• Question: what is it like teaching psychology?

    Asked by anon-237369 to Peter, Mhairi, Madeleine, Catherine, Andrew on 13 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Catherine Talbot

      Catherine Talbot answered on 13 Mar 2020:

      Teaching psychology is a lot of fun! It’s great to help the next generation of psychologists. I supervise final year students research projects so it’s really nice to see them develop a whole research idea on their own and then conduct this research.

    • Photo: Madeleine Pownall

      Madeleine Pownall answered on 13 Mar 2020:

      It’s a real challenge but really rewarding. Psychology is soooo broad (it covers everything about human mind and behaviour, after all!) so it’s always tricky knowing how much detail to teach and balancing this with ‘big picture’ ideas.

      I find that students get a lot out of psychology teaching and learning, because it gives you genuine insights into your own ideas and behaviour!

    • Photo: Andrew McNeill

      Andrew McNeill answered on 16 Mar 2020:

      For me the important thing is that I need to stay abreast of current research so as to understand how to teach psychology accurately. Some studies (like Milgram’s obedience studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) are often reported as showing that we will do anything if someone in authority tells us to. But recent studies show that that is a very simplistic understanding of what these studies show. Some of them show that these studies were really about how to persuade someone to do something. I like to help students come up with new ways of understanding old studies so that they understand psychology accurately.

    • Photo: Mhairi Bowe

      Mhairi Bowe answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      It is really varied, which makes in very interesting – we teach about lots of different topics, processes, and behaviours and we also get to train future psychologists in research-based skills and communication as well as supervising undergraduate and postgraduate research projects. We also tend to use our own research work to provide insights and examples in our teaching which is great.

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