TIPSters:
I have been an off-and-on subscriber of TIPS for many years, primarily
during my graduate years, and have read hundreds upon hundreds of posts
with great interest. However, I feel that only now am I about to begin my
teaching career -- in the fall I'll start my career as a professor and
I've been asked to teach intro psych. Although I previously taught
courses in cognitive psych throughout grad school, I haven't taught in
quite some time (I've been in a postdoc position for the past 3 years),
and I have never taught intro psych. I've already begun to think about
various ways in which intro psych might be taught and thought I'd solicit
inputs from the members of TIPS.
To get some ideas, I decided last week to attend Phil Zimbardo's intro
lecture on social psych, in which he described the stanford prison
experiment, Milgram's infamous study on obedience to authority, etc. It
was an impressive multi-media tour de force -- about 20 overheads, 40
slides, and a half-dozen video clips were displayed during a two-hour
lecture. I started taking notes but found myself eventually just watching
the presentation -- at the end I had less than one page of notes, more
than anyone else around me. No questions were asked by students during
the two hour period -- I assume that these are saved for the smaller
seminar-like sections that are led by the TAs (attendance at these
sections is optional). I thought the lecture was wonderful -- students
applauded at the end.
I learned later that many of those who teach intro psych here approach it
almost like a "talk show" -- lectures contain lots of visuals, video, and
sound, with the primary goal of getting students excited about psychology
and motivated to read the text. There are lots of guest lecturers. The
text seems to be the primary source of learning, not the lecture.
This "talk-show" format appeared to me to contrast sharply with the more
"traditional" format of the intro course that I remember taking as an
undergraduate way back when. From what I can remember, those lectures
were far less A/V-heavy, and focused on basic principles, theories, and
experiments that were described in the course text. Questions from
students were very frequent (but then, we didn't have separate sections),
and there were class discussions occasionally. The central goal of the
course did not seem to be to get students "excited" about the field of
psychology with lots of overheads and videos, etc., but was to facilitate
students' learning of basic psychological principles and elaborate on the
information contained in the text. I felt that I learned as much, if not
more, from lecture than from the text. I don't remember any guest
lecturers. I thought it was a great course.
What do the members of TIPS think about the talk-show vs. traditional
approaches? What are the pros and cons of these two philosophies of
teaching? How to best teach psych 1?
Cheers,
Matthew Prull
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Matthew Prull, Ph.D. Phone: (650) 725-0797
Department of Psychology Fax: (650) 725-5699
Jordan Hall, Bldg. 420
Stanford University Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Stanford, CA 94305-2130 Web: http://matia.stanford.edu/~prullm/
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