Psychology is consistently in the top five college majors throughout the United States. Psychology is also taught in high schools all across the nation. It’s a growing field, currently experiencing an expansion that’s outpacing the national average. The demand for teaching psychology is not only currently high, it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Teaching psychology helps open doors for students not only in their career selection but also in their understanding of the fundamentals of individual human behavior. Teachers of psychology are always on the lookout for interesting and engaging sources to help get students interested and involved in their studies, and like all fields, psychology has benefited from the centralization and availability of resources on the internet. Many major institutions devoted to psychology offer resources for psychology teachers and instructors, free of charge, but tracking all of them down can be a challenge. To help with that, we’ve put together a list of the best the internet has to offer for psychology teachers.
Psychology teachers at all levels of education have access to primary and supplemental materials through the following sites.
The Best Online Resources for Teaching Psychology
- The Society for the Teaching of Psychology. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology is a Division 2 member of the American Psychological Association (APA). It “curates and distributes teaching and advising materials to all teachers of psychology” The Society for the Teaching of Psychology is one of the largest, most thorough and comprehensive online resources for teaching psychology available, with most subdisciplines of psychology included. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology also provides access to ebooks concerning teaching techniques and pedagogy.
- The Association for Psychological Science. The Association for Psychological Science maintains an impressive repository of sources for teaching psychology. All levels of education are included, including high school teachers and instructors at 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities. The site has teaching blogs, classroom activities, and tutorials. It also offers the best excerpts from the APS journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science.
- The American Psychological Association. The APA curates one of the largest bodies of resources for psychology in existence, including teaching psychology. Psych Learning Curve is the APA’s source for teaching psychology and using psychology in the classroom. The APA also sponsors Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools. Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools is a major resource for teaching psychology. There you can find help finding specific information for connecting with other psychology teachers, finding supplemental material for use in the classroom, resource manuals for new teachers of high school psychology and many other resources.
- The College Board. The College Board oversees the nation’s Advanced Placement high school courses. They have extensive resources for teaching high school advanced placement (AP) psychology. The College Board offers lesson planning help, class assignments, instructionals on teaching strategies, and other classroom resources. The College Board’s site also provides extensive resources for pedagogy in teaching psychology.
- The Social Psychology Network. The Social Psychology Network is a hub of information for teaching and promoting social psychology. It also contains resources for other branches of psychology, including teaching resources, links to professional groups and journals, discussion groups, and general resources. Psychology teachers can also find ebooks on teaching, online essays, and class handouts. There are also extensive resources for classroom activities.
- Ted-Ed. Ted-Ed is an online resource featuring many videos and instructional resources for a vast array of subjects. Ted-Ed includes videos, lessons, and exercises that can be immediately used for teaching psychology activities. Note that Ted-Ed does not approach only one specific sub-discipline of psychology, but addresses interesting questions about human behavior that modern psychology tries to answer. Ted-Ed uses a friendly, easy to understand video format that is engaging without getting bogged down in the complex, more abstruse aspects of human psychology.
- The Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA). The SCRA is devoted to teaching community psychology, a fairly recent addition to offerings in psychology. Community psychology is concerned with how individuals relate to their broader communities and how positive or negative community living affects individuals. The SCRA site has extensive resources for teaching community psychology in the classroom, as well as academic research in their field. Information is available for teachers of graduate and undergraduate classes.
- TeachPsychScience.org. TeachPsychScience.org curates resources for teaching psychology, statistics, and research. An offering of Monmouth University, TeachPsychScience is devoted to helping teachers be more effective in teaching the kinds of statistics and research used in psychology as well as the other social sciences. It includes lessons, handouts and activities about teaching research design, experimental research methods and analysis of data. TeachPsychScience also has materials for teaching some aspects of science writing.
- MERLOT Psychology Portal. MERLOT Psychology Portal is an online learning repository with access to 20 different kinds of teaching materials across 15 major subdisciplines of psychology. It offers ready-to-use learning exercises, bookmark collections, and access to journals and publications. Some of these resource collections offer exhaustive materials in support of teaching specific areas in psychology, such as clinical psychology.
- The Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The SPSP curates a collection of teaching aids, videos and sample syllabi from dozens of different real-world psychology classes across the nation. SPSP also provides links to small grants for educators in psychology. The SPSP produces two journals, Personality and Social Psychology Review and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Teachers of psychology have a broad and deep array of teaching resources at their fingertips online and with the increasing popularity of psychology, online resources are going to keep increasing and improving.
Clifton Stamp
B.S. Psychology | Arkansas State University
M.A. Rehabilitation Counseling | Arkansas State University
M.A. English | Arkansas State University
November 2019
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