The Psychology Teacher’s Resource Guide

The Resource Guide is a compendium of 50 “Standards-Based Lesson Plans” created by  Amanda Vanderbur and aligned with the US National Standards for High School Psychology. These, as you might expect, have evolved somewhat between the year this Guide was published (2014) and the year in which this post was published (2024).

If you’re an American High School Psychology teacher you will, hopefully, be aware of both the current standards and how they’ve changed. But in case you’re neither of those I’ve included a link that explains the difference. Because I’m nice like that.

The Guide also helpfully aligns the NSHSP standards to AP Psychology standards (for non-US readers, Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology is broadly equivalent to A-level standard).

Now we’ve got the standards-stuff out of the way, the Lesson Plans are organised into 7 sections:

• Scientific Inquiry
• Biopsychology
• Cognition
• Development and Learning
• Sociocultural Context
• Individual Variation
• Application of Psychological Science

and each Plan provides you with details of the objectives they’re designed to achieve, details of the procedures involved and the preparation they require (including things like Handouts that are included in the Guide).

And that’s about it, really. All you have to do is download the Resource Guide and spend some time browsing its pages to see if there’s anything within you want to use.

And if you’re in the market for more-of-the-same-but-a-bit-different then why not have a gander at The Psychology Teacher’s Toolkit – a UK-based collection of Notes, Starter, Plenaries, Strategies and Sims with nary a Standard in sight.