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Personal
How I Came to Be at Wellesley
I have been at Wellesley College since 1985. It's hard to believe that it's been 20 years! While my teaching duties vary from year to year, I typically offer a course on the Psychology of Teaching, Learning and Motivation (Psyc 248); a seminar in my specialty area, the Psychology of Creativity (Psyc 337); a combined lecture and computer lab course in Introductory Statistics (Psyc 205) and a Research Methods course focused on issues of Educational Psychology (Psyc 206R).
The path that I took to get to Wellesley was far from straight and narrow. When I graduated from college, I was certain that I would never return to school. It was my dream to become an elementary school teacher. As an undergraduate at Brown University, I had had a frustrating time. While I loved the charged atmosphere and the open-endedness of the curriculum, at the time I was there, the university offered no teacher training or certification program at the elementary level. On more than one occasion, I had to endure a professor asking me why "someone with such a good mind would want to waste it on elementary-level teaching". But I persevered and, in some ways, I think the fact that I had to "buck" the system made my commitment to teaching even stronger.
I decided to create my own undergraduate major entitled "Bilingual Education", took a variety of courses that seemed to make sense and volunteered in the Providence Public Schools. Most of my time was spent in an elementary school on the East Side of the city which served a predominantly Portuguese-speaking population.
I spent my first year out of college managing a home for mentally disabled women in Sharon, MA. While the de-institutionalization of special needs populations is now the norm, in the late 1970's those of us working to mainstream mentally disabled adults into society were breaking new ground. Most of the women in my care had spent the bulk of their 40 or 50 years in state facilities ... many had been mistreated and one or two probably weren't mentally disabled at all. Their families, it seemed, had placed them in these institutions out of convenience. At any rate, everyone had to learn a variety of daily living skills ... from cooking to doing laundry to banking. We were quite a sight as we traveled around town in our van. If nothing else, I learned that year not to let people's stares and callous remarks bother me.
After about 14 months in Sharon, I left to pursue a Masters degree in Elementary Education. I was lucky enough to find a program that suited my needs perfectly. Lesley College (now Lesley University) in Cambridge, MA has for many years maintained a collaboration with the Shady Hill School (also in Cambridge). The Shady Hill Apprentice Program allowed me to work as a teacher by day and attend classes at night. It was an awesome year! One of the most difficult and rewarding that I've ever spent.
In the fall of my apprenticeship, I was teamed up with a spectacular teacher in a mixed-age (K-1) classroom patterned after the British Infant system. In the spring, I worked with a third grade teacher who was equally amazing. Exhausted, but finally "armed" with the credentials I needed (Masters degree and Massachusetts teacher certification), I then moved to Denver, CO to serve as head teacher in my own mixed-age (K-1-2) classroom. Teaching is unbelievably difficult; but when things are going "right" in the classroom, there is no place I would rather be. The question is: how do you keep things "right"?
When I moved to Colorado, I was convinced that I would teach forever. Maybe not in the Rocky Mountain West ... but somewhere. Slowly but surely, however, the same set of basic questions kept coming back to haunt me. I was successful at teaching my kids how to read and write and do math, but how was I to foster their intrinsic motivation in the classroom? How could I set up a learning environment that would promote their creativity? Without exception, my kindergarteners came to me bright eyed and enthusiastic. They were ready to tackle almost any challenge and their energy knew no bounds. But by the time those same children became second graders, many had lost their excitement about learning and they were reticent to take a risk or try something new. "If these eight year olds have already lost their natural curiosity and love of learning," I thought, "how will they ever make it through high school or beyond?"
Fairly quickly, my worries began to shift from issues of neat handwriting, mastery of math facts and reading fluency to the realization that my kids' motivation and creativity was dying right before my eyes. Was it something I was doing? Was there some better way to set up my classroom routines? Present my lessons? Structure my curriculum?
I talked with my colleagues. Interestingly, even some of my most seasoned colleagues had never given much thought to issues of intrinsic motivation or risk-taking. But when pressed, everyone agreed that their students' interest levels and creativity were also waning. Everyone seemed to be witnessing the same steady decline, but no one seemed to know what to do about it. I did lots of reading and found a wealth of material on issues of behavior management but next to nothing on how to manage student motivation. Finally, I decided to go back to school and figure things out for myself. Having never taken a psychology course, I registered for the Psych GRE and took the plunge.
Five years later, I received my PhD in Social-Developmental Psychology from Brandeis University. When I started at Brandeis, I promised myself that I would never lose track of my original mission. Some 20 years later, I'm still deeply involved in classroom-based research. Almost all of my empirical work and data collection has been conducted in school settings.
Eight years ago, I spent a sabbatical leave in a fourth grade classroom in Framingham, MA. From September until June, I was there every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday ... sitting in my little chair with my laptop ... gathering material for a book and for my research on "killers" of motivation and creativity in the classroom. It was great to have an excuse to be back in an elementary school classroom. Heavenly really!
This past year, I was fortunate to have yet another sabbatical. Among other projects, I traveled to Shanghai where I visited classrooms and began what I hope will be an on-going and fruitful collaboration with some Chinese scholars.
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