January 4, 2019

Happy New Year from warm..ish, and mostly sunny Texas!

It is my great honor to serve as the 2019 president for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP). As you know, we are a society of teachers whose passion is in creating opportunities for students to learn and grow, sometimes in ways they never thought possible. Like many of you, STP has become my professional family and I truly enjoyed the various service opportunities that it has provided me. Also, like me you may marvel at the wealth of resources that our organization provides to both new and experienced teachers. If you have ideas about how STP can better serve teachers of psychology, contact me or talk with me at a conference. This year, I will be attending COGDOP, SPSP, IACCP, RMP, APA and ACT. I have been thinking about how we can better serve teachers and have come up with seven Presidential Initiatives that will provide opportunities for more of you to get involved with STP. We will be formalizing the process by which we will address these initiatives next month so in the meantime, if any of these interest you, please get in touch. I can be reached at richard.miller@tamuk.edu. Send me a brief statement of your interest and a copy of your CV, by February 15, 2019.

Here are my Presidential Initiatives:

1. I want to broaden our base to increase membership from and provide resources to underserved groups. At the present time, our membership seems to be concentrated at regional universities and liberal arts colleges. Working with our Membership Committee, Diversity Committee, International Relations Committee, GSTA, and TOPSS, as well as COGDOP, I want to reach out to high school teachers beyond those involved in TOPSS and AP, faculty and graduate students at R1 institutions, as well as those teachers that represent diversity and internationalization. To assist with this effort, we will conduct a new member survey but will also survey representatives from the underserved groups who are not members. Outreach mechanisms could include monthly mail outs about programs that fill specific needs, and presentations at meetings and conferences organized by allied organizations, for example IACCP, COGDOP, High school state organizations, etc.

2. STP Program Evaluation. We offer a wealth of resources to assist teachers and I am confident that these resources are well received. In addition, we support several conferences and pre-conferences on teaching. It would be good to have a process to formally assess the impact of these programs from year to year. Dr. Jane Halonen has agreed to chair a task force to review our current assessment processes and where needed, create mechanisms to better assess the impact of our current programs and services. She will be reaching out to known assessment gurus and if you are interested in working with her and the directors of our various programs, please let me know.

3. Sometimes teaching goes well beyond the classroom. To recognize this, I will be working with the Awards Committee to implement an award for (1) mentoring beginning faculty and to develop an award to recognize (2) civic involvement. I welcome your input on how to structure these awards and the criteria we should use in the selection process.

4. Explore ways to expand and improve on what is called undergraduate research. Work with CUR to expand outreach and use of existing resources. Create a task force report that defines what a good undergraduate research experience looks like at both the associate and baccalaureate levels. Develop a rubric for evaluating student researchers. Create an appendix of conferences where dissemination of undergraduate of research is encouraged.

5. SOTL. Create a task force to collect what we know about evidence-based teaching from a full range of sources, and organize by topic area. Create an ongoing clearinghouse for faculty to go to in order to find out what is already available and what is in the works.

6. Teaching-tips Revised. Work with Aaron Richmond to create a process for members to review exercises and demonstrations published in Teaching of Psychology that didn’t work as expected. Submissions would describe and reference the exercise, describe the manner in which it was implemented including type of class, type of students, etc., and speculate as to why it did not work with suggestions that might make it work.

7. Work with Tara Kuther to encourage the development of an e-book on high impact practices that can be implemented at the college level but more importantly at the program level and an e-book that addresses how to translate what we know about learning and memory into classroom practices. This could be a sourcebook that directs readers to already existing material not limited to that published by STP.

I look forward to working with you in 2019. All the best,

Rick Miller, STP President