R. Scott Reed of Hamilton High School (Chandler, Arizona) is the 2021 winner of the Mary Margaret Moffett Memorial Teaching Excellence Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (APA Div. 2). The following interview was compiled by Terri Lindenberg.
I do love the term “psychological literacy.” I hope students will see the world differently and understand themselves and others with a broader understanding that psychology can bring. For many of our students this might be their only exposure to psychology in a classroom, and I hope they leave wanting to know more about the science of psychology.
I love teaching “research methods” as I can see students throughout the year critique research from a variety of fields including psychology. The students today are bombarded with information from so many sources, and it is a critical skill for everyone to learn to properly critique what they are seeing. I also really enjoy “personality” and see a lot of students become comfortable with who they are as a person through learning about this topic.
My most memorable moment was finding out I was elected to the TOPSS Committee, first as a member-at-large and then as the chair. The APA members and their committees are so supportive of high school psychology. The TOPSS website and lesson plans were so important in my development as a psychology teacher; it was wonderful to be part of some of the accomplishments of this Committee. Thanks to TOPSS I was able to attend the 2017 National Summit on High School Psychology Education, two APA conferences, and the APA/Clark University Workshop for High School Teachers twice, and meet so many other psychologists and psychology teachers.
I taught 6th grade, and then middle school math, and then high school math as I was building the psychology program at Hamilton High. I really loved teaching in general, but the students love psychology. My students have done a number of service projects for the National Alliance on Mental Illness and participated in many of the NAMI walks. Many of my students’ passions go beyond the classroom.
When I started teaching psychology almost 25 years ago there were not a lot of materials that were easy to obtain. Now I feel there is so much out there that it is overwhelming. Every single one of us has a different situation as most new psychology teachers have to teach other subjects and are often the only psychology teacher at the school. It is a good thing to look to see what others are doing but be careful of making social comparison to other teachers.
Be an advocate for our subject! Psychology should not take a “back seat” to other subjects. I hear too many stories of this from teachers I have met over the years. Also do your best to try to network with the newer teachers in the area. I also somewhat jokingly tell psychology teachers to not let out the secret that we have the best teaching job on campus.
Seeing the names of past recipients is so humbling. One of the nice things about teaching psychology is that the community is strong. I am so grateful to have been able to meet and learn from so many of the prior winners of this award.
