Chapter 13: Preparing Future Educators to Teach Across Content Areas: Infusing Educational Psychology into Teacher Preparation

As future teachers build the skills, they will need to be effective educators in their own classrooms, one of the most powerful tools that teacher education programs can offer them are principles of educational psychology. Educational psychology offers a blueprint for how the key tasks of engaging, learning, remembering, and forgetting can happen across all content areas (Im et al., 2018). As future teachers collect an array of content-specific information and pedagogical techniques from their methods-focused coursework, a small number of central principles of educational psychology can guide their decisions about when and how to use these multiple techniques, how to assess their effectiveness, and how to troubleshoot and improve over time. Knowing how to integrate these domain-general principles with pedagogical practices may be especially valuable for teachers covering multiple content areas. However, educational psychology is often taught separately from methods courses, whose instructors may not be well-versed in the psychology field’s ideas and terms. Consequently, future teachers may not make the connections between the techniques they learn in content courses (the what and how of their teaching practice) and the psychological rationales for and logistical circumstances under which these techniques can be best used (the why and when of their teaching practice).