Almost everyone can name a teacher who inspired them, or a class that opened up a new horizon. But how do you become that teacher? More to the point, how do you continue to be that teacher semester after semester after semester?
Maintaining your enthusiasm the 14th time you explain Piaget’s stages of development to a room full of sleepy Psychology 101 students can be a challenge. And it’s not always easy to keep up your energy in the classroom when a pile of administrative tasks is sitting on your office desk.
But veteran educators say it is possible to remain vital as a teacher for years or decades. The key is to never let yourself fall into a rut, says Richard Miller, PhD, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M University–Kingsville and the current president of APA’s Div. 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology). “Teaching the same material over and over may be the biggest hurdle to get around,” Miller says.
Fortunately, there are many ways to keep teaching fresh, both for yourself and for your students. The Monitor picked the brains of psychology educators who live and breathe teaching for tips, inspiration and resources. Here’s what they had to say.
1. Keep changing
Prepping for a course is a lot of work, and it can be tempting to reuse a syllabus semester after semester. Don’t. Teaching the same material in the same way is one of the biggest barriers to staying engaged, says Miller. “Faculty often look at developing a new course as something that is a lot of work and not a lot of reward. But the reward is intrinsic,” he says. “If you’re teaching the same class every semester, that’s tougher.”
Even when you’re teaching the same course again, switching up the material can be energizing, says Jane Halonen, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida. These changes can range from an intensive overhaul (she recommends changing to a new textbook every three years or so) to a brief rejiggering of material (changing up slides, thinking up new assignments). Dana S. Dunn, PhD, a professor of psychology at Moravian College, teaches from the same textbook in different semesters, but he swaps out two or three chapters for every new course.
Refreshing the course material needn’t take a lot of time, says Mary Kite, PhD, a professor of social psychology at Ball State University. “For example, in the Monitor there are a lot of little study descriptions” in the “In Brief” research section of each issue, Kite says. “Just going through those and seeing something relevant to your course and bringing that one piece of information in can help you feel more current.”
2. Give active assignments
Grading can be a slog, so keep up your enthusiasm by creating assignments that will be as interesting to grade as they are to complete. “I try to avoid giving students assignments I think would bore me,” says Bernard Beins, PhD, a professor of psychology at Ithaca College in New York. “If it would bore me, it will probably bore them, and grading papers by students who are not interested in the topic can be very painful.”
Successful assignments tend to allow students to bring in their own opinions, creativity and experiences. In his research methods courses, Beins assigns “reaction papers” to students that ask them to respond to and critique specific research studies. Miller asks students to choose topics that interest them and then turns those topics into researchable questions, which both keeps the students interested and challenges him with novel material. “It’s always new,” he says. “You never know in a semester what you’re going to be doing.”
Service learning can also provide opportunities for intriguing out-of-class work. Community organizations have different needs in different years, Miller says, and working in the community can be very rewarding for students and instructors alike. Students in a developmental psychology class might volunteer with children or older adults, then use information from that experience to write a research paper on some facet of life span development. A research methods course might provide an opportunity for the class to set up a survey or evaluate an intervention for a community organization.
3. Do dull tasks first
All the nonteaching duties of teaching can be exhausting and drain your enthusiasm if you’re not careful. When the realities of the modern-day university bring you time-consuming administrative tasks, tackle them right away, Halonen says. “When those things come across my desk, I confess, I swear at them, and then I do them,” she says.
The faster you get the administrative work done, the less stressful it is, Miller agrees. It’s also helpful to delegate where you can, he says.
4. Forge connections with students
The longer you teach, the further removed you become from the student experience, Halonen says. It’s important to make the student-teacher relationship a give-and-take one—and to realize when your pop culture references aren’t resonating. “I put up a slide that had Monty Python on it, and none of my students knew who Monty Python was,” she says. “That isn’t part of students’ popular culture.”
Learning about student culture can be its own reward, Halonen says. Her students introduced her to the singer Lizzo, and the music is “fabulous,” she says. “It’s about being able to stay open to what students can teach you.”
Getting to know students in contexts outside the classroom can also be rewarding. Miller recommends that if faculty have the opportunity to lead a study abroad trip, they should take it. Traveling with students can help forge connections that would otherwise be difficult to create, he says.
5. Make lessons accessible
When students are enthusiastic and engaged, it’s easier to be enthusiastic and engaged as an instructor. Making sure methods and class content are resonating can be energizing. “When I finish a course, I look over my syllabus and notes I make to myself about what went well and what didn’t,” says Dunn. Assigning shorter bursts of reading and writing tends to engage students who have been raised on social media, he says. APA has developed a digital textbook alternative called PsycLearn that facilitates web-based learning activities as a potential complement to readings, papers and lectures. Information is available at PsycLearnopens in new window.
Reducing the use of PowerPoint, or at least excising text-heavy slides, can also keep students more engaged during lectures, says Kite. There are many free graphics and short videos or podcasts illustrating psychological concepts available online. “You can just feel the energy in the room go up when you put up something that’s not text,” she says.
6. Bring in real-world issues
Another way to simultaneously pique student interest and keep course material current is to bring real-world issues into class discussions. “If you look at how the science we are producing makes a difference in the real world, that’s interesting to students, and interesting to you,” Miller says. Many big-picture news stories have a psychology angle, from the emotional impact of climate change, to the morals and values in a political election, to the evidence behind an educational initiative or a substance use policy.
“I try to bring research into the context of students’ lives,” Beins says. “That makes them happier and more willing to participate in class.”
7. Stay current on new strategies
Doing your own homework is another way to keep your teaching energized and alive. Dunn recommends subscribing to a teaching journal, such as Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology or Teaching of Psychology, the Div. 2 journal. Kite recommends The Oxford Handbook of Undergraduate Psychology Education, published by Oxford University Press in 2015 and edited by Dunn. For example, Kite says, an essay in that book got her thinking more deeply about the ethical issues that occasionally arise in teaching, such as fairness and confidentiality.
“There are a lot of things in that volume or related teaching sources, just two or three changes that can really perk up a course,” Kite says. “You don’t have to start from scratch.”
8. Network and collaborate
Another source of teaching inspiration can be found in peers and colleagues. Teaching conferences are particularly energizing, says Halonen: “It’s really hard to go to a teaching conference and not come out of it feeling like you’ve got new ideas you can implement right away.”
If a teaching conference is out of reach, there are other ways to make connections. Psi Chi’s Network for International Collaborative Exchange can facilitate collaborations between classes at different universities on undergraduate research projects. Sitting in on a different instructor’s class in your own department is another way to get new ideas, says Kite.
Social media provides another easy way to connect with fellow educators, says Sue Frantz, MA, who teaches psychology at Highline College. Div. 2 has an active Facebook group that shares ideas, and psychology educators also talk shop on Twitter, Frantz says.
9. Teach what matters most
As of 2016–17, psychology was the fourth most-popular undergraduate major in the United States, according to National Center for Education Statistics data. Many of those undergraduate psychology majors will go on to careers not directly in the psychology field. To keep students—and themselves—engaged, educators need to consider what they really want to impart about psychology, Frantz says. In her Psychology 101 classes, she has now dropped much of the material on the history of psychology and focuses instead on impactful research on topics like stress, coping and happiness.
“I’m representing the field to hundreds of people who are going to go out and live in the world, so what is it that I can tell them about this field that I love that is going to have an impact on them?” Frantz says. “For me as an instructor, what that means is there is great importance to what I am doing.”
10. Know your strengths
Pedagogical methods come and go, and so do new technologies that might affect the way you teach. To weather the changes, know thyself, says Dunn. “I never have a problem trying out some new writing exercise,” he says, “but when it comes to technology, I’m always leery” because of the chance that technical difficulties might waste valuable class time. Other instructors take to tech easily. Similarly, personality differences may dictate whether a teacher will shine as a lecturer, a discussion leader or by assigning active learning projects, Frantz says.
“Don’t let anybody tell you that you have to teach a particular way,” Frantz says. “You don’t. Your enthusiasm for the topic is going to come through, and if you play to your strengths, the students are going to be right there with you.”
