STP at 75: Development of Teaching Resources

What has your role been in the development of STP resources?

I started in this endeavor as a result of an invitation from Joe Palladino in 1992, when he asked me to create Project Syllabus. I think he asked me to do this because I have always been interested in syllabi. I had created several symposia that I called The Compleat Syllabus. It was an ongoing project of mine for several years until I passed it on, and it evolved from a hard copy to an online resource when Mary Allen took over its leadership. It appears to be working quite well right now. I think that’s my creative activity in terms of the resources, except for several individual resources I have posted on STP’s OTRP site (e.g., my Online Career Exploration Resource for Psychology Majors).

I came into STP through Project Syllabus. I was a reviewer first, and then I took over as the director or the editor for it, whatever it is that we call it. By that point, Jeff Stowell, who was Internet editor, had created a SQL database on the STP website. All the syllabi were there. I took a shot at trying to make it a little more user-friendly by having reviewers pull out content. For instance, if you wanted a list of plagiarism statements, you could go into a spot and find a list of that kind of statements. ¹

In a different, but related, vein with respect to resources, our APA Committee on Associate and Baccalaureate Education (CABE) work group identified job-related transferable skills that are listed on syllabi that psychology majors can develop. It isn’t released yet, though. It was a true labor of love. I put in about 50 hours going through every one of the almost 350 syllabi to find assignments that provide students with opportunities to develop the 17 specific skills that our CABE group has identified that psychology majors need to be able to prepare themselves for success in the 21st-century workforce. In each syllabus, I located the page on which I identified that skill-building assignment, then created a URL to go to that syllabus. So if a teacher of psychology wants to be able to find a good example of some syllabi that contain assignments designed to help students develop writing skills, rather than having to read 350 syllabi and going through them to find that information, they can simply click on the ones I identified. It should be a much more efficient process.

You’re a good man, Drew. I don’t care what anybody says. However, I’m not feeling that it was me; I could have been your successor, but I really don’t remember. After that I ended up becoming vice president for resources; I did one and two-thirds terms before my election as STP president.

And Ruth, you probably are one of the generation that started when things were still on paper?

Yes. I took over as the OTRP director from Janet Carlson. She was still photocopying and physically mailing most of the resources. But because Project Syllabus was up on the web and a couple of the resources that people had submitted were going to be webpages, I undertook to get permission from all the old resource creators to put their resource up on the web, scanned the documents to make that happen, and tried to figure out categories to stick them under so that users could find them. I also then made sure that the reviewers were comfortable doing their reviews online. I had had a lot of experience with that when I was the Method and Techniques editor for ToP. It wasn’t very difficult to convince people that they could do it online and just type their comments directly on the manuscript, so that the review process, I think, got much more efficient, except that reviewers are always slow to respond to deadlines. But it enabled me to nag them very easily and send out little reminders. And I also want to invite Sue to talk about the TOPIX because that was her idea. While it was under my watch, I didn’t have much to do with it except to say to Sue, “Run with it!” So, Sue, why don’t you tell us about TOPIX?

Before Sue does that. Let me just say I quickly looked at the STP webpage, and there seem to be 38 syllabus categories in Project Syllabus. Too many to count very easily at all. What really started out as a modest undertaking on paper is quite impressive now. So, Sue?

Since this is a focus on history, I’m curious to know how Project Syllabus specifically operated before the Internet.

Well it was truly a hands-on, hard-copy situation, where we took copies of syllabi and put them into a notebook, and then transported them to teaching conferences and put them out on the table with someone who was available to explain to curious people what this project was all about, and we shared with them. But that was really about the extent of it. It certainly was limited in its effectiveness, as compared to what we have today, when someone can go in and download a copy, print it, and copy and paste from it. It’s light years away from what it was.

When you had that notebook out at conferences, did people pull out their Polaroids or their Brownie cameras?

No.

It really wasn’t a very effective way, and that’s being generous, for sharing this kind of information, because there’s just too many words in an notebook full of 50 syllabi for someone to be able to see and process when they’re walking by a table and talking to someone’s who’s hosting this particular resource.

And the chisels that we used to put the letters in the stone tablets tended to get dull quickly too.

I think it was a really, really a good-hearted start, but not a very effective way of disseminating the information. We needed the Internet, and we needed someone who was Internet savvy like Sue to do that.

Well, Drew you can give me credit for that, but I really don’t know that it was me.

Well, all I know is that you certainly were part of that. I’m giving you as much credit as I can.

I appreciate that.

Wasn’t Jean Slattery the Project Syllabus person that you took over from Sue?

She was. Yes.

Yeah.

So, Sue, do you want to talk about TOPIX?

I don’t know how successful TOPIX has been. Thanks for bringing that up. This was back when wikis were becoming popular. The idea was that we could have a psychology idea exchange. At the time, the PsychTeacher discussion listserv had a lot of traffic and people were sharing a lot of stuff on there. If you were on the PsychTeacher long enough, everything just would come back again and again and again, and that also seemed inefficient. In the end, the idea arose that we could create a repository that was not peer reviewed. This would have been the first thing that we had that was not a peer-reviewed resource. Just a community spot where people could share ideas. Drop them off, take what they wanted and that was the idea. And it was moderately successful, I would say. We still have it. Some people dropped stuff off. Plenty of people took stuff, but it never really turned into the active community that it was hoped to be. But then as it turns out, that’s true of all wikis. Wikipedia is the same way. Wikipedia is managed by a handful of people; it’s not the democratic kind of place that the founders wanted it to be.

There is another aspect of the STP resources that, unlike the wiki, has mushroomed. STP has generated a host of eBooks, the current editor being Tara Kuther. The books can proliferate because there are no page limits, unlike ToP, which believe it or not, still comes out on paper.

One of the things that I was continually on the lookout for with the OTRP teaching resources was whether publishing the resource as a journal article in ToP is more appropriate. Some people had thought that they would skip the review process and send material to me when it was empirical and data driven. They just thought it would be faster and that they wouldn’t have to have as rigorous an editorial process. I quickly disabused them of that idea. We really wanted just the actual resource that a teacher could use, and if they wanted to talk about the control group and how they had proven that it was useful, then I turned it down quickly. Not even reviewing it, I said, “This is more appropriate for ToP.” I think I probably also got some of those that had been turned down by ToP, and they were hoping for a second chance that way. But we did have criteria.

When I was reviewing more systematically for ToP, I recall there were quite a few manuscripts submitted that just for one reason or another were not appropriate for ToP, and we did direct them your way as well. Because they were the activities without the accompanying control group and that kind of thing. It fed both ways, I think, productively.

Yeah.

And, Ruth, were you involved with the resources stuff at the very beginning? I remember Wes Jordan was one of the people involved putting together a pre-Internet collection of resources that were going to be on paper and would be mailed to people. Subsequently, Dave Johnson chaired a committee called the Demonstrations/Activities Clearinghouse from 1992 to 1995, which was intended to gather items and share them. It ceased activity because of concerns about copyright. Were you there at all for that?

No. That really was under Marky Lloyd and Janet Carlson or maybe even Patricia Keith-Spiegel.

Yeah. That went way back.

I came later than that.

It never really got off the ground until Project Syllabus. The Internet was available for better dissemination. I guess one of the things I’d like to know from you is your reaction to what has emerged because I’m stunned at how much stuff is there. Because if you look back in 1990, there really was nothing other than ToP, but that’s sort of a different kettle of fish. What are your thoughts?

I totally agree with you. The resources just blossomed as soon as we had the Internet to facilitate dissemination. We got international submissions and then, as the resource grew, we started to get requests for translations that people wanted to use in other countries where the teachers or the students were not primary English speakers. We had to develop a policy about who had to give permission in order to do that. Was it just the author of the paper or was it also an administrative officer in STP? And Sue, I know you were involved with me as well when we decided whether we would get professional translators or allow the requester to do the translation. So that was a growth that I saw simultaneous with the start of an international focus. I think they played off each other very nicely. And when Jeff was the Internet editor, he used to report data on how many hits each page got and where they were from. Is that still being reported to the STP Executive Committee?

Well, that’s a good question. Sue?

I believe that it is, but I need to confirm that.

Because that might be very interesting if someone, Barney, did a table showing the growth.

Yeah. We’ll need a very long y-axis, I think.

Yes. You could do it by decades or something like that, but just in the time I was the OTRP director, there was a phenomenal growth. I’m assuming it has continued.

Well, you know the energy that you see among the young people that are involved in STP now, I can’t believe that this cohort isn’t just constantly streaming to the website. It’s really an impressive group of young people who are in there. And if I do create a graph, maybe on the x-axis I could have the time element like when Ruth was a whippersnapper and when Drew was a young Turk and Sue is still sort of a youngster and I haven’t figured out where to put myself, but when I was born there were only three digits in the year number.

That kind of takes me to something that I maybe would have wanted to bring up a little later in our conversation, but one of the things that has always been kind of a bother to me is that I know there are some very, very, very good resources out there that people are not aware of. I think we need to advertise them a little bit more, perhaps we could gather some of that information about how many people had visited a resource and put together something like maybe the top 10 hits of last month. It might draw more people to popular resources.

Given the size of STP now, just in terms of the number of resources we have, the programming that we’re involved in, the grants and awards that we have, it’s really a massive organization. Which is really something considering that we have about 3,500 members. And I’m pretty sure that everybody is volunteering at least one thing. In that regard, the Executive Committee just discussed at our meeting this past weekend that it may be time to identify somebody as a PR director, somebody who reports directly to the Executive Committee and who has some awareness of all the things that are going on, along with the ability to do things like write press releases and keep track of organizations and media outlets that need to receive those.

One of the other interesting ways that our resources have spurred teachers is that other divisions of APA or affiliated organizations have gone off and tried to duplicate our efforts, but just within their own content area. I think the quality of our idea was well recognized and then teachers had to choose where they wanted to send their syllabi, to the I/O Psych organization, for example, or to STP. Did they want to send it to the developmental psych organization or to STP? I don’t know the extent to which those other organizations are still doing it, but I think we should be proud of our having the idea first and disseminating it.

It’s impressive, and I think the excitement has grown. STP now has a preconference at several of the regionals, doesn’t it? Plus, places like SPSP.

In addition, some of them just wrap their teaching programming into their regular conference.

That’s right. Like EPA, for example. It has a considerable teaching component, but it’s part of the EPA body as a whole.

I think the fact that they’re doing it all is because they saw our success at it.

Moving on to another facet of our discussion, are there things that have surprised you about the resources? One of the things that surprised me as an early eBook editor is that it’s striking how eBooks have grown from something that was, I think, at the beginning sort of marginal. Some had the idea of why in the world do we have eBooks. Nobody’s going to read them, and they’re not real scholarship. But that idea has changed. Sue you might be able to give detail on this. Are we getting ISBN numbers or looking into it for the eBooks?

We already have ISBN numbers. Each book does get its own number.

Yeah. That had been a while ago. I remember that being discussed before I retired. Jeff Stowell would know that because I thought he was the one doing it, who had initially contacted that organization, but I could be wrong about that.

Something that we had talked about recently was having a print option so a button next to the eBook where you could click it and it would go out to an independent printer who would print and bind the book and then ship it you. This process would let those of you who have older eyes could read it. But as of for now, there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in that from the membership. As a result, that never happened.

Oh, people weren’t interested?

Right.

That’s curious.

Yeah.

Well, I guess you can go online, get the book yourself and print out that chapter without the hassle of paying for the whole book, not that I’d imagine that they’d be terribly expensive.

That is one thing that Bill Altman, VP of resources, is working on with Tara Kuther, our current eBook editor. They are trying make it a little easier to find individual chapters in all those eBooks, so you don’t have to click on each eBook to see what’s there and then find the chapter that you want. It would be more user-friendly to find some other way of dividing up the content so that it’s a little easier to find.

Are they going to go back and do this with the old books?

That’s the intention. They want to figure out a mechanism first, get that to work, and then go back and fix it.

Yeah. That will be a lot of work because there’s a lot of stock now.

Ruth’s got some free time.

Oh, yeah. Right. It reminds me of what we tried to do with the tagging project and Sue, if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to, but here’s your entree.

It’s still going on. In the transcript, if you can disguise the disgust in my voice, I’d appreciate it. The idea behind the tagging project was to tag all STP’s content because the resources are very wide ranging. Stuff is in different places and the thing that you’re looking for, is it in an eBook? Is it a teaching resource? Is it in a syllabus? Is it in Excellence in Teaching? ² And there just isn’t any easy way to find that content. Some of it’s in pdf, some of it’s not. The idea was to tag all our content by different categories to make it a little easier to find. And a couple of people, bless their hearts, stepped forward and started work on doing that. And here we are, I don’t know how many years later, and it is still ongoing; nothing has been resolved. I don’t know if that’s something that’s ever going to happen or if we’re just going to have to rely on Google to get better at individual searches.

That was one of the disappointments in my work. I thought I had some key leaders in place to do this, but personal issues arose in their lives and it got delayed. Then we tried other people, and it got delayed again. I always thought it was a fabulous idea, but the mechanics of it just got bogged down.

It certainly is a massive project.

Yeah. And the more time goes on, the more massive it becomes because we have more resources to work with.

How about taking time, each of you, to talk about why you think it’s important that people recognize the resources, what they’ve provided, and that kind of thing. This is the essay question on the test that you can take in any direction you want.

Could you repeat the question?

Basically, what do you think would be helpful for people to know about the 50th to the 75th year of STP’s existence? Since 1992 or some number like that? Where have we gone, and maybe where do you think we’re heading? This is just sort of a freeform thing because you are the history of STP, so I think it’s reasonable for you to make a statement about STP’s impact and again, where you think it might be heading?

Well, let’s see. Maybe some sort of a time line pops into my head and on it would be the years of our existence and the notable projects and/or resources that we had made available to our colleagues. I mean just so that people are aware of what is available and perhaps within the description of each one of these would be maybe one or two sort of point people that someone who was interested in learning more about this resource could contact us. That’s my two cents to start.

Okay. Ruth, how about you?

You are asking the anti-historian. I am never any good at this. I think teachers who are of the generation that have always had the Internet are going to have a hard time appreciating the clunkiness that we all had to deal with in terms of paper copies, U.S. mail, spending your time at the photocopy machine, tracking people down in real telephone conversations rather than texting or emailing. By the time everybody got on the Internet, rather than just the real techie science types, it enabled us to do so much more as an organization. I remember discussions about whether the newsletters should still be a print version and the old guard was arguing “But I like to hold the paper and really read it.” And the young guard was saying, “Yeah! Get over it. Just read it on the Internet.” I’m thinking of the generation coming up now that they’ve always known the Internet; I’m not sure that they’re all that much more sophisticated than those of us old folk who have learned it in our later years. But the worldview is certainly going to be different. And I’m wondering at some point do they just feel overwhelmed that there’s too much out there, and by the time you sort through it all you’ve expended more energy than you wanted to. With these concerns in mind, where do we need to go? I think that’s still a pressing issue that I’ve heard thematically today in our little conversation. Not just a tagging project, but what Drew was talking about, providing the URLs specific segments of resources.

We really do have more material than we, as individuals, could possibly ever use, which is a good thing, I think.

If I can follow up with one more point, one of the difficult things I tried to ask my reviewers to do was to address the question, “Do we already have this information in a resource? Or should we publish this new resource being submitted to us?” They had a really hard time finding what we had and recognizing that it was a duplicate. When you change the director, they’re not necessarily familiar with the old resources. At the start, when a new submission came in, if I had just published one and now, I’ve got another one, I recognized it. It was in my memory. But it is difficult to go back and evaluate whether a 10-year-old resource was still sufficiently up to date and whether this new resource was different enough. In the early days, everything was new, so it was very easy to just say, “Oh yeah. Let’s put it on.” But now, I think, people are faced with a harder decision, if that makes sense.

Perfect sense. And in fact, my thought is that there’s a lot of sharing that goes on and people don’t know it’s sharing because they got the tail end of some idea and developed a resource based on it that turned out to be the body of the tail that they didn’t see.

Yep.

Sue?

Well, the goal of TOPIX was to try and make everything a little easier to find as well. Even though it didn’t serve that purpose, it was trying to solve that problem that Ruth was just talking about. And what I did not anticipate, and I’m going to defend myself here, because even though I’m not a technology person, predicting the future is very, very difficult for anybody, and my example is Charles Lindbergh. After he gets back from flying across the Atlantic solo, he’s out touring the country and talking about the wonders of flight—and he was absolutely a big proponent of the wonders of flight—and he said that he could imagine a day when as many as 15 people would fly in an airplane. And when he was about 60 years old, he spent the evening before the Apollo 8 launch with the crew.

Well, there weren’t 15 people on the crew.

No, there were not. That is true. See how bad he was at predicting. With that as a caveat about predictions, consider the STP Facebook page. That Facebook group started, I don’t know, less than 10 years ago. And it currently has 10,418 members.

Wow.

Amazing.

And one of the things that they do on that site is often people will post a question about how do you do “x”? Do you know anything about “y”? And very frequently, someone will pop in and say, “Check out Project Syllabus. Check out this teaching resource that’s on the STP page. This eBook has a chapter where it addresses that thing. Check that out.” So even though there isn’t a place for people to go and discover it for themselves, there is a place for people to go and get that crowd sourced information.

Yeah. Which is impressive.

It is. Has the Facebook page taken over from the PsychTeacher listserv? Is the listserv still going on?

The listserv is still going on, but it doesn’t have the traffic that it used to have.

Do you think they’ve just migrated to the Facebook?

I think some people have, yeah. And in other cases, it’s just new people coming on who well, frankly, don’t even know what a listserv is.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mm-hmm (affirmative) Ruth and Drew, since you guys don’t have jobs, there has been a flood of job notices on the STP listserv. There’s still time.

Thanks, but I’m enjoying my nice self-directed occupation as a retiree.

Yes. I second that.

Well, Sue, regarding your point about this generation maybe not knowing what a listserv is, I had never thought of that and it’s probably the case that those do not serve a function for them. Yeah, wow.

I was speaking with a colleague. He’s in his 30s. I made casual mention of the PsychTeacher listserv, and he just looked at me blankly and I said, “Oh, it’s a place where you can share ideas.” He said, “A list what?” He’d never heard of it.

The world has changed.

It certainly has. I was just at the Annual Conference on Teaching, which is STP’s annual conference, and there is a Twitter community around the teaching of psychology. At least a half a dozen times, I was sitting at some table or standing in a conversation where people give interviews to other people and “Oh, you are ___” and they’d cite the person’s Twitter handle. “I’m glad I finally got to meet you in person.” We can see that there is a whole community on Twitter, people who had never met, chatting with each other about their teaching.

You can do that kind of thing when you’re at a convention, and everybody else can respond. Unlike Drew, Ruth, and me. When we started our careers and went to a convention, we would not take anything that plugged in. Life has changed.

True. Yeah. You took a notebook and a pen.

That’s right. Now, are there any other thoughts that you think we should talk about before we conclude?

I guess that’s exactly what we’re about in our conversation. There are just a whole lot of people who don’t know what’s there or perhaps even how to get it, so we need to do a little bit of advertising, if you will. In addition, I think there’s an awful lot that we have out there that maybe is not as up to date as it could be. For example, when I went through all 350 syllabi on Project Syllabus, I found out a rather large number of them were no longer available online. They were still up on the site, so someone could go through and just check to make sure that things are there. Another thing that we could certainly do is to advertise better so that people know exactly what we have. In such an advertising campaign, we might be able to give them some specific suggestions about their questions or needs, along with the site to go to. I think when I started Project Syllabus, I just thought my main duty was just to collect the syllabi and put them in a little notebook, but what I should have been doing is a little bit more advertising and a little bit more of figuring out ways to disseminate them better. We’re not just collecting resources and putting them in a great big bag somewhere and assuming people are going to know what’s in it. We have to do a better job of assembling as many as we can, making sure that they’re current and they’re accurate, and helping people to understand that you may be the type of person who could benefit from taking a peek at Project Syllabus. That being a little bit more proactive rather than just collecting things.

Yeah. And of course, that goes along with the idea that the amount of information that we must disseminate continues to grow and gets harder to keep track of.

That’s correct. Yes.

That goes back to the idea of getting a PR person then.

Yeah. Maybe marketing is what we need. We need someone who’s got some savvy in social media marketing. Lately, I’ve been creating several blogs along with a wonderful young lady by the name of Amanda Macchi who was part of the Education Directorate at the American Psychological Association. She takes the stuff that my old head cooks up and turns into something that looks like someone who’s much more technologically advanced than I. Amanda’s done it, and it’s been a terrific partnership.

It looks like there is a direction for the future.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Any final comments, thoughts? Birthday wishes?

I just want to thank you for spearheading this. That was good of you to reach out to us all.

I’m happy that we had this chance to do it. Because this is the history that we’ve lived. It is a big part of our teaching careers, and it is was what we did in STP.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

The generosity of everyone contributes to everything that we have on STP. Everybody who serves STP in some capacity. The generosity just blows me away. And all those who have come before have been excellent stewards of the organization, and I appreciate all of you who would pass around a hat at meetings to collect money for donuts. Because as of July 31, 2019, including the Fund for Excellence, STP has $1.5 million in assets.

Really?

Remarkable.

That really is.

Yep, and still as vibrant and strong as it’s been.

The human capital is just as phenomenal as it ever has been.

Great.

Okay. Let me just leave with the final comment that you should make sure I have your current email address because when STP is celebrating its 100th anniversary, I’ll be giving you a call, and we can repeat this.

Barney, can I throw in one more thing?

You certainly can.

When you talk about resources, I think Merriam-Webster defines resource as something that provides information or advice to someone who needs it. There are several ways of doing it and we seem to have talked a great deal about Project Syllabus tonight. And that was originally a printed source, and then it became an online source. But one of the things I used to totally and absolutely love to do with my colleagues was to get together physically and do things such as the old international dinners that we used to have at the APA convention. And also, I mean, for years and years and years and years, I coordinated what was called Friday Night Live—demonstrations at a variety of different conferences where I would invite six or seven people to actually get up and do a demonstration as if the audience were students. Then for a while when the mentoring program existed, it was a way of connecting people. So I think we should not overlook the fact that one of the most valuable sorts of resources we have is just our really strong sense of collegiality where we get to sit down and eat a Swedish meatball and converse with a person who needs some advice about how to maintain discipline in their classroom. I think the official online sorts of resources are fabulous, but I also don’t want us to overlook the opportunities that we have just person to person resource.

Since you brought that up, Drew, I do want to say that the mentoring network still exists. It’s now a more formal program. It’s called the Professional Development Mentoring Network. Diane Finley is the director. It’s specifically designed to formally match mentors with early career people, and she’s about to expand that into midcareer. So that’s fantastic. And what used to be the Best Practices Conference that was in Atlanta was rebranded as the Annual Conference on Teaching. It travels around the country. It was in Denver this past weekend and we had a record number of almost 350 participants: It does continue to grow. Everybody absolutely appreciates that time together and Drew, those demos have shown up at other conferences, The National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology features it, and I know Art Blumfeld who runs Teaching Intro Psych Northwest up here in Seattle every spring also dedicates an hour where people can get up and do classroom demos.

Wonderful.

Yeah, and one of the other slightly different kinds of things that STP coordinates is the Department Consultation Service where somebody will go to a department and provide an evaluation of that department. That is also a good way to make connections, and I think it is very valuable to the departments that undergo the self-studies.

Yes.

One of the things on the horizon is Zoom webinars. Just like this. An opportunity to bring people around the world together in one space and talk about whatever the topic is.

Yeah and the Zoom technology is so easy to use, as it turns out. I’d be surprised if that didn’t just mushroom. And you can record it also, so is that going to be part of the event. Sue?

It may very well be. This is totally in its infancy, and it’s up to STP’s next Executive Committee to sort that out and what’s that going to look like.

Sue, is there anything else from the sanctum sanctorum at the Executive Committee meeting at Annual Conference on Teaching that you can relate to us?

Not off the top of my head. You got all my good stuff.

And it was indeed good.

Thanks for putting this together.

Oh, this is wonderful. I’m glad we had a chance to do it.

Yes, it was.

Yep. Okay. Well, enjoy the rest of your evening and Sue, your afternoon. Thanks for being part of this conversation and part of STP’s history. ³