ABSTRACT

About 25 years ago, as a third-year graduate student in experimental psychology, I began to consider my long-term career possibilities. Texas Tech University had a fairly traditional experimental psychology program with a heavy emphasis on research. Although I had been involved in research for my entire stay there, I did not seriously contemplate a career that involved only research—I knew that I also wanted to teach. Fortunately, I was able to spend 2 years in graduate school as a teaching assistant. My experience consisted only of serving as a lab assistant for an experimental psychology course. I also had the opportunity to give a few guest lectures. To help prepare the graduate students for academic careers, Tech’s psychology department offered a teaching seminar to all teaching assistants. Unfortunately, the instructor for the teaching course was one of the department’s weaker teachers and taught the seminar as a PSI course. Although it is certainly possible to read a book and extract important information from it, this approach is probably not the best strategy for training new teachers. Thankfully, the main text for the course was Bill McKeachie’s (1969) Teaching Tips, and I learned many valuable pointers indirectly from Bill.