The Ideal Psychology Professor

Practicing as a psychologist or counselor takes different skills than teaching others to be psychologists or counselors. Most of the faculty members at the school where I teach were trained as practitioners, rather than scholars. But the same skills that make a good therapist usually also help in teaching others about counseling and psychology. You need to be able to connect with people (and not put them to sleep!) You also need to know what the needs of your students may be, much like knowing the needs of your clients. But being a good therapist doesn’t always prepare a professional to be an effective teacher.

I ran across an article in the New School Psychology Bulletin (the psychology journal of the New School for Social Research) which looked at students’ perceptions of what an ideal professor in various disciplines ought to be, and what their actual instructors are preceived to be. This is interesting in light of the fact that (as the authors point out), student evaluations can be very important in the promotion and tenure of faculty members. Having served on a rank and promotion board at Adler School where I am a faculty member, and having read the student comments in over 30 faculty members’ portfolios, I can attest to the fact that student comments can range from the constructive and helpful to the flippant and useless.

But what caught my eye about this article was the way the researchers examined students’ ideas of the characteristics that faculty members in various disciplines should display. Not surprisingly, the students expected psychology professors to engage in more eye contact and to do more self-disclosure than professors in other disciplines. But the only other significant expectation they reported was that they expected history professors to curse more!

When it came to actual professor behavior, the students reported that their psychology professors did indeed make more personal disclosures than either biology or history professors; but they also said that psychology professors were funnier and more physically attractive. Oh, and we also walk around the room more than other types of professors.

So maybe I wasn’t too far off when I guessed that I seemed to do best when I emulated a standup comedian while teaching.

No banjo, though.

As far as the physical attractiveness, I won’t worry too much, because at this point in my life it’s not my highest priority and I can’t do too much about it anyway. Except that I will make a concerted effort not too appear too rumpled (a characteristic they did not measure, but to which psychology professors are as prone as other professors). I can probably get away with being rumpled once in awhile, but you start to risk getting into Walter Matthau territory when you’re perceived as being “Invariably rumpled.”

The Ideal Psychology Professor by Fitzgerald Counseling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.