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.
50 Teachers Teach and Students Learn: Right? Michael Wertheimer University of Colorado at Boulder pp. 341-347

My self-image, which is composed of happy grandfather, father, and husband, almost-octogenarian academic who has been lucky in love and health, and interested bystander in a confusing, often ugly, but fundamentally beautiful world, does not include being one of "psychology's best teachers." Nevertheless it is gratifying, if somewhat puzzling, to be so designated. The following is an attempt to respond to the questions and subtitles that the editors of this book have asked the people they happened to invite to participate in this project to address.

Currently professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), I received my BA degree with high honors in psychology (Swarthmore College, 1947), MA in psychology (The Johns Hopkins University, 1949), and PhD in experimental psychology (Harvard University, 1952). I was a U.S.P.H.S. clinical psychology intern at Worcester State Hospital (1951-1952). After teaching at Wesleyan University for three years (first as instructor, then assistant professor) I joined the psychology department at UCB in 1955 as assistant professor, became associate professor in 1957, full professor in 1961, and professor emeritus in 1993. At UCB, I directed the Psychology Department's honors program (1956-1993) and the doctoral programs in Experimental Psychology (1957-1960) and Sociocultural Psychology (1985-1990).

I have served on-and chaired-many boards and committees of the American Psychological Association (APA), and have been president of its Divisions 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology, 1965-1966), 1 (General Psychology, 1975-1976), 24 (Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 1976-1977 and 1984-1985) and 26 (History of Psychology, 1977-1978). I also was president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association (RMPA, 1981-1982) and national president of Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology (1990-1991).

Honors and awards include election to Phi Beta Kappa (1947), to Sigma Xi (1949), and as an honorary member to Golden Key (1986). I received a Distinguished Teaching in Psychology Award from the American Psychological Foundation (1983), a faculty advising award from the College of Arts and Sciences at UCB (1987), an award from the APA for Distinguished Career Contributions to Education and Training in Psychology (1990), a Gender-Neutral Language Award from the Campus Women's Organization of UCB (1990), and a "Lifetime Achievement Award for Sustained, Outstanding, and Unusual Scholarly Contributions to the History of Psychology" from Division 26 of the APA (2000). The RMPA named an annual pre-convention event, the "Lillian Portenier-Michael Wertheimer Conference on the Teaching of Psychology," after a late Wyoming colleague and myself.

Many of my publications concern the teaching of psychology, including numerous articles in periodicals and books intended to assist in teaching various courses: nine books on introductory psychology (between 1970 and 1979), 10 on history of psychology (between 1970 and 2005), one on perception (1958), and two on research methods (in 1962 and 1981)-as well as 10 entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias (between 1960 and 2002), four contributions to books on activities for the teaching of psychology (between 1981 and 1999), and eight descriptions of psychology in Peterson's Guides to Graduate Study (between 1985 and 1993).

My Early Development as a Teacher

Graduate training at Hopkins and Harvard was exclusively directed to research; I had no specific preparation for a teaching career. My first introduction to teaching psychology was as a 20-year-old teaching assistant for recitation sections of an introductory psychology course at Hopkins. I was terrified of the students, some of whom were older than me, and I had little supervision in that role. My experiences as a teaching assistant for E. G. Boring's courses on Introductory Psychology and the History of Psychology at Harvard were no better; again there was almost no supervision.

Informal introductions to teaching occurred during several summers as a counselor at a two-month-long camp for children in upstate New York when I was a teenager. There I taught swimming, sailing, canoeing, and tennis (even though I did not play tennis very well), and found that I enjoyed helping kids learn skills that they wanted to acquire but did not yet master. At the time I was unaware that I was teaching anything as such. What it felt like was sharing information on rewarding activities about which I knew a little with others who did not yet know quite as much as I did: It did not really seem like teaching, but rather sharing, a pleasant social activity.

I had no formal mentors in my teaching endeavors as far as I remember. However, I did have a number of excellent teachers during my own education, several of whom became admired models. Among them was a first-grade teacher in public elementary school, Miss Walker. She managed to turn a class of kids whose initial reaction to a fellow pupil who had just immigrated from Germany and who could not speak English from ridicule to helpful assistance with learning the complexities, subtleties, and slang of the American English of suburban New York in the early 1930s. Other inspiring models include Robbie MacLeod, in whose seminar at Swarthmore I learned what a powerful teaching technique it can be to apply gentle, but strong, encouragement in a quiet voice to good students to perform at their very best in any intellectual-indeed in any-endeavor; Hans Wallach, also at Swarthmore, who raised interesting questions to which he actually knew the answer, but about which he intentionally fumbled and bumbled in such a way that his students were highly motivated to find the answers themselves; and Karl Muenzinger at UCB, who started each lecture in his course on the history of psychology by trying to establish, like Johann Herbart, an appropriate "apperceptive mass" by reviewing the previous lecture's content. He asked questions such as "What is Weber's Law?" and then consulted his class list and pointed: "Mr. Viney?"-and if Mr. Viney did not respond soon enough, "Mr. Davis?" His procedure produced an alertness in all the students that I have never seen in anyone else's classroom. I should also mention Solomon Asch at Swarthmore, whose technique was almost the opposite of Muenzinger's. He managed to exude an intense, quiet fascination with the subject matter under discussion that was enormously infectious.

When I first had full responsibility for several undergraduate courses-Introductory Psychology, Perception, History of Psychology-at barely age 25, I was unprepared for the task. I made a mistake that I am sure is not unique to me-borrowing from my training in research and scientific writing, I sprinkled my lectures liberally with references to specific articles and their authors' names-perhaps at least one such reference every three or four sentences. My notes for each lecture were painstaking multiple pages with dozens of references, which typically took many hours of preparation for each hour of lecture. I must have been a resounding bore at that time. It only gradually dawned on me that this approach is not a good pedagogical procedure. I did not abandon it soon enough but perpetrated it on my poor students for several years. I soon found that teaching seminars and engaging honors students one-on-one on their thesis projects led to a spontaneous intellectual exchange that both the students and I found exhilarating.

Instead of funneling information, as it were, into passive, receptive brains by lecturing without an awareness of how the information was being received, I gradually tried to develop a pattern of interaction with students that conveyed my enthusiasm for the subject matter. I strove to promote an interest in the students themselves and to heighten their efforts to grapple with fascinating material that they had not understood before, convincing them that they could, with diligent study, actually master the material in a way that would be rewarding for them. I worked to: convince them that they are capable of understanding complex ideas, and could even come up with worthwhile new ideas of their own. In later years I used various "gimmicks" such as trying to impersonate famous past psychologists-and encouraging students to do such impersonations as well-in front of a large class on the history of psychology, or making up cross-word puzzles as quizzes for a course (which I soon abandoned, since several students had never tried to solve a cross-word puzzle before), or devising various mnemonic devices to help in memorizing significant facts, names, or events. However, over the years I realized more and more that effective teaching is less a matter of conveying information than it is encouraging students to make full use of their intellectual prowess, convincing them of their own abilities, and sharing with them an enthusiasm for intellectual activity and for the subject matter at hand.

The inherent pleasure of intellectual activities, of following fascinating ideas wherever they might lead, of becoming immersed in intriguing puzzles to which there might or might not be a solution-and irrespective of whether anyone else had ever thought about a given issue in quite the same way in which I am exploring it myself-is what attracted me to a career in college teaching. My father had encouraged all his children in intellectual activity, and my last two years as an undergraduate convinced me to prepare for a university career. During those wonderful years at Swarthmore, I was fortunate to be accepted into the "honors program." One's full load in each of the last four semesters consisted of two weekly seminars, one in the major and one in a minor. Each week you prepared a paper or a report for each seminar. The seminars typically met in the evening, for 2 1/2 hours, but often stretched to 3 or even 4 hours; typically there were only a half dozen or so students in each seminar. You were never graded by your professors, which induced a superb relationship between student and professor: no "apple-polishing," only an effort to use the professor's knowledge and wisdom to try to enhance your own. Those heady four semesters ended in a month-long nightmare in which you had a three-hour written and a one-hour oral exam on each of your eight seminars administered by outside examiners. The time before that, of total immersion in a variety of intellectual fields with no holds barred and with no evaluation (other than peer and professor reaction), was heaven. An academic career that actually paid one to devote oneself to the free exploration of ideas wherever they might lead was enticing indeed.

Working at Defining Myself as a Teacher

One obstacle in my teaching was that it took me some time to realize that a good teacher is not a show-off, a scholar who carefully documents every assertion. True, as Karl Muenzinger once poetically put it, a gifted teacher might be able to show students "the treasures that lie hidden until roused by magic words," but most teachers rarely achieve this goal. Rather, good teaching usually involves motivating students, setting up conditions that maximize their zeal to use their time and talents productively. The lecture method is known to be among the worst techniques for teaching anything; most students learn better by participating in demonstrations or by reading something than by listening to presumed experts talking at them. Throughout my long career I was always afraid that I might be wasting the students' time (and their and their parents' money), especially in required large lecture courses where I never succeeded in convincing every student why the course was required. Such experiences were among the worst frustrations of my teaching career.

Did time spent in out-of-the-classroom scholarly work, such as empirical research or technical writing, or committee assignments or administration, interfere with teaching activities? I do not think so. As director of the undergraduate honors program (which required a thesis), and member of numerous master's and doctoral committees, my other endeavors meshed well with my teaching duties. Dozens of publications involved collaboration with graduate students and even undergraduate students. Research, administration, scholarly work, and "service" all blended with each other, and with teaching; indeed they often enhanced each other in complementary ways. Many of the products of collaborative research became part of the content of my teaching. I saw no incompatibility between teaching and the other routine chores of the academic life.

The Examined Life of a Teacher

It dawned on me later in my career than would have been desirable that a good teacher does not teach what to think, but how to think. This objective was a goal of all of my admired model teachers. In the more than half century during which I taught, fads came and went; problems that were salient at a particular time were usually not solved, but just abandoned in favor of some other new problems that happened to become popular. There was a bit of progress in some fields occasionally, but mostly there was just change. What did not and should not change is love of wisdom (the root meaning of the term "philosophy"), the need for what MacLeod called "humble and disciplined curiosity." That is what a good teacher strives to encourage in students and self.

Another principle of which I became aware is that the teacher's task concerns reorganizing the cognitive domains of students. Students may come with an undifferentiated or prejudiced conception of the domain to be studied, or may have almost no idea of the area at all. The teacher needs to understand where students are coming from, and then find the best way to help them develop an overview that matches more closely how that domain is viewed by experts. Finding such transformation techniques that will work with different students is not easy, because different students come with different initial cognitive baggage. You do need to know where they are coming from if you want to help them get to where you want them to get. Only if students become proficient in thinking like experts in a given domain are they likely to be able to make creative original contributions that will be taken seriously by experts.

The experience that has been most rewarding in my teaching has been seeing young minds open up and blossom-and succeed in tasks that may at first have seemed to them impossible to accomplish. Among hundreds of successful honors candidates were many who obtained tremendous satisfaction from undertaking original work for their theses, carrying out rigorous empirical chores, and writing up their findings competently-tasks of which, until they actually accomplished them, they never before realized they were capable. The elation that such success produced was beautiful to see. It convinced many of them to alter their occupational goals from going into business or being a one-on-one psychotherapist to contemplating a more intellectual life.

By contrast, what has been most frustrating is that in every lecture course I taught (and even in many seminars) there were always at least a few students I was unable to reach. This frustration occurred most frequently, of course, in large required lecture courses. I never did learn how to solve this problem.

Throughout my career, I always tried to do everything, including teaching, as well as I possibly could. This goal was reinforced by my exhilarating years as a student in Swarthmore's honors program. Anything worth doing at all is worth doing with everything you have got. The motivation was always there, but I fear that I was quite naïve about what works and what does not during my early years of teaching.

I do not know how to evaluate teaching, including my own teaching. Is it the success of one's students? Many honors candidates and graduate students went on to illustrious careers, and I received some heart-warming testimonials about my teaching from former students-but I still harbor nagging doubts: Was their success due to their having been effectively selected, rather than due to anything I might have taught them? Did they achieve their success despite my interference rather than because of something I taught them? I did try to improve my teaching techniques throughout my entire career, but frankly do not know whether in fact I did become a better teacher.

Advice for New Teachers

Teaching is a noble activity that can be tremendously rewarding (though usually not financially). There is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone who was muddled about some issue catch on, and, beaming, show a clear, differentiated and sophisticated perspective over an area that was previously murky. How does one achieve this gratifying goal? I doubt that anyone has a good answer that will apply to all teachers. You have to try out different styles and methods, and find out empirically which ones seem to work best for you-the best methods for teaching different domains (statistics, history of psychology, personality theory, etc.) may well be different, even for the same teacher, depending on the size of the class, the level of the students, and many other variables. One conclusion, though, is clear to me: There are few careers that can be as rewarding as being a college or university teacher. I am deeply grateful that I was actually paid during my career for doing something that was challenging, usually felt worthwhile, and was a lot of fun.

Final Thought

If you are convinced you want to be a college or university teacher, go for it. You may not always know how well you are actually doing, you may discover that you have done well something you thought you had done poorly, and you may find that you will not always be rewarded for doing well something that you may think you are doing well. Nonetheless, all in all, it can be a wonderful career.

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

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