If you did a survey of high schools offering psychology throughout the country, you will probably find most have only one psychology teacher on staff. In some cases this can lead to a sense of isolation. Many psychology teachers have noted they feel a bit "like an island" with no one to share ideas with. With the advent of the internet and email, this feeling of solitude is not as prevalent as the pre-internet era when peer interaction was primarily limited to conferences and workshops.
Listservs and discussion groups have helped build electronic bridges between psychology teachers around the country. Any teacher joining these groups can send email to a specific address which in turn is distributed to everyone else on the list. By sending one email, a teacher can reach hundreds, in some cases thousands, of other psychology teachers.
There are three groups of interest to high school psychology teachers. They include the AP Psychology Electronic Discussion Group, Psych-News listserv and PsychTeacher electronic group. Each is detailed below.
AP Psychology Electronic Discussion Group is sponsored by the College Board and specific to those teaching AP Psychology. For more information go to
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/homepage/4340.html or to become a member go to
http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/homepage/4631.html.
Psych-News is designed primarily for teachers of high school psychology, both the AP Psychology and secondary level psychology. To subscribe, send the email message "subscribe Psych-News Bob Smith" (without the quotes and your full name in place of Bob Smith) to
listserv@list- serv.uh.eduPsychTeacher is a moderated (which means messages are monitored before being distributed to the group) electronic discussion group from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) and meant for all education levels. While discussions tend to deal more with post-secondary education, many postings are from and of interest to high school psychology teachers. To register go to
http://list.kennesaw.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=PSYCHTEACHER&A=1
There has been lots of beginning of year activity on a relatively new Advanced Placement Psychology Teacher Group. There have been some amazing resources shared on there that I/we will be sharing on the THSP blog soon. For now, here is the link to the group. Click the link to join--but be sure you are a teacher.
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