The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography: Perspectives from Exemplary Psychology Teachers Edited by Trisha A. Benson, Caroline Burke, Ana Amstadter, Ryan Sidey, Vincent Hevern, Barney Beins, & Bill Buskist.
33 A Life of Learning and Teaching Wilbert J. (Bill) McKeachie University of Michigan pp. 228-232

I am Professor emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, where I have taught for the past 58 years. My primary activities have been teaching, research on learning and teaching, and training college teachers. I have been President of the American Psychological Association; the American Association of Higher Education; the Division of Educational, Instructional, and School Psychology of the International Association of Applied Psychology; and the Center for Social Gerontology; and Past Chair of the Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication of the American Association of University Professors. I have also been a member of the Council of the National Institute of Mental Health, the Special Medical Advisory Group of the Veteran's Administration and various other governmental advisory committees. I have published a number of articles and books, the best known of which is Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers. 12th ed (2005), published by Houghton-Mifflin. Among other honors I have received 8 honorary degrees and the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.

My Early Development as a Teacher

My training for teaching started before I began graduate school. I graduated from Michigan State Normal College in 1942, prepared to teach high school mathematics, history, and English. My career as a high school teacher lasted only two months. World War II had started and I spent most of the next 3 years as a radar and combat information officer on a destroyer in the Pacific. My only teaching was training a young Naval Academy graduate in ship handling. During combat my job was to plot the position, course, and speed of potential attackers to guide the officer of the deck and gunnery officer in keeping us alive and carrying out our missions.

I had been one of the first officers trained for destroyer radar/combat information duty. By the end of the war I was probably the most combat-experienced destroyer radar officer in the Navy because my classmates had either been reassigned or killed. The order of discharge after the war was determined by length of service and amount of combat; so I was released in time to enroll in the 1945 fall term at the University of Michigan. A year or two previously I had written to my wife that if I survived, I wanted to do graduate work in psychology. The next year I was one of eight graduate student Teaching Fellows teaching three discussion sections meeting 2 hrs a week in connection with the 500-student lecture in Introductory Psychology.

Our Department Chair had asked Harold Guetzkow, an assistant professor, to meet with the Teaching Fellows weekly to talk about teaching, discuss problems we encountered, and debate the virtues of different ways of approaching teaching. Such training in teaching was rare. Graduate departments trained students to do research; teaching was simply something you did with the knowledge you had gained.

Harold was an ideal mentor. He developed the sort of accepting, supportive situation that enabled us to discuss problems arising in our classes without our feeling embarrassed or defensive. Too often novice teachers are afraid that admitting problems will damage chances for promotion. Several years ago one of our PhDs who had not had our teacher-training program made frequent long distance phone calls from UCLA to me at Michigan to ask for advice about his teaching because he did not dare reveal problems to his colleagues at UCLA.

Deciding to Become a College Teacher

I do not think I ever made a conscious decision to become a college teacher; I just drifted into it. When I had collected the data for my dissertation, I went to Don Marquis, our Department Chair, and said, "I guess I should start looking for a job."

He said, "Pick any university you'd like, and I'll get you a job there." (Quite a different situation from today's job market.) I said, "I'd like to go someplace interested in teaching like Bennington or Sarah Lawrence.'' A couple of weeks later he called me in and said, "How would you like to stay here for a few years to manage the introductory psychology course and train the teaching fellows?" Having been away from home for 3 years while I was in the Pacific, that sounded good to me--and I've been teaching at Michigan ever since.

Working at Defining Myself as a Teacher

I enjoyed teaching. One of my GI Bill World War II veteran students in 1946 wrote on his rating form, "I didn't come to Michigan to be taught by a rosy-cheeked boy." (I doubt that he had had as much combat experience as I did) In any case, most of my students accepted my rosy cheeks and my teaching.

My biggest problem in teaching now is that I do not know the students' culture. In order to teach effectively we have to build bridges between what is in our heads and what is in the students' heads. Because I seldom watch TV, go to movies, or participate in other aspects of the popular culture, I have trouble coming up with useful metaphors or analogies that will help students understand difficult concepts. I try to overcome this problem by using a lot of student interaction, buzz groups, asking the students to come up with examples, etc.

The Zero-Sum Game-Teaching vs. Research.

Often one hears faculty complain that teaching has prevented them from getting their research done. Because my research is on teaching, I probably experience less conflict between teaching and research than faculty members in other areas of research; however, even for those whose research is in other fields, the classic research by Pelz and Andrews (1966) showed that full-time researchers are no more productive that those who teach at least a quarter-time. Teaching not only provides a change of activities, which helps reduce boredom, but it may also help us clarify thinking that was fuzzy before we tried to explain our research to novices.

The Examined Life of a Teacher: My Philosophy (If You Can Call It That)

I often cite John Dewey's maxim--teaching is like selling. You have not sold something unless someone has bought it; you have not taught unless someone has learned.

Another important principle guiding my teaching is that each human being is a natural learner. Our task is to stimulate their natural curiosity, to provide challenges that they can enjoy surmounting. If the teacher is enthusiastic about the subject, students are likely to believe that it is something that might be valuable and interesting.

Students differ in prior knowledge and motivation. Thus, to teach effectively we need to have a repertoire of teaching strategies that continues to develop as new classes pose new challenges.

We need to develop our theories of learning and motivation continuously in order to adapt effectively to new situations. Each class is different from others, and each class changes over the course of the term so that those strategies most effective for teaching during the first weeks of class are likely to be different from those needed later.

Changes Over My Career

When I began teaching, most Introductory Psychology classes were taught by lecture. Nevertheless, even in my 500-student lecture sections I often broke the class into 6-person groups to discuss particular problems. After the advent of cognitive psychology, I realized that it was much more valuable for students to talk to one another than to listen to me; so I used more small-group activities, minute papers, pair discussions, etc.

Satisfactions

Probably the most rewarding thing for me is to see students get excited about psychology and want to learn more. However, it is also very satisfying to see evidence of understanding when I manage to develop an example or demonstration that clarifies a difficult concept, and when in the midst of a class discussion I gain a new insight, I almost jump with joy.

Assessment

When I began teaching, we used multiple-choice tests and thought of them as assessment of the students' achievement rather than of the effectiveness of our teaching. Now I use more papers, research projects, essay questions and measures of conceptual structure, all of which I review with my teaching assistants as assessment of how well we have taught as well as of how well the students have learned.

Improving My Teaching

I still get good ideas to try out from Teaching of Psychology, from the American Psychological Association, Midwestern Psychological Association and American Psychological Society conventions, and from faculty members at other colleges where I speak or give a workshop.

Advice

• Get to know your students. I have one of my former students take a picture of each student. Then I meet with each student and make notes on the back of the picture that will help me know what experiences they have had that might be helpful in class discussion.
  
• Do not grade on a curve. Avoid creating a sense of competition. Competition increases anxiety, may discourage cooperative learning, is detrimental to intrinsic motivation, and results in less deep learning (Covington, 1998).
  
• Reduce time pressure on tests. Give students the time necessary to complete tests. I plan my tests so that the fastest students are through in about half of the allotted time, and I announce at the beginning of the test that students can take as long as they need to complete the test. If another class is coming into the classroom, I take any of my students who aren't finished back to my office or to the seminar room next to my office.
  
• Practice applications. Give students opportunities to put psychological concepts into practice through such activities as service learning, research projects, and exercises in observing and describing behavior on campus or at home.
  
• Work to improve your teaching. Every teacher can improve.
  
• Talk about your teaching. Faculty development centers can be very helpful. So is talking about teaching with colleagues.

Final Thoughts

I find it hard to believe that any other career can be as fascinating and satisfying as that of teaching psychology. We are lucky to have a subject matter that is intrinsically interesting and that is continuing to develop. Who can help being intrigued by gaining understanding of why others act as they do, as well as of one's own human nature?

Boredom is rare because each class poses new challenges, and within each class the individual differences among the students continually stimulate one to devise new strategies for helping the students become better learners-learners not only in this course but learners in years to come. As a Baptist humanist, I believe that one's eternal life is in the impact one has on other human beings and the impact that they in turn have on others. At age 83, I feel fortunate to have had the opportunities and good luck I have had.

References

Covington, M. V. (1998). The will to learn: A guide for motivating young people. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McKeachie, W. J. (2005). Teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (12th ed.). Boston: Houghton-Mifflin

Pelz, D. C., & Andrews, F. M. (1966). Scientists in organizations: Productive climates for research and development. New York: Wiley.

This page was first posted online on November 10, 2005 and was last updated on November 10, 2005

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