
Excerpt from Introductory Psychology for Teachers: Revised Certain principles have been established as fundamental to good teaching. Theoretically, all psychologists are agreed that a course of study should proceed from the known to the unknown and from the concrete to the general; that students should learn by doing; that the problem or project method of teaching is superior to memorization of a textbook; that functional not faculty psychology should be taught; that individual differences in students should be taken into account; that a beginning course should be designed for the benefit of the great majority who never go farther; etc. The aim of this course is to meet these and other ideals of teaching in an introductory course of psychology designed primarily for the use of prospective teachers. Instead of beginning with the most uninteresting phases of psychology and those most unknown to students, the course takes up concrete experiences of everyday life, relates them to the problems of learning, individual differences, and influencing others, and so develops these topics. Each general principle is discovered by the student out of his own experience in solving specialty organized problems. Only after he has done his best is he expected to refer to the text and by then the text is no longer basic but only supplementary, clearing up misunderstandings and broadening the whole viewpoint. Behavior as a whole is considered from the start; gradually it is subdivided and subdivided, so that finally such topics as "memory" or "attention" can be discussed without fixing in the mind of the student the idea that they are separate entities. And in general the course is prepared on the assumption that the majority of students are never going to specialize in psychology and should consequent!}' be given the most interesting and useful facts and principles of psychology, regardless of whether or not they arc usually reserved for graduate students. The cour
Page Count:
506
Publication Date:
2015-06-24
Publisher:
LULU Press
ISBN-10:
1330583167
ISBN-13:
9781330583166
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