Intro to Intro

I rounded the corner of the hallway and saw hordes of students standing, sitting, and slouching near the door to the lecture hall. For reasons beyond my ken the administration decided that classrooms in this building needed to be locked between classes, so I pulled out the shiny new key and held the door open while the students filed past. One asked me if I was her professor, and when I said yes she stuck out her hand and said “Hi, my name is [unfortunately I don’t remember it]!”

She was one of the 188 students in my Introduction to Psychology course. I know that there are universities with larger, even MUCH larger, Intro courses than this, but this was a first for my university. Up to this point our Intro courses maxed out at 35 or so. Budget cuts prompted our Department to think about how we could reduce the number of adjuncts we hire, and this large section saves us 5 or 6 hires. 

Of course I’ve taught Intro many times before, but it has been almost 10 years since my last go-round. So my appetite for challenge was met by teaching Intro again after this lacuna and the large class size, a new experience for me. Actually one of my first teaching experiences (in grad school) was teaching Intro with a class of about 50, and that course was taught in an auditorium in a science building, as this one is as well. 

Intro to Psyc is perhaps the most frequently taken classes in higher education outside of required courses in math and writing, so the resources available for teaching it boggle the mind. Many of these resources seem to channel instructors into a traditional lecture format, perhaps because Intro is taught so often by inexperienced instructors. Every publisher has not only a complete set of ancillaries, but now most have engaging online supplements to the text. So I could have reduced prep time and effort, and my anxiety, by adopting the Intro text my Department had already chosen by committee, downloading the PowerPoints slides and test bank, and (digitally) dusting off my classroom activities from 10 years before. But where’s the fun in that?

Instead, I decided that I was going to draw on my 20+ years’ experience in the classroom and the research about how people learn and design my class with the students’ learning at the center. This decision led to many hours of work and the familiar feeling of walking the line between fearless and foolhardy.  In the next series of blogs I will describe the design decisions I made, why I made them, and how they turn out.

Buckle up.