Teaching is in large part a nurturing process, at the undergraduate as well as at the graduate levels. The university experience is an important part of students' lives, and one they will relate to and use in the future, drawing from the knowledge and example provided by their instructors.

I consider the classroom learning environment to be a function of the reciprocal interaction between instructor and students. This necessitates the recognition that instruction is not static, but a dynamic interaction between teacher and student. In teaching, I attempt to tailor instruction to the needs and level of the students, yet at the same time I challenge students to achieve at their highest levels (I do not believe I have heard many students refer to my classes as easy.)

I structure learning activities that are designed to facilitate and enhance students' engagement in the learning process. I emphasize critical thinking with a focus on critique, evaluation, and synthesis of information. This necessitates students' active engagement in the course content. I believe that to critique and evaluate information requires a greater depth of learning than just reading and presenting the information.

I endeavor to prepare students to become active consumers of information and be able to critically evaluate material presented in my courses and generalize this perspective to the critical examination of research, theory and practice in their other courses as well as professional and life activities.

Graduate thesis and undergraduate research supervision are also important components of my teaching responsibility, and represents a critical instructional role. I am an active and rigorous thesis supervisor who expects students to be actively engaged in the research process. This includes nurturing their talent, working with students to guide and develop their competence in conducting research, and providing assistance to the graduate thesis or undergraduate research project a positive learning activity.

My specific teaching duties have varied over the years, although for the past 23 years at three universities I have taught courses in research methods and in the assessment of social, emotional, and behavioral competencies in child and adolescents. My teaching also includes courses in the psychological foundation of school psychology, child and adolescent psychopathology, advanced assessment techniques, and graduate seminars on such topics as depression and suicide in children and adolescents.

I greatly enjoy teaching at the university level. It takes a great deal of work, but it is reinforcing to see the product of student learning at the end of the semester, as well as later in life.

I find myself becoming interested in more questions in psychology than I can pursue. My research over the past 30 years has been on varied topics, with a number of programmatic lines of inquiry. However, to a great extent, my overall research interests including those of today have not diverged too greatly from my graduate school days when Norman Sundberg asked me to co-author an Annual Review of Psychology chapter. The chapter was to be a review of major research over the previous three years in the area of assessment of psychopathology. Our chapter (Sundberg, Snowden, & Reynolds, 1978) which was reframed as reflected in the title: Toward assessment of personal competence and incompetence in life situations, characterizes much of my work in the area of psychological test development, and my interest in studying the psychosocial characteristics and competencies of persons. This is reflected in my published measures of depression in children, adolescents, and adults; suicidal ideation in adolescents and adults; anxiety in adults; psychopathology in adolescents; psychological adjustment in adolescents; bullying, bully-victimization, bully-victimization distress, and school violence anxiety in children and adolescents; and social and prevocational knowledge of adolescents and adults with mental retardation.

My research interests go beyond the psychometrics of test construction to include research and writing on the treatment of depression in children and adolescents using cognitive behavior therapies; the nature and study of internalizing disorders in children and adolescents; the study of depression in gifted children, and children, adolescents, and adults with mental retardation; suicidal ideation and behavior in adolescents and adults; the diagnostic utility of computer administered and clinical interviews of depression in adults; and the study of a facet model of self-concept, including academic, social, and physical self-concept, among other studies.

More recently, my research has included investigations of exposure to school and community violence in children and adolescents and the potential psychosocial impact that it has on young people; and the study of bullying, bully-victimization and the internalizing and externalizing outcomes related to bully-victimization. I have initiated several investigations of deliberate self-harm in children, adolescents, and adults, with an on-going study of self-harm and mental health characteristics in college students.

My research with graduate and undergraduate students has included many of the areas listed above, as well as topics and questions that are unique to the individual student's interest. For example, one of my recent master's students at HSU just completed a thesis examining the hypothesis that self- control as a component of self-regulation mediates the relationship between language and aggression in children. I am open to working with students who seek to conduct research in areas other than those listed above, as long as I find the area of interest and the question meaningful.