Cognitive Processes A, graduate course (2012-2014)
Modified course and delivered lectures, ELSC, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012
This was the first course I ever taught. I was notified a month before the beginning of the school year that I would be teaching this course. I was officially the teaching assistant (TA), but as was the custom at ELSC at the time I taught the entire course, wrote the final exam and graded the students. I was pretty nervous, not only because this would be the first class I would teach, but also because it was on a topic in which I had limited experience. The aim of the course was to give students coming from non-cognitive backgrounds an overview of cognitive psychology, with a slight emphasis on cognitive models. Topics included perception, attention, problem solving, and memory. The following month consisted of extensive article reading. Every few days I would meet with Prof. Anat Maril, who supervised the course, to discuss the literature and the PowerPoint presentations I was making. The end result was a success, and the course received very positive feedback.
For the lessons I made PowerPoint presentations, which I would post on the course website either prior to the lesson, or immediately after it. I made sure to read out the text in the slides, as well as ask if it made sense and if anything was unclear. I made a strong emphasis on keeping the lessons interactive, and as a result many lessons continued right through recess. If there were no questions I would ask the class questions to get them involved, and to make sure they understood.
I incorporated many video excerpts taken from TV series, such as House M.D. These excerpts illustrated concretely many fascinating neuropsychological disorders that we discussed, including split-brain syndrome, akinetopsia, confabulation, hemispatial neglect, semantic dementia, and blindsight. Every couple of weeks I would give the class a paper to read as homework, and a few questions in the final exam were on those papers. I think that reading academic papers can really help students get a picture of what questions and problems underlie the research.