Teaching

I have taught over 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Notre Dame. I have also taught students at Princeton University, Harvard University, Westville Correctional Facility, and Saint Thomas More Academy, a K-12 school I co-founded.

In 2017, I was awarded the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Notre Dame. The Joyce Awards are the University’s most prestigious recognition of extraordinary achievement and sustained effectiveness in teaching undergraduate, graduate, and/or professional students. Joyce Award winners serve as mentors and exemplars of outstanding teachers across the disciplines. 

Courses at Notre Dame:

Teaching Philosophy:

My teaching philosophy is inspired by classical pedagogy, in which the teacher first helps students to build the intellectual virtue of understanding through exposing them to diverse aspects of the reality they are studying. The students are encouraged to discern what principles are at work in the reality they observe, and taught to understand those principles through combining them to reach conclusions. The students study through deliberate practice, repeating small variations on one exercise at a time until they reach mastery; they learn to keep practicing not until they can get it right, but beyond that — until they cannot get it wrong.

Having helped the students build a foundational understanding of the subject, the teacher next helps students build the intellectual virtue of knowledge, teaching them how to systematically order these principles, seeing the order among these principles as constitutive of a systematic order of reality. Finally, as a teacher in a Catholic University, I then seek to impart some measure of the intellectual virtue of wisdom to my students, teaching them to see God as the cause and end of this order of reality.

In 2017, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to write a reflection on teaching, where I shared practical advice about the basic outlook of a teacher.