Psychology from an applied perspective: How can we use insights from psychological science to improve our lives? To improve society?

benefits for students

  • Build an understanding of psychology and the habit of applying its insights to improve students’ own lives & the lives of others

  • Learn skills that will be just as valuable tomorrow as in college as in their careers

  • Gain insights into the human mind from how to manage anxiety and procrastination to how to recognize and confront prejudice

  • Explore interests through college-level seminar discussions and through meaningful assessment tasks

HOW SCHOOLS can USE THIS curriculum:

  • As curriculum for a psychology class

  • As additional psychology electives

  • As curriculum for an advisory period

  • As a J-term or end of year project elective

Ultimately, how you use the curriculum is up to you. Each module is available individually.

Unit Summaries

Each unit is 15 instructional hours and is written as ten 90-minute lessons. Each class assigns homework where students further their background knowledge and apply the concepts they’ve learned to their own lives.

Cognitive Science: Peak performance

  • Learn the habits of high performers

  • Master research-backed practices to learn efficiently, build productive habits, and manage challenges like anxiety & procrastination

  • Apply what you’re learning to something you care about including learning foreign languages, writing a musical, optimizing exercise routines, or re-engineering study schedules

Positive Psychology: Wellbeing

  • Build everyday mental health & resilience for life’s setbacks by applying research-backed frameworks & practices

  • Learn how your emotional state interacts with your environment to influence wellbeing

  • Apply what you’re learning to make wellbeing-enhancing changes for yourself or for others

The Psychology of Identity & Prejudice

  • Learn the psychology of identity formation, tribalism, and prejudice

  • Understand the factors that contribute to your identity & how you can continue to explore it

  • Learn how our wiring for connection can also lead to prejudice & what we can do to reduce our biases

The science of social connection

  • Explore the research on social connection, resilience, boundaries, and rejection

  • Develop your emotional intelligence

  • Learn insights from social, evolutionary, and clinical psychology about why connection matters and how to connect more effectively

Decision Science

  • Learn about the most important cognitive biases and how they influence our decision making

  • Unpack four case studies of when decisions went wrong

  • Develop an understanding of when to think twice and when to go with your gut

transfer to action: applied learning

A hallmark of our Practical Psychology curriculum is “transfer to action.” Most days we ask students to apply what they learned in their own lives outside of class. The next day starts with a debrief of how this went and what students learned from doing this. The goal is that students gain agency to transform themselves and the world around them using the knowledge and skills from the class.

MATERIALS INCLUDED IN THE CURRICULUM

  • Assessment tasks for each unit

  • Assessment task rubrics

  • Sample assessments for each unit

  • Surveys to gauge student behavioral & attitude changes

  • Unit plans

  • Daily lesson plans

  • Conceptual guides (e.g., temporal self-appraisal theory)

Our curriculum development team

Caroline Castleman

Caroline developed Cognitive Science: Peak Performance. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University where she earned a degree in the history of science with a minor in neuroscience.

Lauren Woodard

Lauren developed Positive Psychology: Wellbeing. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Vermont where she earned a BS in psychology. She works as a researcher at the Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders

Sabrina Flores

Mackenzie DeLoatch

Mackenzie developed Psychology of Identity & Prejudice. She has a BS in psychology from Duke University where she worked as a research assistant in the Diversity & Identity Lab for three years.

Sabrina developed Psychology of Connections & Relationships. She has a BA in psychology from Duke University where she minored in neuroscience & global health.