TEACHING
The classroom keeps
me honest.
You can't explain the difference between a research insight and a research observation to an undergraduate who's never shipped anything without being very precise about what you actually mean. That precision is good for me.
I've been teaching in some form since 2013 — management, organizational behavior, UX design, and design thinking — at three different universities. It's never been a side project. It's part of how I stay calibrated.
Why I teach
Teaching design thinking to undergraduates is humbling in the best way. Students ask foundational questions that practitioners have stopped asking — "why do we do it this way?" and "what if we didn't?" — and those questions are useful to sit with.
It also keeps me close to what genuine learning feels like, which matters when you spend a lot of professional time designing research programs, onboarding experiences, and discovery rituals for teams trying to learn something new about their users. Understanding how people actually absorb new ideas — haltingly, through doing, by getting it wrong first — makes me a better practitioner.
And honestly: I love it. Getting a room of 20-year-olds to care about empathy mapping is a harder facilitation challenge than most client workshops. It keeps the skills sharp.
Courses I've taught
NEBRASKA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
January 2025 – present
Problem Solving and Design Thinking
A 15-week undergraduate course in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship program. Students work through the full design thinking process — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — on a real problem of their choosing, with actual users involved at every stage.
This is an experiential course, not a lecture course. Students conduct field interviews in weeks three and four. They build low-fidelity prototypes with paper before they touch any digital tools. They run real usability tests, analyze the results, and iterate. By the final presentation, they've done the thing, not just learned about it.
20 students per cohort · Innovation & Entrepreneurship program
Core texts: IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, Don't Make Me Think (Krug), Sprint (Knapp), The Design Thinking Playbook (Lewrick, Link, & Leifer)
Industry guest speakers: UX researcher, product designer
Tools: Figma, FigJam, paper prototyping, field research
Final deliverable: full design thinking project with user-tested prototype and presentation
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA—LINCOLN
August – December 2025
UX/UI Design
A 15-week undergraduate course covering UX principles, heuristics, usability testing, and UI design, built from scratch with original curriculum. Students learned industry-standard tools and methods while grounding their practice in foundational texts.
18 students
Tools: Figma, FigJam
Core texts: Don't Make Me Think (Krug), Laws of UX (Yablonski), Mapping Experiences (Kalbach), Designing Interfaces (Tidwell, Brewer, & Valencia)
Hands-on projects integrating research, design, and usability testing
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA
August 2013 – May 2018
Principles of Management & Organizational Behavior
Five years teaching management fundamentals and organizational behavior in UNO's College of Business Administration, while also early in my UX career. This is where I developed the facilitation instincts that still show up in how I run workshops and design sprints today.
Critical thinking, decision-making, interpersonal communication, and the organizational dynamics that determine whether good ideas make it to execution or die in a meeting. Useful context for someone who now helps product teams work better together.
College of Business Administration
Focus: critical thinking, team dynamics, leadership, decision-making
INSIDE THE NWU COURSE
What fifteen weeks of design thinking actually looks like
The course follows the full double diamond, but with the emphasis on doing, not just learning. Check-ins at the end of each phase keep teams accountable without turning the course into a checkbox exercise. Here's how the semester breaks down:
WEEKS 1-3
Empathize
Mindset of a designer · user research techniques · empathy mapping · journey mapping · field interviews
WEEKS 4-5
Define
Synthesizing findings · affinity diagramming · problem statements · "How Might We" questions
WEEKS 6-7
Ideate
Divergent and convergent thinking · rapid ideation · concept sketching · idea evaluation
WEEKS 8-9
Prototype
Low-fidelity paper prototypes · digital wireframes · service blueprints · iterative improvement
WEEKS 10-11
Test
Usability testing · assumption testing · feedback analysis · iteration
WEEKS 12-15
Implement + present
Prototype-to-solution · cross-functional communication · feasibility · final presentations
If you're a student, former student, or educator who wants to connect — I'm genuinely happy to talk. Use the contact form.
If you're thinking about bringing design thinking facilitation into your organization, that's also something I do — through workshops, sprints, and team training. That lives over on the services page.