JOIN US!

Thursday & Friday, June 27-28, 2024
Duke University

Durham, North Carolina

This annual conference is limited to 100 participants who share a passion for Introductory Psychology. It will feature three outstanding keynote addresses as well as a range of workshops, demonstrations, and interactive round-table discussions. You can expect to leave the conference with new ideas you can implement to improve your course and engage your students. 

The Psychology One Conference is open to anyone who teaches introductory psychology, including college faculty, graduate students and high school teachers.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Barbara Frederickson

The Goods in EveryDay Life: Implications for Individual Well-Being and Classroom Culture

Professor Barbara Fredrickson has investigated the nature of positive emotions for more than three decades. In this presentation, she will share her foundational Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions as a backdrop for her latest research on the value of positive emotions, which focuses on the positive emotions individuals co-experience with each other through day-to-day social connections. She will describe how mental health, physical health, and resilience grow stronger through shared moments of positive emotion. Furthermore, when people connect over positivity they gain greater appreciation for oneness, altruism and humility, character virtues that can benefit whole communities, including those forged in classrooms. Dr. Fredrickson will highlight the evidence that supports these conclusions and describe simple “micro-interventions” that anyone can use (including teachers!) to increase positive connections and reap the associated benefits.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory (www.PositiveEmotions.org). She has published more than 150 scholarly papers, becoming one of the most highly cited scientists. A recipient of numerous awards for her research and university teaching, Dr. Fredrickson also reaches general audiences worldwide through her two books, Positivity (www.PositivityRatio.com) and Love 2.0 (www.PositivityResonance.com) and her free, online course on the Coursera platform.

Melissa BeerS

The Bigger Picture: Introductory Psychology's Place in General Education

Introductory Psychology courses are not only the gateway to the discipline but can play a central role in students’ general education. Recently, the APA Intro Psych Initiative (IPI) advanced a set of learning objectives to encourage courses to teach and assess common skills, themes, and knowledge that can serve students beyond psychology. In our time together, we will consider the IPI objectives in the broader context of general education and how instructors might integrate the multiple goals and objectives of their courses in meaningful ways. Finally, thinking beyond the Intro Psych course, we will consider the broader and more far-reaching ways Psychology can impact the student experience.

Dr. Melissa (Missy) Beers is a social psychologist who has taught at Ohio State for 24 years. She directed Introductory Psychology, one of the university’s largest GE courses, for 16 years and trained and mentored new graduate student teachers. She was a core member of the APA’s Introductory Psychology Initiative and co-directed the team focused on Teacher Training and Development. Missy has a strong history of service at Ohio State and nationally. Her work in curriculum, assessment, and teaching development have been recognized with the OSU Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Honors Award, the College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Staff Award, The Ohio State University Distinguished Staff Award (including the inaugural Dr. Michael V. Drake President’s Award distinction), and a national award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology for the mentorship of teachers.

 

She now serves as senior director for General Education (GE Bookends) and has helped establish a new Department of General Education at Ohio State. The Bookends are two novel courses all Ohio State students complete as part of the GE Curriculum: a Launch Seminar students complete within their first three semesters and a Reflection Seminar students complete prior to graduation. As senior director, Missy oversees curriculum and assessment and supports a diverse instructional team staffing these courses, impacting all undergraduate students at Ohio State.

SUE FRANTZ

AN INTRO PSYCH COURSE THAT MATTERS: WHAT OUR NEIGHBORS NEED TO KNOW

An estimated 1.5 million students take Introduction to Psychology in the U.S. every year, but only a small number of them go on to major in psychology. For most of these hundreds of thousands of non-majors, Introduction to Psychology will be the only psychology course they will ever take. Our non-majors are our neighbors, such as police officers, healthcare providers, librarians, engineers, teachers, business owners, and politicians. What do they need to know about psychology? Our time with our Introduction to Psychology students is finite. For every concept we choose to cover, we are choosing not to cover something else. Because of the scope of its impact, Introduction to Psychology is the most important course in our curriculum. Rather than default to teaching this course as we always have, let’s consciously choose to cover the psychological concepts our neighbors need to know. 

Sue Frantz is a first-generation college student who earned her BA in psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and her MA in social psychology from the University of Kansas in 1992. She has been in love with sharing the concepts of psychology with her diverse student community since she began her teaching career as an adjunct professor at community colleges in the Kansas City area, before landing her first full-time professor job at New Mexico State University—Alamogordo (NMSU-A). After teaching at Highline College in the Seattle area for 22 years, she is now faculty emerita. Having relocated to Las Cruces, NM, she is affiliate faculty of psychology at New Mexico State University.


Frantz has been active in the national psychology instruction community for almost 20 years. She was on the executive committee of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology for eight years, serving as its president in 2019. She received NMSU-A’s Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, Washington State’s Ana Sue McNeill Assessment, Teaching and Learning Award in 2011, and was the inaugural recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at a Two-Year College or Campus Award in 2013. In 2016, she received APA’s highest honor for professors of psychology—the Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award.


 She is co-author with Charles Stangor on FlatWorld’s Introduction to Psychology, 4e (2023) and Principles of Social Psychology, 3.0 (in press). She is also co-author with Douglas Bernstein and Stephen Chew of Teaching Psychology: A Step-by-Step Guide, 3e (2020).

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