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.
43 My Career in Teaching: A Series of Unexpected Events Randolph A. Smith Kennesaw State University pp. 295-301

I have been Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Kennesaw State University (Kennesaw, GA) since July, 2003. Prior to that time, I taught at Ouachita Baptist University (Arkadelphia, AR) for 26 years, advancing to the rank of Professor and serving as chair of that department for almost 20 years. I received a BS in Psychology from University of Houston in 1973; I earned my PhD from Texas Tech University in Experimental Psychology (specialty in human learning and memory) in 1978. I have been active in Southwestern Psychological Association, serving as its President in 1990-91. I have also been highly active in the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP), serving as Membership Chair and Fellows Chair; I have served as Editor of STP's journal (Teaching of Psychology) since 1997.

I have been elected as a Fellow of Divisions 1 (General) and 2 (Teaching) of the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2002, I was honored to give the teaching-oriented Harry Kirke Wolfe address at APA. While at Ouachita, I won a Sears-Roebuck Foundation Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award. I am the author of a critical thinking book (Challenging Your Preconceptions) and co-author of two research texts (The Psychologist as Detective: An Introduction to Conducting Research in Psychology and Introduction to Statistics and Research Methods: Becoming a Psychological Detective). In addition, I have edited the instructor's resource package for Wayne Weiten's introductory psychology text throughout its six editions.

My Early Development as a Teacher

Unlike many teachers, I had not really thought of a career in teaching until graduate school. As an undergraduate, I had planned on obtaining a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling until a faculty member at University of Houston asked me about my GRE scores and then recommended that I pursue a PhD. So, on fairly short notice, I revised my plans and applied to experimental psychology programs around Texas. I was accepted into the social psychology program at Texas Tech; I shifted to learning and memory because my graduate school mentor, Phil Marshall, offered me a research assistantship when I arrived at Tech. After some time in the program, it dawned on me that teaching was the most likely way to make a living with an experimental PhD. During my last 2 years at Tech, I held a teaching assistantship, which required taking the department's teaching course. Interestingly, the course was taught in PSI format; there was little, if any, practical, hands-on experience in the class-I do not remember even having to give a lecture. All I truly remember from the course is that it introduced me to Bill McKeachie's Teaching Tips (1969). Further, my assistantship entailed serving as a lab assistant for a research course. There was no classroom teaching involved-just serving as a resource and tutor for students who had questions or who were having trouble with the course. During my last semester at Tech, I actually taught my first course. I drove to a small college 40 miles to the north 2 days a week and taught Experimental Psychology. I had no supervision or oversight in that experience, so I basically taught myself to teach as I went along.

Although I had plenty of role models for teaching and people who served as mentors for my research experience and professional development, I never really had a teaching mentor. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least in my experience, people did not spend much time talking about teaching. My teaching life took a giant turn, however, one day in 1984 when I picked up my mail. I found a brochure advertising the Mid-America Conference for Teachers of Psychology (MACTOP) in Evansville, Indiana. The program looked interesting, so I decided to attend. Twenty-plus years and countless (almost) teaching conferences later, I credit the vast majority of my development as a teacher to people I met and observed at these conferences. Two things stick in my mind from that first teaching conference in Evansville. First, I learned that Teaching of Psychology (ToP) existed. I started subscribing by joining Division Two and have benefited immeasurably by gleaning many ideas from the pages of the journal. Oddly enough, I now find myself editing that journal. (This transition reminds me somewhat of the old joke: "A few years ago I couldn't even spell psychologist, and now I are one.")

The second thing that sticks in my mind from the first MACTOP is a story that Arno Wittig (Ball State) told during his presentation. He talked about a time that he was teaching in General Psychology about disorders. He was talking about mania, and the students seemed uninterested. In desperation, he jumped up on the long tables in class and ran back and forth to simulate mania, knocking students' notebooks and books off the table in the process. He certainly got the students' attention. However, the point of his MACTOP story became clear when he said that, a few years later, a student stopped him on campus-the student said that he had been in that class and still remembered Arno running around like a madman. Arno was pleased, but proceeded to ask the critical question: "Do you remember what I was talking about?" The student said "No, but I remember you running around like crazy!"

Arno's story registered with me on multiple levels. It made me think, for the first time, about a deeper level of assessment in the classroom. How do we, as teachers, know that what we do actually accomplishes what we want it to do? This thought led me to think about the possibility of not only finding the answer to that question but also to the notion that asking and answering such questions was research worthy of being labeled scholarship. All scholarship did not have to consist of asking minute questions in the lab as I learned to do in graduate school. Even today, Arno's presentation continues to affect me. As Editor of ToP, I have increasingly asked authors to go beyond simple student affective responses to provide evidence that their teaching ideas actually work. In summary, attending the first MACTOP started me down the road toward the scholarship of teaching.

Working at Defining Myself as a Teacher

I believe that I have faced a couple of major obstacles in my development as a teacher: isolation and lack of a mentor. The isolation I experienced came as a result of my first job at Ouachita-the Psychology Department consisted of only three faculty members (counting me). The other two faculty teaching psychology actually had seminary degrees, so I was the only PhD-level psychologist on the faculty. Thus, I had no one with whom to discuss psychology-related topics. Although Ouachita was a teaching institution with a heavy teaching load (I began my career with a 5/4 teaching load), there was no forum or other formal institution devoted to dealing with teaching. One of the benefits of the isolation was that I developed friendships and interests across disciplinary boundaries. Still, we did not talk much about teaching.

I previously mentioned the lack of a teaching mentor throughout graduate school. The isolation at Ouachita and lack of formal attention to teaching prolonged this feeling of not having a mentor. At the same time, I was feeling less and less like the type of psychologist I had trained to be in graduate school. Teaching nine courses a year (typically without any repeats) and working closely with students in supervising their research left no time to develop the in-depth programmatic research that I learned about and read during graduate school.

Again, it was the advent of teaching conferences that helped me to define myself both as a teacher and as a psychologist. Teaching conferences helped alleviate the isolation I felt at Ouachita. Over the years, I have attended teaching conferences in Indiana (MACTOP), Illinois and Florida (National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology), Georgia (Southeastern Conference on the Teaching of Psychology), and New York (Northeastern Conference on the Teaching of Psychology). In the early 1990s, I even co-founded (with Steve Davis of Emporia State University and John Hall of Texas Wesleyan University) a teaching conference in Fort Worth, Texas (Southwest Conference for Teachers of Psychology). I made numerous contacts with like-minded individuals at these conferences over the years. Not only did these contacts help reduce my isolation, they also served as mentors, role models, and colleagues for teaching. The advantage of knowing many people devoted to teaching is that I can access information from experts on virtually any topic regarding teaching. Importantly, the conferences allowed me to once again feel good about myself as a psychologist-I could now work on scholarly projects that were directly related to my demanding job of teaching.

The Examined Life of a Teacher

During my career, I have mostly taught research-oriented courses. At Ouachita, I taught the entire research sequence: Statistics, Experimental Psychology, and Research Methods. Thus, I am most experienced teaching the courses that psychology majors least want to take, and as a result, one of my core goals of teaching is having students develop an appreciation for and interest in research in the discipline. Given that most psychology students want to "work with people" in some way, research is usually low on their interest list. I try to have them see that "working with people" has to be based on research-without research evidence to back a therapeutic approach, people may use approaches such as rebirthing therapy, which led to deaths in Colorado and North Carolina. In addition, it is my belief that learning about and appreciating research increases students' critical thinking skills.

Another core goal of my teaching is having students learn to apply the principles that they learn in class to the everyday world. If students only memorize definitions and principles but cannot apply them to the real world, then I feel that I have failed them. For example, when I teach Social Psychology, I spend a good deal of time covering cognitive errors. If students can define and describe cognitive errors but can not recognize them in operation, then those students have not gotten anything out of my class that will help them in life. Coming to this goal has probably brought about the greatest change in my teaching over the years. For many years, I believed that my job was to teach students everything that was in the book, plus all the important information that was not in that particular book. I presented fact after fact in class, typically failing to get all the way through the text because there was simply too much to present (and for students to learn). Focusing more on application has forced me to teach less because, in addition to presenting information, I find that I have to help students learn to apply the information. Thus, I try to teach more by teaching less.

My rewards from teaching are based on my core goals. When I see students getting turned on to research, asking research-related questions, I feel that I have done my job and earned my pay for that day. When I talk to students who are considering research-related careers rather than "only" helping people, I feel that I have had some impact. One of the greatest rewards has come when students have come back to visit from their graduate programs and have talked about how well prepared they were for statistics or research classes compared to their classmates. As far as my application goal is concerned, I feel rewarded when a student asks a good application-type question in class or writes an essay on a test using a principle or a concept in a way that I had not considered previously. In my Social Psychology class, students complete a project in which they apply 12 principles from the class to the real world. As I read their different entries, I invariably come up with some good examples to use the next time I teach the class. Of course, my frustrations are also linked to my core goals. Students who compartmentalize the department's research courses from their "fun" or "interesting" classes are quite frustrating. At Kennesaw, we are working on a departmental mission to teach scientific psychology across the curriculum. We hope to disabuse students of the notion that research and applied psychology are somehow different and are not related.

Another major change in my teaching over time is my intentionality. Based on reading about and working with assessment, I think much more about what I want to accomplish in courses and even in individual class meetings. In the old days, I simply went to class to teach some material. Now, I am much more likely to develop specific goals as I think about teaching the material. To paraphrase Charles Brewer, I find that I am much more likely to get where I want to be if I know first where I am going. If teachers do not think about their goals, they are unlikely to attain them. Thus, I find myself being much more intentional with my classes than I used to be. I have found that many of my assignments have changed over time because of teaching with more intentionality. Even though I have long wanted students to apply material that they learned in my classes, I formerly just assumed that it was happening. However, as I became more intentional, I decided that I needed to determine whether students were actually learning to apply the material. Therefore, I developed assignments that more directly measured whether students could apply the material from class. I am much less likely to have students write a simple term paper. Instead, if I give a term paper assignment, the last third of the paper is an application section in which they write about how the topic and the related information apply to the real world.

In most courses, I make assignments other than term papers. As I mentioned previously, social psychology students compose a journal of 12 applications of social psychology phenomena to the real world. Students in my Learning class completed a behavior modification program, using themselves, friends, or pets as the targets of the project. Not only do these types of projects flow from my intentionality about my course goals, they also mesh well with the current emphasis in assessment. In my opinion, the best assessment today focuses not on what we do as teachers, but instead on what students learn. All the best teaching techniques, activities, and assignments are useless if students do not learn from them. In fact, at Kennesaw, we have shifted from talking about assessment and instead focus on assurance of learning. This shift in assessment has the potential to transform much of what we do in higher education. The future is exciting, thanks in part to changes in assessment practices.

An important lesson I have learned about teaching is that, to be done well, it requires continuous monitoring and improvement. I pay attention to my student evaluations-students are the most knowledgeable people about what we are doing. I would never recommend that faculty members do everything that students suggest on their evaluations, but I do recommend that they pay attention to the suggestions. When I read the same comment from multiple students, I figure that they may be giving me valuable information. Another important activity for teaching improvement is exposing myself to new ideas. The primary ways I seek out new ideas are by attending teaching conferences and presentations and by reading. I have already addressed the advantages of teaching conferences, so I will not belabor that point further. Kennesaw is fortunate to have a strong teaching focus, so teaching merits a good deal of attention here. The university supports a Center on Excellence in Teaching and Learning, so I have the chance to attend teaching-related workshops on my own campus. As far as reading is concerned, I read hundreds of ToP manuscripts every year-all have the potential to affect my teaching in some way. There are also many excellent books available on teaching-related topics; I avail myself of those resources when I can find the time.

Advice for New Teachers

I hope you find something of value in my advice for new teachers. At the same time, please pay close attention to my first piece of advice-you must find what works for you.

1. Develop your own style. Trying to copy someone you respect may lead you to be a poor copy of a good teacher. All styles do not fit all people.
2. Get as much experience as you can. As with many tasks, one of the most important factors is practice. You should get better with experience.
3. Do not fear failure (at the same time, do not embrace failure). If you fear failure, you probably will not try new things in your teaching. Experimentation sometimes allows you to find approaches or techniques that you will incorporate in your repertoire. By the same token, experimentation allows you to discover what does not work for you.
4. Be intentional. Think about what you want to accomplish and develop a plan to accomplish it. Students may not develop in ways that you want if you hope they "pick it up" incidentally.
5. Develop a teaching support group. Talking with other faculty about teaching can invigorate your teaching, give you new ideas to try, provide you with feedback about ideas you would like to try, as well as many other benefits. Depending on your situation, this group can be composed of other new teachers or seasoned veterans, colleagues from your department or other departments or even other campuses, and so on. The important element is not the composition of the group but the willingness of the group to celebrate teaching.
6. Enjoy yourself! You are fortunate to have a job that is challenging and rewarding as well as being just plain fun.

Final Thoughts

When I look back on my career, I am amazed at where I now find myself and at the opportunities I have had. In graduate school, I never would have predicted what has happened. Thus, my final piece of advice: Be open to new and varied opportunities-you never know where they will lead you.

References

Davis, S. F., & Smith, R. A. (2005). An introduction to statistics and research methods: Becoming a psychological detective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

McKeachie, W. J. (1969). Teaching tips: A guidebook for the beginning college teacher (6th ed.). Lexington, MA: Heath.

Smith, R. A. (2002). Challenging your preconceptions: Thinking critically about psychology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Smith, R. A. (2005). Instructor's resource manual for Weiten's Psychology: Themes and variations (6th ed., Briefer version). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Smith, R. A., & Davis, S. F. (2004). The psychologist as detective: An introduction to conducting research in psychology (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

This page was first posted online on November 12, 2005 and was last updated on November 12, 2005

Copyright 2005 APA Division 2, Society for the Teaching of Psychology. All rights reserved. Copyright Policy. Copyright in this web site is owned by APA Division 2, Society for the Teaching of Psychology. Copyright in individual articles and similar items are generally owned by the author(s), except as otherwise noted. You may review the materials in this site for information purposes and may download and print ONE copy of the materials for your own personal use, including use in your classes and/or sharing with indiviual colleagues. No other permission is granted to you to print, copy, reproduce, or distribute additional copies of these materials. Anyone who wishes to print, copy, reproduce or distribute additional copies must obtain the permission of the copyright owner.