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Teaching

Following my Research blog, let's check out a few more words from Webster's.

Professor: "college or university teacher of the highest academic rank in a particular branch of learning".
Teach/teaching: "to impart knowledge of or skill in; give instruction in"
Learn/learning: "to acquire knowledge of or skill in, by study, instruction or experience".

So the inter-relationship is quite clear. Professors teach and students learn (although many professors recognize how much we learn from our students and that's where our own "experience" comes in). The Professor-Student Interaction The teaching/learning interaction occurs in many ways at a research university: the classroom, the laboratory, the discussion group, Facebook, the library, the podcast, the (a)synchronous distance class, the professor-student advising partnership, the mentor/advisee relationship for a masters or doctoral degree, etc.

This partnership implies a set of mutual of responsibilities. The teacher shall:

be on top of the subject matter
be skilled in transferring the requisite knowledge to the students
turn up to class on time
challenge/question the students
involve the students in learning
set and grade appropriate assessments of students' knowledge
advise them continually about the best way to obtain their degree.

Likewise, the student shall:

be prepared and attentive
turn up to class on time
participate in class
challenge/question the professor
carry out assignments on time
seek advice on curriculum and courses to take.

These two sets of responsibilities must also be interpreted in reverse as the individual rights of the professor and the student within the mutual compact between the teacher and the student.

One of the most difficult parts of the professor-student interaction is reconciling the differing expectations of the student and the professor within the scope of the mutual rights and responsibilities that I just outlined.

Teaching - Then

For generations, the way in which professors imparted their knowledge was to stand in front of the class, speak and perhaps write (chalk and talk). I was taught thus and I learned most things that way. Professors prided themselves on walking into their classroom, starting the lecture by writing on the board, talking at students for an hour or so then walking out (i.e. auditory learning). If we were lucky, the tedium was interrupted with the occasional Kodak 35 mm slide, or a personal anecdote. Basically learning was accomplished by just listening for an hour (although that clearly worked for me and those others who could learn that way). Now we are much more aware that learning comes in several different styles – experiential, visual, auditory, reading/writing, tactile, etc. Today we teachers need to incorporate all of those styles into our teaching, not just the one that worked for us when we were taught to learn (and, in allowing us to succeed, likely excluded equally talented colleagues who learned differently).

So, just because I was taught a certain way, doesn't mean that I should continue to teach that way. Students who come to university today learned in different ways in their K-12 system than we did (depending of course on the relative age of students and faculty). It is our responsibility as professors to teach students in ways that they can relate to, not in ways with which we are comfortable because that's how we learned. The same argument can be made for research. Just because we solved a problem a certain way during our terminal scholarly degree, doesn't mean that we solve every subsequent research problem that same way – but more about teaching and research later.

Teaching – Now

If we are to teach our students in the way that they are taught in K-12 system, then we must stay in contact with that system and be aware of how new generations of students will expect to be taught when they come to university.

I was recently in Mobile at the George Hall elementary school – a 100% minority school in one of the poorest areas of that city. The teachers were podcasting some of their classes and in the process of setting up streaming video webcasts for some of their other classes. At another high school in Mobile, foreign language class was taught synchronously on-line from a school where there were enough students who wanted to learn Spanish that a teacher was on site. So the web, the ipod and the video from afar are all common in third grade. Should we not be doing the same at a leading technological university?

As teachers we should continually find out the expectations of our students in terms of the best way for them to learn – not seek their input on the content or the way we test their grasp of the content - but the ways that we communicate the knowledge that we believe they must gain from the courses we teach in order that they be successful in applying that knowledge.

Teaching Success

There are several versions I have heard of the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the freshmen (usually in an engineering) class and the professor opens the conversation on the first day of classes by saying "look to your right and to your left: one of those two you see will not graduate from this institution." And this fact was taken as a measure of the quality of the university! In what other profession is the failure of the staff to communicate effectively with the new members of the organization regarded as a measure of success?

While we should always aim to raise our expectations of our students, we should always measure our success in light of theirs. The bell curve of human intelligence is fundamentally unchanged. The bell curve of educational success should not be tied to teaching methods. If our students arrive at UAHuntsville learning via the web, Wikipedia, Google Earth, team projects, etc., why should we be surprised if they don't relate to teaching in our old ways? If we fail our students because they can't learn the way that we teach, who's responsibility is this, within the professor-student compact?

I believe it is the professor's responsibility.

For example, we may bemoan current students' lack of ability to memorize facts or crucial equations but we forget that they have learned by looking up facts when needed, rather then rote memorization which was a strong facet of teaching a generation ago. Is the ability to memorize facts as important today? For example, on my iPhone, a Yahoo search for Boltzmann's constant (k) reveals 638,000 hits in 0.23 seconds and gives both Boltzmann's original equation defining the constant and the commonly accepted value as 1.3806503 × 10-23 m2 kg s-2 K-1. Similar searches give the essential information on everything from the sublime Socratic method to the trivial volume of a dodecahedron. Memorizing such information, once essential to us when we were tied to textbooks, is no longer required because it is immediately accessible, wherever we are. So why test for and value such memory skills and expect them to be a necessary skill for learning today?

So to be successful teacher today, we should perhaps welcome iPhones and Blackberries into the teaching arena and use them as educational tools, not bar them as counter-productive. In my generation, we banned calculators (but not slide rules!) because we thought calculators prevented students from learning the skills that we thought necessary (i.e. mastering a slide rule) instead of welcoming the new technology and using it to teach differently. While there is still a place for chalk and talk, for one-on-one discussions after the class, for slides (PowerPoint or otherwise) to illustrate a complex point, for handouts (but not paper ones!!) to augment the class content, we should not repeat the pedagogical mistakes of previous generations and ban technology when it can improve, rather than detract from, our ability to communicate with our students.

The Professorial Challenge

Part of the overall difficulty is, I believe, tied to the professorial skill set. We professors start our careers as scholars in a specific field and, in various ways, we refine our knowledge over the years to the point where we are convinced of the validity of our conclusions. Given the time and effort we have spent examining the alternatives and arguing the finer points of the details, such certainty is not surprising. So we know we are experts and we are right - and indeed we might well be (although any student of intellectual history knows that all our current certainties are either wrong or will not be viewed in the same light in a hundred years time). It is a natural human tendency to transfer the certainties of our scholarly expertise (such as the way to teach Wellington's role in Napoleonic wars) to other issues - and I plead as guilty as the next professor to that certainty.

Another limitation of the professorial skill set is the counterintuitive notion that the more we know about a given concept the harder it is to teach that concept. This is because the more we know about something, the more difficult it is to see why others cannot understand what is so obvious to us. For example, in my own field of electron microscopy, the crucial concept, central to the whole discipline, is that the passage of an electron wave through a crystal is described concisely by a pair of coupled, harmonic, second-order, differential equations and all aspects of the interpretation of electron images and diffraction patterns are contained in these beautiful Darwin-Howie-Whelan equations. It is indeed difficult for me to understand that others don't see this beauty so clearly.

However, it took me more than 20 years since first encountering the DHW equations in undergraduate class before the implications were so obvious to me. So I much prefer to introduce students to the exquisite nature of electron images and diffraction patterns before trying to persuade them that they are all governed by two complex equations. For certain students who will never become microscopists I teach them in totally different ways to the hard-core physicist and nanotechnologist for whom the technique is essential. For example, it is far better that all students be inspired first by the power of the microscope images, and only afterwards be interested enough to master the essential equations (rather than the opposite approach - to which I was subjected).

Perhaps one consequence of this "familiarity breeds incomprehension" aspect is that all professors should teach beyond their specialty, be expected to teach a variety of courses within their own discipline and give no course continually throughout their professorial career. Preparing and giving a course in a different topic quickly reveals ones own lack of knowledge of certain aspects and thus helps us in relating to those students who face similar challenges in understanding our teaching.

So How Should We Approach Our Teaching?

We are hamstrung because few, if any, of us were taught how to teach before we became professors. Several (or usually one or two) sessions as a TA do not qualify anyone to become a teacher. In fact, most professors learn to teach by trial and error coupled with osmosis, perhaps imitating those teachers from whom we learned best (because, by chance, their pedagogical method and our specific learning style coincided?)

One of the most difficult and vivid experiences early in my own teaching life was to have my class videotaped. As I watched the video privately later that day, it was immediately and painfully evident to me how I only looked at one side of the class, I often addressed the blackboard as I chalked (still the only option in 1983), I failed to answer the question as I talked because I didn't listen to it, and so on. I recommend subjecting yourself to a similar ordeal if you wish to improve your teaching.

So how do I get my class videotaped or seek other help on how to teach better? Well we have experts at UAHuntsville, as do all other universities, who are teaching professionals (i.e. teaching is their scholarly expertise) and they are aware of the latest theories and skill sets for effective teaching and can, in turn, teach them to us. We should all continue to improve and refine our teaching styles, just as we continue to improve and refine our scholarly skills in our chosen area of expertise. None of us would be content to do our research today using the computers we used during our Ph.Ds. Why then should we be content with using the teaching skills today that we learned during our Ph.Ds? Let me expand further on this point because it relates to our twin roles as teachers and researchers/scholars

The Interplay of Teaching and Research

I have often said (starting in my interview for this position) that I regard teaching and scholarly research as two sides of the same coin. At a research university, all tenure-track/tenured faculty members should be expected to do both – and do both well. However, I acknowledge that in different disciplines within the university there are different expectations. For example, if there are no masters/doctoral programs then scholarship would involve more individual creativity and research and less advising of graduate students. Likewise I know that faculty members at different stages in their professional careers may change the relative distribution of their research and teaching. Often the younger faculty will be at the forefront of their specialty, having recently completed a doctorate or post-doc. appointment. This is the time for chairs and colleagues to mentor them and ensure that they embark on a successful research career (while also beginning to develop their teaching portfolio). Likewise, after some decades in their research field some faculty may feel that their creative ideas have waned and they wish to commit more time to teaching. Alternatively, they may become international scholars whose research is even more time consuming than earlier in their career. Such distributions are natural, should be encouraged - and exceptions should also be expected and made.

Nevertheless, at all stages of a professorial career, there are tremendous advantages to intermingling the different skill sets of teaching and scholarship.

A scholar will be:

on top of the latest developments
au fait with the current controversies
enthusiastic about her or his field
understand the relevance of their specialty to the world
committed to passing on their enthusiasm and knowledge in the classroom, thus inspiring the next generation to follow in their footsteps.

In turn, accomplished teachers:

understand how to get complex ideas across in a simple form
hold a class's attention at 8:00am on a Monday
focus on getting one message across in any one class rather than doing a brain dump of a dissertation in 50/75 mins.
always relate key curricular ideas to other parts of the students' major and/or to experiences in their own lives (or preferably the lives of the students).

Such teaching skills are also invaluable in making polished, coherent presentations at conferences and in seminars at other universities, crucial for distilling complex ideas into clearly written research proposals (that may be reviewed by peers who are not experts in the precise field) and perfect for getting donors enthused about support for particular parts of the academic enterprise.

What is intriguing to me is that scholarly researchers in many disciplines:

recognize the value of shared and/or interdisciplinary research
seek co-investigators who bring complementary skills to find the best solution to the particular problem
revel in demonstrating their own research expertise to their peers in publications and proposals
are happy to tell the world about what they are doing at every possible conference
always seek new and better ways (technical or otherwise) to solve their research problems.

In contrast, it is relatively rare that university teachers indulge in these same practices. If a professor is committed more to teaching than to scholarly research, for whatever reason, should it not be expected (at least at a research university) that the professor bring that same scholarly curiosity to their teaching? I think it reasonable to expect that full-time teachers:

become the go-to experts in their own departments on pedagogical matters (technical and otherwise)
be willing to team-teach to learn different views of their class topics
mentor younger, less experienced colleagues on teaching in the particular department
always seek to learn skills they do not have personally from other top of the line teachers (or from brand-new teachers who think differently about teaching)
share their skills with others at teaching conferences
publish papers in peer-reviewed teaching journals on their latest teaching breakthroughs
show their colleagues how these breakthroughs can be used to solve pedagogical problems
bring more students into their classrooms and teach those students in better, more engaging, ways.

Teaching is central to every university's mission and goals and, as I said in my previous blog on research, 60% of a professor's salary from the State goes for teaching (actually, I said 40%, as several people pointed out - so much for my quantitative skills). Either way, teaching is a major responsibility for all tenured and tenure-track professors. Being an excellent teacher is, and will continue to be, a prerequisite for hiring, promotion and tenure at UAHuntsville.

So, as you have just read, I have my own distinct views on what constitutes a good teacher, distilled out over 25 years of undergraduate and graduate teaching at a research university. As an expert in the role of unfilled states above the Fermi level on the interfacial embrittlement of metals, I am naturally convinced of the merits of my pedagogical conclusions given above.

I would hope that my views would be challenged and that various alternative arguments will be presented, vigorously promoted and vehemently defended.

Disagreeing with me is certainly an option. Engaging in the conversation across the campus about teaching expectations and methods is not optional. We must engage in such conversations continually at all levels.

Give Dave your comments here!