For the 2024-2025 school year, the River Dell administration decided to expand their horizons to new elective opportunities for students, one of them being Introduction to Human Behavior taught by Mrs. Lauterhahn.
The idea for this new course came about last school year.
“We’re always reviewing our courses and looking at our program…annually,” explained Dr. Torres, Supervisor of ELA and Social Studies. “We do [this] so we can see where there are needs…I always feel like we could be offering more [electives].”
Social studies electives such as sociology and psychology are some of the most popular electives at River Dell. “Our enrollment in our psychology program is probably around 80 to 100 students,” said Torres.
Seeing the interest and popularity in social science electives, the administration sought to give underclassmen an earlier introduction to these courses. At the same time, it allowed students who are not specifically interested in psychology or sociology to be introduced to the social sciences from a broad perspective.
Dr. Torres shared that they wanted to “create a combination that might interest students who [weren’t] specifically interested in psych or…sociology but [were]” intrigued in those topics in general.
Introduction to Human Behavior provided the perfect balance as it covers anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
“You get to really talk about a lot of different things, and there is a lot of flexibility,” said Torres. “That’s where I engage the teacher…to develop a comprehensive curriculum,” she elaborated.
In order to determine which teacher would direct the course, Torres shared that she “basically had conversations with different teachers to see if they had any interest.”
Fortunately, Mrs. Lauterhahn, teacher of Constitutional Law and Civil Rights and AP Government and Politics, had this interest.
“I heard that there was a new course…and [Dr. Torres] asked if I would teach it,” explained Lauterhahn. “I love to teach new things, so I said ‘absolutely.’”
Aside from helping to write curriculum, Lauterhahn had to prepare over the summer by coming up with lessons plans, activities, and projects for the first semester of the year. Then she did the same for marking periods three and four. “During this first half of the school year during my prep time, I was able to prepare for the second half of the school year,” she shared.
Now almost a year later, there are two periods of Introduction to Human Behavior each consisting of about 30 students.
“I think it’s great because it gives a lot of students the ability to see if they actually want to pursue psychology,” explained Lauterhahn. “I think it’s a great experience for [students] to be a little bit outside the box of their usual core subjects.”
Dr. Torres agreed, as she shared that the course provides “a flexibility in human interest.”
“I just think it’s a really dynamic course,” Torres added. “It’s one of those types of courses that really every year you can do so many things with.”
