By far the most important reason this is a bad approach is that it doesn't work, if student learning is the goal. I remember feeling the pressure to cover everything as a new instructor. Intro is a required course for Psyc majors, and I felt like the instructors of courses taken later in the major were depending on me to lay out some foundational knowledge of the discipline that they could build upon. Since many of those instructors were my senior colleagues, I certainly wanted to come through. So my goals included students mastering the content of every chapter, which I now know to be an impossibility. This summer I counted the number of bold terms in the text, and the result was 560. Five hundred sixty. 560! I can assure you that I don't know all 560 terms and I've been at this for quite a while. The most talented instructor using the latest edtech and SoTL-infused design could not get students to master that much content. So blasting through all that content will not produce the desired learning. Do. Not. Do. This.
Another reason not to attempt to cover everything in Intro comes from a topic the very first chapter in most books: psychology is a science. This means that our current knowledge is not sacred, and in fact it will be outdated at some point in the (perhaps) near future. Would you consider using a book from the 1990s? Me neither, and our fancy books in 2017 will seems as unappealing years from now as the text I used as an undergrad (and which I still have!). At some point there was an instructor desperately trying to get to the facilitated communication section of the book. Don't be that person. In addition, I use an OER text, meaning the content is free and accessible to anyone with a device that hooks up to the web. Information is free.
My course of 190 students contains exactly 3 psychology majors. Now, I hope to recruit some of my students to the Major, but the overwhelming majority of students are taking the only psychology course of their lives. If anything this puts more pressure on me to make sure they know some things really well, because this is the only shot they have at it. But the list of things I really want them to know as they live their lives and work at non-psychology jobs is much shorter than 560 items long. I spent much of the summer going through the text and coming up with what I call the Most Important Concepts (MICs) for each chapter. I tried to limit myself to just one or two per chapter, and this was really tough. For example, what are the MICs for the chapter on the brain and neuron communication?* Or what's the one MIC for the chapter on disorders?** I tried to think about what I wanted someone to know about the topics 5 or 10 years from now. This reduced my goal for student learning from mastering everything to mastering 30-40 things. Much more realistic.
If I was teaching anatomy to pre-med or nursing students my goals would be different. In courses like that mastery of content is vital, critical, perhaps life-saving. No one's going to live or die because of what they learn in my class. Don't get me wrong, I believe in the importance of my discipline and I have seen students' lives improved because they took a psychology course. But mastery of every scintilla is not required.
So that leaves the question of what to cover. Again, I think the better way to think about it is to recognize that students will not master all the content in the text or that you blast them with in class, and that there are things that I/we really want them to learn and remember for years. But that can't be too many things, and they are likely the big themes from the course, not the definitions of any term. What we as experts in the field can provide our students is some curation of the material, reducing it down to a digestible and nutritious series of nuggets. Do that and put down the fire hose.
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*I compromised on 2:
- Neurons are the building blocks of the nervous system and have three main parts, and
- The brain has parts that do different things
**Psychological disorders are often just extreme versions of normal, even healthy, feelings and thoughts
