A respected colleague1 asked a group of psych teachers: “What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about the art of teaching in your career, and on a second note, what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about teaching PSYCHOLOGY in your career.”
My response was:
Teaching psychology well is really doing three separate things well. First, we need to care about and for each of our students. Second, there is a body of knowledge supported by on-going research on how people learn and what instructional strategies have the best results for the most students. Third, psychology is a constantly evolving science (Arbesman 2012 estimates the half-life of facts in our field to be seven years) and so we need to keep up in advances in the field.
I gave that reply this morning and have been thinking about it since. And I stand by it.
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An interesting side-note is that I don’t think we’ve ever actually met in person. ↩︎