by Stephanie Afful, 2025 STP President

Greetings and happy New Year to our cherished STP friends and community! 

I am honored to serve as your 2025 STP President. We really have something special in this professional organization. I started my service in STP on our very first Early Career Psychologist committee. A few years later, I joined the Executive Committee as the secretary and now just thrilled to be in this position. My presidential theme this year is “Stronger Together: Building a Community to Combat Teacher Burnout.”   

Why burnout? As teachers at all stages of our careers, we likely are balancing our love for teaching with the ever-growing demands and stress of this job. We are still recovering from pandemic teaching, many of our universities are in financial crisis as we approach the great enrollment cliff, AI has changed the way we assess student learning, and we may experience compassion fatigue with the mental health crisis in college students. I hope we can use our collective expertise, care, and community to prevent our flame from going out and spark the joy of teaching again.

Now you might be thinking that one way to mitigate burnout is to say NO to more service but…I do hope you will consider joining one of our presidential task forces. As the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, we should think about ways to care for each other and ourselves as we do for our students, as well as balancing the demands of teaching, research, and service. Given those demands, I would like to call for volunteers to serve on the following presidential task forces (deadline to apply is January 31, 2025):

1.  Combating teacher burnout 

This task force will focus on tips, toolkit, recommendations to help faculty manage burnout.

2.  Supporting research on small budgets 

This task force will focus on ways to support faculty who engage in the high-impact practice of mentoring undergraduate research but have little to no funds, such as compiling resources on collaboration sites, networking, grants, etc. 

3.  Using AI to our advantage 

This task force will focus on using AI to manage academic workflow. How can AI help faculty save time?

4. Developmental Content for Intro Psyc Working group

In addition, we have one working group that will be reviewing developmental content in Intro Psychology courses/textbooks. For many of us teaching Intro Psych, we may not be trained in developmental. This working group will review current coverage and provide advice for teachers and textbook authors on what content should stay and what content should go. 

WHAT do I actually have to do? We would anticipate these groups meeting virtually once a month for 2025, starting in February. Some task forces continue into the following year. Task forces write an end-of-year report to be shared with the Executive Committee.

WHAT are the outcomes? Presidential task forces often lead to presentations at ACT or APA, ToP articles, white papers, or even new awards or lines of funding for our members.

So I hope you will join me this year, whether on a task force, at a conference, or by email, as we share our best practices on Building a Community to Combat Teacher Burnout.