Great Teacher Award

Weinraub shows students everyday psychology

Weinraub

Question: What do you get when you combine 300 undergraduates in an introductory psychology course with a professor pretending she’s a harried mother trying to soothe her wailing infant, answer the telephone and deal with a complaining upstairs neighbor ... all in the same nanosecond?

Answer(s): A belly laugh, an appreciation of parenthood, and a prime learning experience courtesy of Marsha Weinraub, Great Teacher.

“I’m a ham,” Weinraub said with a grin, remembering classes where she used inanimate objects — dolls, umbrellas, you name it -- to act out how a mother feels when a baby won’t stop crying.

“People remember real things,” continued Weinraub, the University’s Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology. “With the crying baby, I hope they’re learning appreciation for a woman who has a baby she can’t soothe. And then we talk about what it means when babies cry.

“I also act out different types of attachment styles. We talk about what happens to these babies and what causes different types of relationships. I talk about things I’m doing in my research lab. Then they can understand what we’ve learned about parent-child relationships and what we don’t yet know.”

A native Philadelphian and a nationally recognized expert on personality and social development in infants and young children, Weinraub is the fifth psychology faculty member in the past 11 years to receive the Great Teacher award. No other single department has more Great Teacher sculptures, a statistic not lost on her.

“We have a strong tradition of good teaching, and it makes for a strong program,” said Weinraub, who acknowledged that she has learned plenty from her colleagues in her department, which is nationally known.

“When I came here, I was not a great teacher,” continued Weinraub, who directed the psychology department’s developmental area for six years and currently directs its graduate training program. "Temple is really a place where I’ve lived and grown.

“Teaching is a relationship, a special one. It’s the kind of relationship where it’s one person’s mission to help another. My job is to give something. Theirs is to take. It’s not like a friendship relationship. There has to be a separation because you have to evaluate your students.”

Weinraub expects that relationship with her students to prosper whether she’s teaching large introductory lecture classes, working with students in independent study, or training graduate-level staff in her Personality and Social Development Research Laboratory in Weiss Hall.

She relishes each teaching opportunity and enjoys the challenge — and promise — of bringing her field alive to students. In course evaluations, students marvel at Weinraub’s ability to hold their attention, give them real-world examples, reach them, exude warmth an enthusiasm, and learn their names ... even in a class of hundreds.

Whether they become psychologists or not, Weinraub said, her students “are all going to have families. They need to think about human beings as developing individuals. Developmental psychology is really interesting, particularly in the early years. It’s like opening a window to them. It’s so exciting.”

In Weinraub’s classes — she has developed 10 undergraduate courses in her 29 years as a faculty member — there are many life lessons to be learned. And there’s not always just one right answer.

“I care not only that students learn the basic ideas, concepts and principles, but, more importantly, that they can critically evaluate the ideas and apply the concepts and principles to new examples.

“The fruits of my teaching come when students raise questions I had not even considered,” Weinraub continued. “The sweetest fruits come when the students suggest novel ways of answering their unique questions. If students demonstrate to me that their answer is as good as or better than mine, I accept it.”

Deeply committed to undergraduate education, Weinraub, the first in her family to attend college, was involved in the psychology department’s recent effort to restructure its undergraduate curriculum. She also pushed to offer courses of interest to non-majors.

“Marsha argued for these courses, contending that we have an obligation to serve not only our majors, but also the general student body,” fellow psychology professor Luci Paul said. “She knows the kind of leadership critical to first-rate teaching.”

“I’m very aware that I had a really good undergraduate experience,” Weinraub said of her years at Brandeis University. “Brandeis gave me small classes and great professors who were doing their own work but who cared about sharing their work.”

Weinraub invokes the same mantra at Temple. A member of the University’s Million Dollar Research Award Club, Weinraub has published widely in the areas of infant attachment, gender role development and family interactions.

She has served as a principal investigator on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development since its inception in 1989. Through this national longitudinal project, she investigates variations in early child care in infants and toddlers and the effect of those variations on children’s social, emotional and intellectual development.

Additionally, Weinraub is co-principal investigator on a two-year project examining the effects of child care subsidies on parental employment, children and their families.

Both are enormous undertakings that strive to educate the general public about what happens in modern families.

“There is a huge gap in the knowledge of child development among adults in this country, which has very serious implications for the children who are growing up today,” said Mary Mohler, editor at large for Parents magazine, who frequently calls on Weinraub for expert commentary.

“Marsha takes her educational mission seriously. Her expertise helps inform and educate 14 million adults each time she answers a question for the magazine.”

Bat mitzvahed last June, Weinraub said her spiritual life has had an impact on her teaching.

“I haven’t always had great teachers, but I have had some really great teachers rabbinically,” she said. “Through them, I learned a nicer way to treat my students. And I have a better sense of caring and compassion for them than I used to have.”

Weinraub’s Great Teacher nomination packet bulges with professional testimonials and recommendations, superior teaching ratings, student evaluations and class syllabi. But it also includes scores of handwritten messages, warm notes of thanks from former students who have learned — and prospered — under her tutelage.

“You make me feel,” one reads, “like I have something important to contribute to the field.”

“I have learned so much from you,” states another. “Thank you for taking the time to work with me one-on-one.”

“What a great experience to join you in your office and brainstorm with you about my future! You are full of ideas and vision,” says another.

“I do save them,” Weinraub, who received the 1985 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, said of the notes of appreciation. “When I get them, students acknowledge that they ‘got’ something, something they’ll use throughout their lives.

“It’s fun to see people this age really grow up and blossom and find their niche. In what other profession could we have regular exposure to young people, their ideas, their concerns ... and their passions?”

- By Barbara Baals