Teaching
Statement
I see myself first and foremost as a teacher. And that leads to a strange commitment:I need to make myself unnecessary so that my student can become independent. My anchor is a line from Fred Keller: the student is always right; he is not asleep, not unmotivated, not sick, and can learn a great deal if we provide the right contingencies of reinforcement. I take that literally. My job is not to transmit content and hope it sticks; it is to arrange contingencies that increase my students’ engagement, interest, and the quality of their work. When a student falls behind, I look at my own teaching: did I deliver the material meaningfully, measure performance in time, and offer the support that was needed? Thus, they can behave meaningfully when I’m not around.
What I most want students to learn is how to think in behavior-analytic terms. Behavior analysis is conceptually demanding, and it would be easy to reduce it to terms memorized for an exam. I refuse that. I build courses and lectures around a firm conceptual foundation, giving tools students need to construct their own answers, and an explicit ethical commitment to the people and communities they will serve. I want them to leave my classroom able to ask good questions and defend their reasoning, not merely recite mine. I want them to recognize the very processes we discuss in the world around them all the time: selection, reinforcement, and choice are not confined to the textbook, and seeing them at work is part of thinking as a behavior analyst.
I also want them to see that our science from an ethical standpoint. The concepts we teach carry theoretical, ethical, and social-justice commitments, and I name them rather than hide them.
To do this, I rely on debate, prompted by art, film, and other media, gamification, and problem-based work, because, as my mentor Emmanuel Tourinho often says, the organism must behave before we can deliver any consequence. I vary how I assess students, and I monitor their progress continually. At UNT, this has played out across the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, from Behavior Principles and the ABA Capstone to PORTL Practicum and doctoral seminars in experimental analysis and behavioral systems. In the combined student evaluations, my median ratings cluster at 4.7 out of 5, rising to 4.9 for enthusiasm and for whether students felt encouraged to speak. In Brazil, successive Psychology cohorts, including those in 2024, 2025, and 2026, have named me as a faculty member who significantly shaped their academic paths.
Underneath all of it is a simple commitment: to teach with ethics, kindness, and compassion. I mentor graduate students through genuinely difficult work and strive to meet them as people first. That, finally, is what Keller’s line means to me. If a student can learn a great deal under the right contingencies, then arranging those contingencies with care is the whole of the job. And then, I can send them off knowing they will do good.