Teaching

I’ll be on sabbatical during AY 2023-24, and will be a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics.

In Spring 2023 I taught a freshman seminar in social and political epistemology at Harvard. Here’s the syllabus. Email me if you’d like to hear more about it.

I'm a qualified teacher. In between my M.Phil and my Ph.D., I completed the UK's Teach First programme, earning a PGCE (the UK’s main teaching degree) and working full-time for two years at The Quest Academy in Croydon. Officially, I taught Citizenship and Religious Studies. Unofficially, the former classes were largely political philosophy, and the latter were largely a mix of metaphysics and ethics. This remains by far the most difficult and by far the most rewarding thing that I have ever done.

As a Teach First teacher, I had 25 classes (approx. 500 students) and 15 pastoral tutees. I got used to working with students in challenging personal circumstances; many of my students had unstable home lives, and some were refugees or asylum seekers.

As part of my PGCE I specialized in positive behavior management, differentiation, teaching students who are learning English as an additional language, and "Assessment for Learning" (AfL).

I continue to use the skills and techniques that I developed during my time as a secondary school teacher in my undergraduate and graduate teaching, and sometimes I do things to try to encourage my peers and colleagues to draw on pedagogical research in their curriculum planning and class preparation. Here are some resources I’ve made for this purpose:

  • A PowerPoint of templates for “active learning” activities suitable for use in the undergraduate philosophy classroom.

  • The booklet from a workshop on inclusive pedagogy that I’ve run at NYU, Rutgers, and Stanford (with some slight modifications each time).

  • The booklet from an interactive presentation on backwards planning and integrated course design that I delivered at the Eastern APA 2018.

  • The booklet from an interactive presentation on assessment for learning that I delivered at the Central APA 2017.

 

I co-founded the Michigan High School Ethics Bowl in 2013, and co-organized it until I left Michigan in 2018, working in partnership with a local community organization called A2Ethics and with thirteen schools across Michigan to provide after-school Philosophy classes and organize three annual events. More info on the Bowl can be found on my Service page.

 

I've also been:

  • Instructor for the Moral and Political Workshop (a work-in-progress seminar for dissertators somewhere within the realm of the normative) at Harvard.

  • Instructor for Phil 166 (Current Moral and Social Issues) — a large lecture course — at USC. Here are the syllabi from the first and second iterations.

  • Instructor for the Dissertation Seminar (a work-in-progress seminar for third-year students) and for a grad course on blame at USC.

  • Instructor for a grad course on moral motivation, for The Nature of Values, and for the Advanced Seminar (Honors seminar) at NYU.

  • Instructor for Phil 181 (Is Morality Objective?) at the University of Michigan.

  • Discussion Section Leader for Phil 361 (Ethics), Phil 160 (Introductory Logic), Phil 303 (Intermediate Logic), and Phil 232 (Philosophical Problems) at the University of Michigan.

  • Supervisor and Grader for Part Ia Logic at the University of Cambridge.

In grad school I designed a syllabus for a service learning course affiliated with Ethics Bowl, in which undergraduate students spend some time studying ethical theory and some time studying pedagogy, and then go and coach high schoolers. Here's that syllabus.