​I enjoy doing class activities with my students and experimenting with new ones to try. I also tend to hoard activities, saving any interesting ones I come across for future use. When I was planning a new course prep for this semester, I went through my NITOP binders to pull out any activities I felt were relevant. I love that there is so much sharing of ideas at that conference.  Now I want to pull from my endless folder of activities and share with others a favorite of mine. Picking one activity to discuss was difficult, but I settled on a role-playing activity good for industrial/organizational courses because it’s the only activity I have that is from a published paper. This also happens to be the activity that earned me my first high-five from a student, so I guess it is student-approved as well. 

TNP team has put together a Q&A style post about the academic job market. Today our guest contributors answered questions about what happens after submitting your job applications, like how long to wait to hear back from the search committee, or what happens when if we get an interview or a job offer. ​

This week TNP is doing a series of posts revolving around the academic job market with the help of some experienced guest contributors. Today’s post is all about funding – whether it be for your own research or a post-doc position. ​

This week TNP is doing a Q&A with some insightful guest contributors about the academic job market. Today’s post discusses preparing application materials for teaching-oriented academic positions. There are many different resources out there about application materials. You’ll notice that we didn’t ask a ton of questions about teaching and research statements. For more on that, check out Kameko Halfmann’s blog post about application materials to be very helpful. In it, she goes into detail about teaching, research, and diversity statements, as well as providing tips about the cover letter and CV. Below are some other, more specific questions that we had related to application materials. ​

Guest Contributor: Dr. Brian Day, Butler University

Well the title of this article sure did its job – it grabbed my attention while I was browsing through past volumes of the journal Teaching of Psychology. As an instructor tasked with teaching Introductory Psychology for the foreseeable future I was intrigued by the prospects of improving student success through valuable instructor-student relationships. In the article titled “Student Success in Introductory Psychology: The Value of Teachers Knowing More About Their Students”, Wu and Kraemer (2017) discuss a project with the goal of identifying indicators of student success in introductory psychology courses. Their hope was that if these indicators could be identified early, then teaching, classroom methods, and classroom engagement opportunities could be tailored to help particular students succeed. The results of the investigation showed that a student’s ability to engage academically, prepare appropriately, their self-views concerning growth, and some in-class behaviors all correlated with performance outcomes (namely scores on exams). The authors discuss all of these findings in regards to strategies that college instructors can use to promote student achievement in introductory psychology, and this is where I wish to reflect.