Early Summer as a Time to Reflect on Your Past Teaching Year

The what-seemed-to-be endless spring semester is over. Most psychology educators are done with the 2021–2022 academic year. Some are teaching a summer course or two; others are catching up on writing and research; and still others are starting to think about their fall 2022 courses, which are (happily) two or more months away.

Taking Reflective Stock Now

How do you do this without feeling you are reliving the semester that just ended? Simple: by taking reflective stock now, in early summer, which is a way to begin to plan for fall courses without actually doing much (yet, anyway).

To begin, ask yourself this question: Overall, what kind of teaching year did you have? Was it a good one or a not-so-good one? (If the latter, COVID-19 and its tentacles may have been the problem—and most academics report being unusually worn out this year—then again, so do non-academics, including many of our students.)

Questions to Consider

Still, you might do a wider postmortem on your year by answering some or all of these questions:

• What assignments worked well in your classes?
• Which ones need to be revised or even removed?
• Should you find some new readings, as some are becoming dated (or you are tired of discussing them)?
• Are you assigning enough writing?
• How many exams in a typical class do you give? Too many or too few?
• Are you using whatever teaching interface you have available (e.g., CANVAS) effectively?
• What, if anything, do you want to consider changing about your teaching in the coming year?

Now, I am not suggesting you change all of these things in all or even one of your classes. I am suggesting you consider making one or two changes to a class or two. For example, I will be teaching personality this coming fall, and I decided, upon reflection, that given the amount of writing assignments I give (several—some long, some short, some that build upon one another), a midterm exam and a final seem a bit much, especially since I am adding a new assignment that requires explaining some key idea(s) from the subdiscipline in both written and drawn form (I’m asking students to create a comic panel that presents some important concept about human personality). So, I’ll swap out one exam for this new (and, I hope, creative) assignment—that’s my modest change (and time will tell if it works).

So, while you are whiling away time on the patio, in the pool, strolling the beach on vacation, or just hanging out around the house, take stock while thinking about what change or two you might make in your classes in the coming academic year. It is time well spent, but not too much time (yet). And I find this advanced thinking with a little planning makes putting together my course materials—when August rolls around, as it inevitably will—much easier.

Imposing some order at this point in time is also a way to express some cognitive and behavioral hope that our classes will be even more like they used to be this fall. I realize that we are not necessarily out of the pandemic woods yet—COVID-19 upticks and variants may plague us for the foreseeable future--but we can try to impose a little order on our lives and our teaching by taking stock of the past year and looking ahead to the next one.