The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

Teachers After 4:10 — Mrs. Katherine Minter

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We all know that Mrs. Katherine Minter teaches AP and IB Psychology classes here at Westwood, but did you know just how involved in the psychology world she is?  From being the National Chairperson of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary School to writing a textbook, Mrs. Minter has done it all.

Mrs. Minter loves teaching psychology – because when she’s teaching, she’s in her ‘flow’.

“I believe that when your work becomes your play, you have achieved something very special.   In psychology we actually have a term for that, and it’s called ‘flow’. It’s when you’re in your zone — time stands still and you’re completely immersed in something you enjoy,” Mrs. Minter said. “‘Flow’ is also defined as something that’s challenging to learn and do well, and not everyone can do it and be good at it, but when you’ve achieved that, and you’re at the highest level of it, it’s wonderful.  That’s how I feel about teaching and about my science — that I’m in flow when I’m involved in teaching.”

While at Texas A&M, Mrs. Minter double-majored in Psychology and English, and also received her teaching certificate.

“I really never thought I was going to teach,” Mrs. Minter admitted. “I was going to be a clinical psychologist and go on and get my PhD. I went through graduate school, and my internships were in hospitals and clinics counseling families with critically ill children and also adults in Hospice.”

However, when she got married and had a child, Mrs. Minter’s priorities shifted.

“I realized that, for me, my family really comes first,” Mrs. Minter said. “And for counselors, you have to be available after hours and on the weekends! Because people are working or they’re in school, the practice would start about 4:00 and maybe go till 8:00 or 9:00 to accommodate people, and then those who couldn’t come right after work, would have to hold weekend hours. And that is the opposite of what I wanted my family life to be.”

After Mrs. Minter finished her Master’s Degree in psychology, she began teaching language arts at a middle school. The next year, she was offered the opportunity to begin a psychology course at a high school while also teaching American Literature in junior English.

“They were thinking about starting a psychology course, and I thought, ‘Well, cool! I can teach English and start a psychology course — those are my two majors; that’d be fun.”  So I applied for the job and I got it!” Mrs. Minter said. “At that time it was called Regular Psychology; there was only the high school level of it, and it wasn’t rigorous!  See, I loved the subject, so I was thinking, ‘Why are they watering this down? Why are we allowing this course to accept just sitting around, talking about our feelings?’  — This is not the science I was taught at A&M’.  So I volunteered  to rewrite the curriculum for the district — no one particularly cared about psychology because it was an elective — and I wanted to rewrite it, and so I did, and I made it rigorous.”

When Mrs. Minter moved back to Texas, there was a movement in the American Psychological Association to begin implementing a nationwide set of teaching standards for the psychology courses being offered.  The science of psychology was coming to the forefront.

“They created an association that’s part of the APA, called Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools (TOPSS), and they were writing national curriculum, sending it to the states, suggesting it be the standard for all psychology classes to achieve’,” Mrs. Minter said.

In 1991, The College Board began putting together an AP Psychology course.

“English and history had been around a long time in AP, but no one had considered Psychology at an AP level,” Mrs. Minter said. “At Westwood, they came to me and said, ‘Do you want to start this?  Do you want to teach this AP Psychology?’ and I said, ‘Yes!  Let’s do it!”  I was in on the beginning of it, the very cutting edge — we were pioneering it, and there were only a handful of us across the country..”

Since there was now an AP Psychology course, there had to be an AP Exam and it had to be graded.

“A friend of mine, who happened to be my college roommate, was also a psychology teacher in another city; she was one of the small group that was organizing the reading of exams for the very first time with The College Board.  They came together one weekend — everybody had flown to Clemson University, there were only about 25 people to read exams — and there weren’t enough teachers grading!  So they said, ‘Who can we call?’, and my roommate said, ‘Katherine majored in psychology and she’s teaching psychology, do you want me to call her?’,” Mrs. Minter said. “So on a quiet Sunday afternoon at the beginning of June, I got a telephone call from ETS in Princeton and they said, ‘Would you like to be an AP reader for AP Psych?’ and I said, ‘I would love to be! When do you need me?’ and they said, ‘Tomorrow at 8:00 AM’. I said, ‘Woah!’, but I went to my husband and said, ‘I’m gone! Okay? Is that okay?’, and he said, ‘Go for it!!’, and I packed up and they put me on a plane that night and I was there in the morning. And that was my first reading.  I’ve had many years of reading AP Exams off and on since then, and it’s always a valuable experience!”

Since that first reading, Mrs. Minter read every summer for 13 years in a row.

“It grew: there were 34 of us that year, then we needed 75, then 100, and now we’ve got over 250 readers, grading 200-some-odd thousand exams every year. I go every few years to the readings now, because I’ve done it a long time,” Mrs. Minter said. “Those of us that started in the early days were asked to give training, and I’m always willing to try; I said, ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’ll try!’, and so I would be hired by The College Board to go to different colleges and universities around the country and present how to teach AP Psychology to other teachers who were just starting.  Those week-long teaching sessions in the summer are called the AP Summer Institutes.”

Mrs. Minter has now been a consultant for the College Board for 22 years, travelling to multiple states to teach AP Psychology, and last March, she became an International College Board Consultant when they chose her to travel to Shanghai, China, to help open AP courses in Chinese schools.  Simultaneously, she has held offices for different psychological organizations, helping to spread the teaching of psychology and set the high standards for the course.

“I started as a state representative to the APA, trying to get psych teachers together to talk shop and network, and I would try in all my summer institutes to connect teachers; I would do that all over the country. Eventually I was nominated for a national office, to be the National Chairman of TOPSS. I said, ‘Well, sure, I’ll run’, and I actually won!” Mrs. Minter said. “So for three years, APA flew me to Washington, D.C. for 4 days, twice a year. We had representatives on the board from all over the country, representing different areas of psychology.  I was the Chair for three years, then after that served in the position of Past Chair.  So altogether, I served six years in the environment of Washington, D.C., learning all about how to affect policy.  All this time, I was also enjoying being a classroom teacher at Westwood.  Our national goal was to increase the rigor of all psychology courses across the country, whether AP, IB, or On-Level Psychology.

Because she was becoming well-known in the psychology world, Mrs. Minter was then approached to write a teacher’s manual to a college psychology textbook.

“Evidently, the publishers at McGraw-Hill called The College Board and the APA in Washington, asking, ‘Do you know anybody that you would recommend?’ And when you’ve been active and working in a field as I had — your name pops into their heads. And so in 2006, McGraw-Hill Publishers called me and said, ‘We have a college textbook that we want to market to the AP high school teacher, so we need an AP Teacher’s Manual written that will be shrink-wrapped to accompany the textbook.  Will you write it?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know how to do that, but yes, will you help me?’ and they said, ‘Well sure’, so I said okay!  So I was hired to write the AP Teacher’s Manual and it was published in 2009, used for three or four years — it’s in another edition now, so it’s still out there. So that was my first national publication experience, and that was cool!”

The manual may have been Mrs. Minter’s first publication, but it certainly wasn’t her last.

“About four or five years ago, Pearson / Prentice-Hall Publishers called me and said, ‘Would you write a high school textbook for us?’ They also asked another one of my colleagues, who was also a Past Chair, and we both agreed to co-author the textbook,” Mrs. Minter said.

Mrs. Minter discovered that writing a textbook is no easy task, but can also be loads of fun!

“It took eight months to complete it. I was writing at nights and on the weekends; most of our work was done in the summer, because we were both off school . I was still doing my Summer Institutes, but when that day was over at 5:00, I’d go have dinner, then spend four hours every single night writing this textbook — it was good, because there were no distractions in the hotel room,” Mrs. Minter said. “My partner, Will Elmhorst, was doing the same thing — he would send me his draft of a section to proofread and edit and add on, and I would send him a draft of another section, and we collaborated all the way through. Then it was sent by chapters to the publishers and editors, and they did their thing, and then we were asked to do fun extra things such as pick colors for the print headings — ‘Which picture do you want?  There’s four of them, what’s your favorite?’, and we’d say, ‘That one!’ and that’s the one that would go in the book. It was really a fabulous experience. And in the end, we completed it, and it was published.”  

Mrs. Minter and Mr. Elmhorst’s book sold so well, they were approached to update for a second edition, which is now selling well across the country.

“It’s kind of a matter of ‘say yes to new experiences’, and then figuring out later how to do it — because who knows how to do anything before you’ve done it?,” Mrs. Minter said. “I’ve learned that, somehow, you muddle through, you get the experience, and just the fact that you’ve stepped up — it opens doors for you.”

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