For most faculty members, there is no external stimulus that makes us take a good long reflective look at our teaching in a broad context. There is pressure to teach and to teach well, but that expectation always seems to be in the here and now. Hence, we usually look at our teaching in terms of the next class, the next test, the next demo for a lecture. In the absence of any significant external stimulus for reflecting on teaching, what can compete with funding deadlines, committee meetings, the student at our door, the next paper sitting nearly complete on our office desk, or even the more immediate need to finish our next lecture prep?
I won’t try to suggest that I have the singularly right or best answer to this question. Much like scaling a mountain, there are many paths through the foothills and approaches to the summit—which in analogy I admit I myself have still not reached. However, to extend the analogy, there are commonalities no matter how we approach the climb: at some point we’ll break out of the cover from under the tree line (we’ll be seen as faculty who think about our teaching), smaller mountains are easier to train on than larger ones (we’ll build confidence as we solve small problems before tackling big ones), and the experience we gain can be as much a benefit to others as to ourselves (sharing what we’ve learned about teaching benefits others and reinforces our own understanding). There are three simple points that I want to share, based on my own experiences with trying to improve my teaching.
Make time
If there is no external stimulus that requires you to broadly examine your teaching, then making the time to do this must come from within yourself and your own desire to be a better teacher. We all know the tactics we use to push everything out of the way when we are working on a proposal deadline or a journal manuscript. We close our office doors, we work at home, and we burn the midnight oil until we eat, sleep and dream of our project descriptions and data analysis. This is the hallmark of a successful manuscript or proposal: the consummate work that results from an intense focus. A similar tactic must be used to critically examine our teaching. If your office is like mine—filled with manuscripts for journal articles, a computer with an open email browser, and notes for the beginnings of the next grant proposal—then a different venue must be found for reflecting on teaching. In this regard, the existence alone of the Center for Teaching Excellence is significant. Even if your schedule is such that you can’t seem to free the time for CTE-sponsored events, just drop in to visit as a quiet place to get away from the lab and office. Their substantial library is an open resource for KU instructors. Bring notes with you from the last time you taught a particular course, or even just blank pages, and quietly reflect on your teaching. If you’re not sure what questions to be asking yourself to begin, the library resources can be good fodder, especially for those of us who have never thought about how to think about teaching.
When I started teaching at KU, I had never thought much past how one lecture connected to the next. It is a common “divide and conquer” technique that I think is a healthy defense mechanism to keep us from becoming overwhelmed, especially when preparing for a course offering the first time. I also fell victim to one of the more common pitfalls in teaching: the belief that somehow I was doing an excellent job with my lectures, and somehow it was the students who weren’t getting it. In the sciences, we’re not surprised when we repeat an experiment identically and get exactly the same result. But somehow when we teach, we get tripped up thinking that next semester, if we change nothing, somehow the class of students will be different and next time the result will be better. Equally disastrous is the belief that we must change everything about our teaching all at once. If we’re reflective enough to want to take a serious look at our teaching and desire to be better instructors, then statistically speaking we can’t be doing everything wrong.
Break it up
Just as you know you can’t teach a whole semester’s content in a day, realize that it is equally daunting to try to improve everything you can in your teaching on a similar schedule. This is why I didn’t say there was anything wrong with the “divide and conquer” approach to teaching class one lecture at a time. The pitfall is becoming myopic and looking at teaching as only a set of connected lectures that follow one another sequentially. Similarly, if we find a long laundry list of things to try to improve our instruction, attempting all of them at once can do more harm than good, supplanting effective practices for the sake of trying something new. Again, as researchers, we know that if we fix a problem by changing two things at once, we’re in the dark as to whether it was one or the other (or both) changes that resulted in a positive outcome. In terms of advancing knowledge, we haven’t done ourselves any favors, because eventually we have to go back and do the experiment to figure out which of the two factors (or the combination) resulted in improvement. There is something else we know from our research programs: some experiments fail to produce the outcome for which we hope. That doesn’t mean we haven’t cultivated valuable wisdom from them.
Learning these truths was the biggest surprise I discovered when I participated in the CTE Best Practices program in Spring 2003. Previously, I had been a passive attendant of the Teaching Summit and a few other CTE programs. I applied for the Best Practices Institute to make time to reflect on my teaching and to actively improve my instructional techniques. I picked through the readings that had been assigned before the scheduled meetings, and I had to admit to being intimidated by the feeling that it seemed everyone knew more about teaching than I did. I also worried that in order to improve, I’d have to become an expert in the field and start publishing papers in journals for education. Neither of these fears materialized. One of the most reassuring revelations of the Best Practices Institute was that I didn’t have to create an entirely new research program in physics education to improve my teaching. My colleagues attending Best Practices were all very much like me, each of us having come to the realization that we were not content with the status quo and wanting to improve our teaching practices. As we shared our problems and discussed our frustrations, it also became clear that the challenges we were having were not specific to our particular subject matter. Physicists were facing the same difficulties as professors in psychology, speech-language-hearing, engineering and East Asian studies.
The two-day program was beneficial in many ways. First, referring back to my initial point, it was two full days of discussion and reflection on teaching among colleagues with the same concerns and the same desire to make improvements. While CTE staff provided the structure and initiated the first discussions, by the end of the second day the group dynamic had changed significantly. In particular, the belief that those outside of one’s specific discipline couldn’t relate to someone else’s instructional problems had completely dissipated. Second, while the content of the program approached teaching like any other academic endeavor, and thinking critically about it like any other research problem, the ultimate product of the reflection was not a journal article. The point was not to make us all the next best experts in education or require us to establish a research infrastructure to publish scholarly communication in education journals. The workshop leader focused on giving us time to reflect on what we thought was not working in our teaching, then challenged us to interact with each other and come up with approaches we might try to improve its effectiveness. Third, we were all a group of colleagues in the same situation, comforted by the understanding that there was no “silver bullet” to solve all our instructional problems. If there was such a thing, it would have been packaged and sold to us on CD-ROM a long time ago. This awareness was very liberating; in an encouraging and non-judgmental environment, we had freedom to explore ideas both one-on-one and in groups, as well as time to reflect about possible benefits and pitfalls.
In the process, we rediscovered many of the work habits we try to impress upon our own students about learning: make time for homework and reflection, working in groups is often more effective than working alone, and don’t be afraid to get the wrong answer. Finally, we were introduced to a web-based tool to help us organize our thoughts and innovations that involved neither formulating a thoroughly detailed teaching portfolio nor developing a new research program. The web-based posters allowed us to simply and concisely organize assessments of our instruction and to serve as an ongoing journal of innovations we were going to attempt and how effective we found them to be.
A constant cycle
The best teaching practice is a constant cycle of reflection, innovation and assessment that brings us back to reflecting on our teaching on a regular basis. I would have considered my time well spent with CTE even if my experience had culminated with the Best Practices Institute in 2003. However, many participants continued a dialogue throughout the following academic year. We met to show each other the open questions we had each settled on exploring in a subsequent offering of one of our courses. We differed on how to present our reflections in our web posters, but these differences varied largely according to taste. Again, we found that the issues we dealt with transcended our disciplines, because many of our innovations centered on how material was being delivered, not in the details of subject matter. We compared and contrasted what we had learned through our initial reflection and innovations we implemented and assessed, which resulted in understanding each other’s outcomes, both successes and failures. This was even more evident when some of us responded to an invitation to return as part of Best Practices Institute 2004.
Our participation in this second CTE program was different from the prior year: we were brought in as facilitators to the conversation, not as experts with answers, but as colleagues with examples of reflection to help guide the dialogue. We found that rather than dominating the discussion, we were able to simply be examples of reflection that resulted in an exchange developing more quickly and easily among our new colleagues than our own group had managed the year before. We were able to provide a point of view that had not been as evident the first time: our web posters were only the beginning of a longer process of an evolving cycle of reflection, innovation and assessment, then a return to reflecting on a course again. The realization that this circular process is somewhat more important as a teaching practice regardless of the outcome of any particular innovation was more profound the second time around, for both the facilitators and the first-time participants. Had I made only one pass through the CTE program, I don’t know that I would have as deeply appreciated teaching as an open-ended scholarly endeavor. By providing an example to my colleagues, I believe the first-time participants saw clearly that one need not try to implement all possible innovations at once to have a successful experience reflecting upon teaching.
Finally, having worked through the process more than once, I find that I’m now much better equipped to reflect on my teaching on a regular basis. I still interact with my Best Practices colleagues from time to time, either by perusing their ongoing web posters, or by meeting them face-to-face at CTE programs. Interestingly, I find that I’m using my time more efficiently to reflect upon teaching in much the same way I do my research, resulting in a better balance between the two scholarly activities. I’m now able to do this quite effectively in my office, where my open email browser, my idea for the next grant proposal, and the journal manuscript I’m finishing all exist along side the courses that I continue to work to improve.
Jeffrey Olafsen is an assistant professor of physics. He has taught at KU since 1999.