The Society for the Teaching of Psychology (Div. 2 of the American Psychological Association) is a group that promotes excellence in the teaching and learning of psychology. We provide information, materials and most importantly, a community of teachers who want to help each other achieve greatness in our classrooms. So in short, we’re here to help you.
That sounds very nice, but let’s talk some specifics here. You’re teaching psychology, and you want to know exactly what we can do for you. Fair enough. STP has lots of ways to make your job easier and help you be a better teacher. First, let’s look at STP’s wikis.
One of our most popular teaching resources is the wiki ToPIX, the Teaching of Psychology Idea Exchange. It contains a plethora of materials — seriously, insert your favorite cliché here, a cornucopia, a gold mine, a wellspring — of teaching aides including large collections of activities, handouts and classroom demonstrations’ video and audio files that you can use directly in class, organized by topic; lists of books and films for each topic; and news stories you can use in class to illustrate particular concepts. In addition, you’ll find materials to help your students learn about critical thinking and information literacy, study strategies and ways to be more effective writers.
You may also find the collection of pedagogical materials helpful. For instance, there are pages devoted to creating effective grading rubrics to help reduce the amount of time you have to spend on grading papers and other assignments, helpful guides to using different technologies in your classroom, and tips on dealing with particular classroom problems and generating good class discussions.
ToPIX also provides links to many other resources that our members have gathered from all over the Internet, to help you be a more effective and happier instructor: teaching podcasts and blogs, listservs that send great teaching ideas straight to your email, other teaching wikis and sites with good classroom activities, other organizations and teaching resources from other divisions of the APA.
I encourage you to spend some time exploring ToPIX, and even better, to become a STP member and share some of your materials and ideas with our community of psychology teachers.
Another interesting resource that you and your students may enjoy exploring is the Today in the History of Psychology wiki. It’s a constantly growing online compilation of key events and people in psychology, with over 3000 entries. Today in the History of Psychology is organized in a cross-referenced calendar format and has links to other online content. You can use it to find information for your class, or as an excellent tool for projects and assignments. For example, you might assign students to look for and discuss (or write about) the important psychological events and birthdays that happened on their own birthdays (my birthday includes the founding of what became Great Britain’s Royal Society in 1660).
Finally, one of our most interesting efforts is the Psychology in Communities Wiki. We designed it around the idea that those of us who teach psychology are experts in our fields. Every year we share our knowledge of psychological science with students, helping them challenge their beliefs about behavior and perhaps improve their daily lives. Why stop there? We can share psychology with our wider communities, enriching the lives and improving the interactions of our friends, neighbors and communities in general. We created this wiki to share the information we all need to help us teach the general public.
Here, you’ll find ways to work with your local media, strategies for becoming a popular speaker for local groups, and even scripts and PowerPoint presentations that you can use for particular talks. There’s a link to STP’s media training website, to help you figure out your preferred way to work with the media (for example, becoming a trusted source, or getting your own column or time on the air), and to give you the step-by-step directions for achieving your goal. Some instructors have also used the information in this wiki to create assignments for their students. For instance, you might ask them to write letters to the editor or short columns for their local newspapers, or engage in a class project that culminates in a presentation for local officials or members of the media on a topic of interest.
These are only a few of the valuable teaching resources you’ll find on the STP website. We’ll explore some specific teaching resources in a future Psychology Teacher Network issue.
The Society for the Teaching of Psychology provides all of these resources, and many others, free of charge on our website. Membership in STP includes the journal, Teaching of Psychology, access to our Professional Development Mentoring Service, online access to the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly (thanks to a reciprocal agreement with the Society for the Psychology of Women, APA Div. 35), access to our searchable membership directory, special publications for members only, and a host of other benefits. The cost of membership is just $25 per year for faculty, and only $15 for students, and you don’t need to be a member of APA to join us. Learn more about joining STP on our website.
About the author
William S. Altman, PhD, is a professor in the psychology and human services department at SUNY Broome Community College. He earned PhD and MS degrees in educational psychology and measurement, and an MPS in communication arts from Cornell University, as well as a BA in history from the University of Pennsylvania, and he studies effective teaching and learning strategies. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology honored him with the Wayne Weiten Teaching Excellence Award in 2018.
Altman currently serves as STP’s vice president for resources. He’s been a consulting editor and reviewer for Teaching of Psychology, coordinator of STP Programming for the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, co-editor for E-xcellence in Teaching, a contributor to the Teaching of Psychology Idea Exchange, and has written and edited a number of academic and nonscholarly publications. He also spent over a decade on local radio, was a professional photographer, and performed in theater and as a standup comic (ostensibly to work on classroom presentation skills, but mostly because it's fun). He’s driven by a wide and unpredictable curiosity, an almost pathological and sometimes annoying need to solve problems of nearly any sort, and a sense that it all ought to be fun.