Previously, we explored ways in which you might use the three wikis provided by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP; APA Div. 2) to enhance your classes. Today, let’s look at how our free e-books can help you both in the classroom and with your professional development. STP publishes e-books on a wide range of teaching and career issues, such as evaluation, student engagement, classroom practices and student research, as well as more philosophical essays from exemplary psychology teachers. I’d like to highlight some of the books you might find most helpful.
- Introductory Psychology Teaching Primer (2nd Edition), edited by Sadie Leder-Elder, Jessica J. Good, Stephanie Afful, Jared Keeley, and Jennifer J. Stiegler-Balfour
This e-book is a chapter-by-chapter guide to teaching introductory psychology, designed to give you what you need to get started right away. Each chapter is matched to a particular chapter in the average introductory psychology textbook, and includes coverage suggestions, learning objectives, activities and techniques, possible assessments, relevant articles from the journal Teaching of Psychology, links to materials on the ToPIX wiki, chapter connections and the student learning outcomes put forth in the "APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major: Version 2.0 (PDF, 448KB)," with resources designed to help your students reach these objectives. - Integrating Writing into the Psychology Course, edited by Tara Kuther
This e-book is designed to help you begin to incorporate writing into your course, and if you’re already using writing as a tool for your class, to inspire you with new opportunities to integrate writing. APA recommends that we help our students develop competence in scientific writing and the ability to express ideas, arguments and information to multiple audiences; to explore the knowledge base of psychology; to practice and develop skills in scientific inquiry and critical thinking; and to wrestle with ethical questions and apply standards and values to build diverse and respectful relationships. This e-book will give you workable strategies for integrating writing and promoting student skills. It also includes short writing assignments in several subfields, and semester-long scaffolded assignments that can be adapted to any course. - Promoting Psychological Science: A Compendium of Laboratory Exercises for Teachers of High School Psychology, edited by Richard L. Miller
A dedicated group of high school and college teachers has filled this e-book with lab exercises for most of the topics taught in a high school psychology course. Each one gives your students the opportunity to plan and carry out investigations using laboratory procedures, highlighting the fact that psychology is just as much a science as biology, chemistry or physics. You’ll also find specific suggestions for data analysis and the preparation of lab reports. - Teaching Introductory Psychology: Tips from ToP, edited by Richard A. Griggs and Sherri L. Jackson
A collection of articles from STP’s journal Teaching of Psychology, this book covers many different approaches and techniques to teaching introductory psychology. It begins with such topics as research participation for introductory students, active learning, issues with exams and exam design, study guides and textbooks. The e-book also deals with the uses of technology and classroom demonstrations, and provides activities for each unit in the introductory course. - The Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning, edited by Richard J. Harnish, K. Robert Bridges, David N. Sattler, Margaret L. Signorella and Michael Munson
Technology has long been a part of teaching. From the days of chalkboards and slide rules to our current time of social media and smartphones, teachers have both used and contended with technologies. Each advance in information technology can affect how students learn and how we teach. Indeed, recent research suggests that information technologies may be both beneficial and harmful to how students learn. This e-book will help you to determine which technology to employ to facilitate your students’ learning. - Telling Stories: The Art and Science of Storytelling as an Instructional Strategy, edited by Karen Brakke and Jeremy Ashton Houska
Explore the many uses of Story in psychology instruction with this e-book. It’s filled with teaching tips, examples, resources, and outcome data, and is organized into sections focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of Story, the autobiographical use of Story, application of Story in different course contexts and interdisciplinary perspectives on the pedagogical use of Story. - A Guide for Beginning Teachers of Psychology, by James H. Korn and Jason Sikorski
If you’re just starting out in the field, you may find this a really helpful resource. The authors have provided chapters about developing your philosophy of teaching, planning your course, presenting material to your class, managing class discussions, using writing as a tool, grading, evaluating teaching, ethics and developing your teaching portfolio. - Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching. This series has been edited by several people, from 2000 to the present.
Since the spring of 2000, the essay series E-xcellence in Teaching has been a feature of STP’s PsychTeacher listserv. We invited the authors of these essays to contribute their work on various aspects of teaching psychology. They cover a wide range of topics, from classroom demonstrations to essays about pedagogy and the philosophy of teaching. Many of these essays provide specific teaching tools and techniques that you can adapt for your own class.
You can find these and many other e-books on our website.
STP 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 teachers, 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. 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 essay series, 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.