do it faster or better. Repeat.

Scientific schooling uses precisely the same techniques as scientific management. Measure (test) everyone. Often. Figure out which inputs are likely to create testable outputs. If an output isn’t easily testable, ignore it.

It would be a mistake to say that scientific education doesn’t work. It does work. It creates what we test.

Unfortunately, the things we desperately need (and the things that make us happy) aren’t the same things that are easy to test. (#38)

On exceptional learning:

The industrialized, scalable, testable solution is almost never the best way to generate exceptional learning. (#43)

On the content gatekeeper:

It used to be simple: the teacher was the cop, the lecturer, the source of answers, and the gatekeeper to resources. All rolled into one.

The Internet is making the role of content gatekeeper unimportant. Redundant. Even wasteful.

If there’s information that can be written down, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number or sharpen an axe.

What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better. (#44)

On competency:

Competence is the enemy of change!

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

If I’m going to make the investment and hire someone for more than the market rate, I want to find an incompetent worker. One who will break the rules and find me something no one else can. (#50)

I admit it. I’ve assigned multiple choice questions before.

They are easy to produce and quick to grade. They seem to provide an objective, comparable measurement of student knowledge. And no one will criticize me for using them.

So why do I feel guilty?

Because when I use multiple choice for assessment, I know I am settling. It’s like shopping at Wal-Mart. I know it’s not good for me, store employees, or society as a whole.

But I can’t help myself. The system is in place. Society wants me to shop there.

So I do. It’s just so…convenient.

Multiple choice tests have been a staple of American education for almost a century. Concerned about the subjective judgement and large amounts of time associated with grading papers, Frederick J. Kelly developed a more efficient, objective testing method in 1914.

Professor Kelly’s creation was a product of the machine age. Multiple choice questions were “a dependable, uniform, easily replicated product— the assembly-line model of dependability and standardization.”

There wasn’t much evidence that the multiple choice test was an accurate measure of what a child knew, but no one could deny the test’s efficiency.

America has grown out of the machine age and into a new economy defined by new technology and global connections. But in education, efficiency still reigns supreme. Often at the expense of effectiveness.

I’ve come to view multiple choice tests as the poster child for our outdated, mass-education system. They reward memorization of isolated facts and information, leaving little room for coherent thinking, logic, and individual style.

We can do better.

I know it will take more work. I know it will be uncomfortable. It could get us in trouble. But new technology makes it possible to support more imaginative assessments that are efficient and actually effective.

Multiple choice tests had a good run. Now let’s move on to something better.

But instructors who use SAGrader tell a different story.

Pam Thomas, a biology instructor at the University of Central Florida, sees SAGrader as an extension of her own grading capacity since she controls the evaluation rubric.

“It’s not outsourcing assessment, it’s using automated assessment that is totally professor controlled…[T]he machine grades just as I would. It is me using the machine to grade, what would be unimaginable numbers of papers.”

Pam regularly teaches classes with over 400 students. With such a potentially large grading load, the choice is between offering no writing assignments at all, or allowing students to write with SAGrader. Pam says SAGrader offers “the ability to have large classes do the same types of work as small classes.”

Another teacher, Joe Swope, finds that SAGrader actually increases his meaningful  interactions with students. In a recent MindShift article, Joe said:

“Just because the software is grading doesn’t mean I don’t read student work. [I use SAGrader to] find trouble spots and start a dialogue that’s more than just comments in the margin. [SAGrader makes me a] better teacher because it has freed me up to talk to students.”

It’s the same with instructors interested in SAGrader. The first thing they want to know is: Who else is using it? Do they like it?

To give you a taste of our user experience, we’ve been highlighting some user experiences on this blog. Today you get a bonus treat.

Pam Thomas, a Biology instructor at the University of Central Florida, recently contributed an article to the UCF Faculty Focus.  The Faculty Focus aims “to provide an exchange of ideas on teaching and learning for the university’s community of teachers and scholars.”

In the October issue, many of the articles dealt with strategies for teaching writing. Pam writes candidly about her SAGrader experience, providing insight into the nuts-and-bolts of using the tool in class.

SAGrader provides Pam with a way to realistically employ writing assignments in the large classes she loves to teach. The result, according to Pam, is not only increased academic performance, but also enhanced engagement with students.

The students react differently when confronted with a blank space to write into. That blank space provides me the window into their minds and a manageable way to grade their responses.

Pam mentions the advantages of assessing student progress before a test or quiz, and the flexibility to design high-level writing assignments just for her class. Pam has found success with scenario questions that require synthesis and application, since it is crucial to help students “develop analytical skills rather than rote responses from open books or notes.”

In one freshman class, Pam saw her in-class test grades increase 12.5 percent when students used SAGrader. Pam attributes this to both the learning and teaching benefits SAGrader provides:

My class was on the way to learning to express ideas in written form, clearly and concisely, while also learning vocabulary, technical scientific information, and critical thinking skills.  You can see exactly why and when students don’t understand, and you can use it to help them learn during the next class or right away if you desire.

If you’re curious about SAGrader, I encourage you to read the entire article (Pam’s article begins on page six). It’s a fantastic look at SAGrader from the teacher’s perspective.

But Willis reminds us that certain tasks — like writing — strengthen parts of the brain that can pay dividends in any domain.

Through writing, students can increase their comfort with and success in understanding complex material, unfamiliar concepts, and subject-specific vocabulary. When writing is embedded throughout the curriculum, it promotes the brain’s attentive focus to classwork and homework, boosts long-term memory, illuminates patterns, gives the brain time for reflection, and when well-guided, is a source of conceptual development and stimulus of the brain’s highest cognition.

We’ve known this for a while. It’s one of the reasons writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs have gained popularity since the 1980s.

At the most basic level, writing requires students to recall knowledge rather than just recognize it (e.g., a multiple-choice question). With more complex writing activities, students must retrieve information, link it with related concepts, then organize and express those ideas in their own words. There’s evidence that this retrieval process produces more learning than even the most thorough study session.

Writing can also have social and emotional benefits. Willis points out that many students are afraid of making mistakes in front of their peers or the teacher. With cloud-based collaborative tools, students can write anonymously and fearlessly express themselves.

Especially with peer anonymity, there is accountability and peer interaction, without the concern about mistakes that is so paralyzing to many students during class time.

Writing activities can empower students to connect with the course material in meaningful ways, confidently explore new ideas, benefit from feedback and reflection, and reflect on their progress over time.

Be sure to check out the full article for more about the benefits of writing for math and science.

Photo via

Joe is passionate about finding effective ways to teach that go beyond lecturing and reading a textbook. He recently finished a fantasy novel called “Need For Magic” that integrates principles of social psychology into the story line. Teachers around the country have been using it to engage their students in discussions on topics like the bystander effect, obedience and the fundamental attribution error.

Joe’s next project is a curated collection of psychology-related videos that can be used to help illustrate concepts in Psych 101, such as classical conditioning and child development.

Based in the Washington D.C. area, Joe teaches almost 200 total students in five sections of AP psychology. He also teaches at the local community college. He’s been teaching for about 10 years.

This is Joe’s second year using SAGrader in his classes. He’s been kind enough to share some of his SAGrader experiences in this informal Q & A.

Why did you decide to use SAGrader in your class?

“I decided to use SAGrader because I know that writing is critical to the study of psychology, but I was getting discouraged that I could not give my students the attention their writing needed.  In addition to improving their writing skills for academic’s sake, I wanted to prepare them better for the writing portion of the AP exam.”

How has your class improved since you started using SAGrader?

“After my students became accustomed to using SAGrader, they have become more engaged in writing.  Despite the fact that SAGrader allows me to assign them more work, they seem to be more proactive in completing the increased work load.  I think it is because the can work on an essay for a few minutes, get good feedback, take a break and retry at another time.  It puts the control in their hands. With their busy schedule of practice, part time work and other classes, SAGrader allows them to work on the essays when it is convenient for them.  I think that allows them to take ownership.”

“For the students who complete all of the assignments in my AP class, I saw a huge connection in a passing AP score. The rubrics of the essays are strikingly similar to the rubrics that are used at the annual AP reading.”

What are your favorite features or benefits of the program?

“By far the greatest benefit is the increased communication I have with my students regarding their writing. I didn’t expect that.  On some level I thought SAGrader would allow me to step back, save some time and let the software grade several hundred of the same essays.”

“What I have found, through answering challenges and watching their scores rise, is that I am more engaged without spending more time.  I can reply back to specific questions and misconceptions.  Communicating through the challenge system allows me to focus on student responses and have an electronic discussion with them.”

What would you say to other instructors thinking about using SAGrader in their class?

“I would say that SAGrader actually increases student and teacher involvement in the writing process.  While the students might spend a bit more time, the teachers will spend less time but get better results.  SAGrader allows teachers to focus their efforts on students that need help and concepts that are challenging rather than spreading their attention too thinly on everything and everyone.”

Thanks Joe! If you are interested in learning more about SAGrader, send me an email at colin@ideaworks.com.

Introductory Psychology courses are filled with interesting concepts that can be demonstrated to students using methods other than lecture and reading. Here are a few activities I’ve put together over the last few years. They work great for high school and college classes.

(By guest blogger Joe Swope).

#1. Understanding Depth Perception using Echo Location

Have a student stand about 8 feet away from a brick wall or other wall with a hard flat surface (no posters, pictures, windows).  Then have the student hum or hold a note out loud as he or she walks toward the wall with EYES CLOSED.  Instruct the student to listen to the tone as he approaches the wall.  Without peeking, he will be able to get within an inch of the wall by sound alone.

#2. Where Rods and Cones Are and Aren’t

Have a student sit in a chair facing the class.  Have another student stand behind him with a handful of different colored pens or markers.  It doesn’t matter what the ink is, the outside of the pens need to have different colors.  Have the student who is standing behind the seated student slowly bring one of the colored pens around to the seated student’s peripheral vision.  Try to keep the colored pen about two feet away from the seated student’s head.  The seated student will be able to see movement but will not be able to determine the color of the pen.

#3. Classical conditioning

This one requires a teacher who paces during lectures and is not afraid of annoying the students.  For a few weeks before the unit on classical conditioning, the teacher should push the top of the pen of a student in the front row.  The instructor should do this for every student in the front row.  It is terribly annoying, but the instructor should do this a few times ever class before the unit on conditioning.  After only a few trials, the students will associate the instructors presence near their desks with pens being jostled.  As a result, after only a few classes of this the instructor can simply walk by each of the student’s desk and watch them automatically pick up their pen until the instructor has passed by.

Once the instructor reveals that students have been trained, a discussion should ensue as to whether it was classical conditioning or operant conditioning.  Note: Even though the students cognitively understand why their pens were annoyingly jostled, the effect is long lasting and students will pull their pen from the paper for weeks afterward.

#4. Conformity

Either wait for or construct a situation where a student leaves the room for a few minutes.  While he is outside of the classroom, instruct the other students to stand up when the student returns and sits in his seat.  As soon as the returning student sits down in his seat, he will see his classmates immediately rise.  For added effect, have the classmates rise with their notebooks and continue with the lecture.  Chances are the student will stand.

A less dramatic but a more sure effect is to have the students already standing when the student returns.  If class continues and the lecture proceeds with the rest of the class ignoring him, the returning student will blend in and remain standing.  Note: If the class is aware that the lesson is on conformity, the student might be wise to the gag.

#5. Serial Position Curve

Have the student put away pens and paper.  Ask them to remember as many words from the following list: giraffe, lion, tiger, rat, alligator, buffalo, eagle, ox, bear, beaver, mouse, cat, deer, fox, raccoon, opossum, rabbit, squirrel , elephant, cheetah. Take a moment to distract the student by reminding them of upcoming homework or by telling them a knock-knock joke.

Then, ask students to write down as many words as possible.  Give them a few minutes to wrack their brains.  Ask, by show of hands how many students remembered which words.  Tally student responses on the board.  Have students notice that the animals in the middle of the list were not remembered as much as the animals at the beginning and at the end of the list.

#6. Remembering by Schema

Have the student put away pens and paper.  Ask them to remember as many words from the following list: refrigerator, oven, cutting board, dishwasher, knife, pot holder, blender, spatula, toaster fork microwave, spoon, toaster, fork, stove, frying pan, dish towel, freezer.

Take a moment to distract the student by reminding them of upcoming homework or by telling them a knock-knock joke.  Then, ask students to write down as many words as possible.  Give them a few minutes to wrack their brains.  Ask, by show of hands how many students remembered refrigerator, how many remembered oven.  Hands will raise as students eagerly display their brilliance.  Then ask how many remembered sink.  A few students will raise their hands despite the fact that sink was never mentioned.

#7. Priming and “Reading Students’ Minds”

This one takes a little planning and works well for a lecture on consciousness.  On the day before the demonstration takes place, create baseline data by having student write down the first animal that pops in their head.  Collect the papers.  Then on the day in question and throughout the lecture, the instructor will lace his words with the theme of jungle cats.  It is a common school mascot and the teacher can remark ask about how the “Lions” did.  Or the instructor can ask about the Cincinnati football team and what the heck is a Bengal anyway.  Throughout the lecture the teacher might refer to Simba or Mufasa.  The teacher might remark about how he played golf on the “linx”.

After weaving such instances into his remarks, lectures and conversation, the instructor should then ask students to write down the first animal that springs to mind.  Collect the responses and explain how instances of big cats have been ‘subtly’ presented to the students.  Record the baseline data on the board from the previous day.  Record the current collection of student response on the board as well.  Check to see if there is a noticeable difference in responses that include big cats.

#8. Operant Conditioning Using Token Economy

The instructor should ask for two student volunteers.  One will be the trainee the other will be the trainer.  The trainee will need to step outside of the room for a few minute.  During that time, the class will determine what behavior the trainee will perform (standing on a desk, walking near a window, erasing the chalkboard, etc.).

When the trainee returns to class the only feedback he or she is given is the words hotter or colder.   Using these as makeshift punishments and rewards in a token economy the trainee will attempt behaviors in order to receive a “warmer” reward and avoid the punishment of “colder.”  This works remarkable well and it is surprising how easy it is to get an average student to do an abnormal behavior with the right system of rewards and punishments.

 #9. Speed of Neural Impulse

Generally, the neural unit comes after the unit on research methods, so this activity is a nice one to tie the two units together.   You will need a stop watch and a calculator. Have students stand up in a circle around the room.  Have each student use their right hand to grab the left wrist of a classmate.

Assign one person the job of starting the impulse.  Start the stopwatch at the same time you say “go.” He will then squeeze the wrist of the person to his right. As soon as that person feels the squeeze, he will then squeeze the left wrist of the other class mate and so on.  Have the last person in the circle say ‘stop’ when they feel the squeeze.  Stop the stop watch as soon has he says “stop”  record time on the board. Do this a few times and record the time for each trial.

For tie-ins to the neural unit, estimate or measure the arm length + shoulders + neck of each student.  Add that combined distance and divide by the time it took the signal to get around the circle.  That is an approximate speed for the neural transmission.

For the research tie-in, have your students predict what would happen if student grabbed the other wrist and reversed the direction. Test it. Have you students predict what would happen with eyes closed. Test it.  What are some confounding variables?  Are their biases?  The activity is flexible enough to be the start of quite a few subsequent activities, discussions and assignments.

#10. Taste Transduction and Spatial Coding

This one is the only tip that requires special material, a bag of Hersey Kisses.  Distribute a Kiss to each student.  Have them “dry” their tongue as much as possible.  One method, however awkward they might be, is to have students blot their tongues with a paper towel or napkin.

Once the tongue is free of saliva, have the students place the Kiss on the back of the tongue.  It is helpful to have students look up while doing this so saliva has a more difficult time reaching the tip of the tongue.  Most students will report that they feel the texture and weight of the candy, but they do not taste sweetness.  Some will report that they can smell the aroma of cocoa but cannot taste chocolate.  Eventually the saliva will carry chocolate molecules to the front of the tongue and the students will taste sweetness.

Today’s guest post is contributed by SAGrader user Joe Swope, a psychology teacher in the Washington D.C. metro area who is always exploring ways to teach beyond the lecture and textbook. Joe has a strong track record developing creative ways to engage students with psychology, including a novel that meshes fantasy and social psychology, and a curated collection of psychology-related videos.

Photo via