---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 21:42:22 -0700 From: Kevin Karplus Subject: Re: Incentives? Offices of Teaching Support (exact name varies) are a common institutional response to pressure to provide better teaching. I've yet to see any indication that they are effective a producing better teaching. They do provide employment opportunities for people with PhDs in education, and they could, perhaps, be useful to some faculty. I've not been too impressed with the ones I've seen. The UCSC office has tried a variety of different things: 1) mid-quarter course evaluations 2) reviewing videotapes of classes with the instructor 3) seminars presented by top teachers in the university 4) seminars presented by outside experts 5) workshops on new classroom technology (world-wide web, live projection of computer screens, ...) Some of these things have been interesting (particularly some of the discussions lead by top teachers); some has been popular (mid-quarter course evaluations are often requested by untenured faculty); but I'm not sure if any of it has really translated into better teaching or better learning by the students. A big part of the problem is that any University-wide effort is bound to be quite generic, and focus almost exclusively on the mechanical aspects of lecturing or leading discussion groups. These skills are useful, but not very difficult to learn to an adequate level. (Improvement is always possible, but except for the worst teachers, the return on the effort for improving just the mechanics is not very large.) A good teaching discussion might focus more on how to teach specific content, how to structure the material to make a coherent whole, what ideas are the crucial ones for a particular class, and which stuff is just entertaining examples. This sort of discussion, which mixes content and methods, can only occur when the people in the discussion are intimately familiar with the material to be taught and the range of students to be taught. For practical purposes, this means that such a discussion requires that the participants have taught the course (or perhaps one course before or after in a sequence). In universities where the teaching duties don't rotate much, there may not be many people within the university to have the discussion with. It may be a good idea for the research conferences to set aside some time for discussions on a particular, commonly taught class, so that people can talk about their accomplishments and their problems with people who can provide meaningful feedback. This need not be a formal paper session---having people speak informally for 5-minutes or less on particular problems they have had or nifty solutions they have found will probably do more to foster the necessary discussion than long papers. For example, this summer I attended a 1-week workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl on bio-informatics. Although the week was mainly dedicated to discussions of research (which varied from fascinating to tedious), there was one evening discussion where people talked about the various bio-informatics courses that they were teaching or about to teach. The range of different views of what was appropriate to teach in such a course was considerable, and often reflected the research directions of the faculty do the teaching. I did get some good ideas (and pointers to instructional material) for the course that UCSC is creating. Now, having made the point that I think the teaching discussions need to occur at a disciplinary level, and that there isn't much that the universities can do as institutions, let me contradict myself a little and point out a couple of times I have had good teaching conversations with colleagues from other disciplines. In both cases, the discussions came at the end of a quarter in which I had taken a course from the other faculty member. In one case it was an introductory molecular biology course, and in the other it was a course on campus architecture and planning in the US. At the end of the courses, I was able to talk with the faculty about what (I thought) had worked well or poorly in the course--which specific assignments had been too easy or too difficult, which discussion techniques had worked with the students, and which had failed, what I had had trouble getting from lectures into my notes, what I saw fellow students struggling with. These discussions would not have been possible had I just attended one or two lectures---they relied on my having done all the work a student would have done---on my having been a student for the purposes of the course. WARNING: I'm now about to go into a lot of detail on the above two example. You may wish to skip down to the "----" line below. FOR THE CHEMISTS on this list, I'll tell you a little about my experiences in the molecular biology class. This was a junior-level course aimed at students intending to continue in molecular biology, not at pre-med students. There were slightly over 100 students in this lecture course. First, you should be aware that I did not have the pre-requisite organic chemistry---indeed I had not had any chemistry since a high school chemistry class 25 years earlier. One consequence of this is that I could not copy the structures drawn on the board as fast as the instructor talked about them, and I could not trust my notes afterwards to have all the atoms correct. I noticed, however, that many of the other students were also not copying the structures accurately. This observation is one that a generic classroom observer could have made, as long as they were informed enough to recognize that the students were not copying accurately. The homeworks I found fairly easy, though it was frustrating that the first homework reviewing equilibrium constants (not review for me!) required looking up a constant in a reference book, since the required constant was not in the text, the assignment, or the lecture notes. The "intellectual content" of the homeworks seemed fairly small, and I could often do the week's homework in just an hour or two flipping through the text (not even reading the full assignment). The closed-book exams I found quite difficult---not because the questions themselves were hard---they were very similar to the homeworks, but because they required enormous amounts of memory work. For example, remembering the structure of all the amino acids, and all the dimensions of the different DNA configurations. I did not have the time to spend on memory work, and I did not attend the review sessions (which often presented what you needed to memorize). Despite putting in only an hour or two a week outside class, and not having had any of the pre-requisite material, I still finished in the middle of the class. This leads me to suspect that my experiences in the class were not so very different from the other students, despite their more thorough preparation. Several computer science grad students with interest in bioinformatics were also taking (or sitting in on) the class. One of them (who like me, hadn't had any chemistry for 20 years) did extremely well in the course, putting in nearly 20 hours a week to really master the material and ace the exams. A year later, she cannot remember the structure of all the amino acids, nor the dimensions of the DNA configurations, despite doing publishable work in "computational molecular biology". Her experience and mine lead me to seriously question the value of the memory work so heavily emphasized in the course. Both of us would have preferred a class in which more attention was paid to using data to elicit interesting facts, or in repeating the discovery processes that lead to finding the knowledge originally, and less to raw memory work. Of course, this may represent a disciplinary bias---computer science relies heavily on the skilled application of basic principles, and chemistry may rely more on bringing together previously unrelated facts. Memory work plays little role in computer science, but the some of the concepts require a lot of practice to master. After the course was over, I did have an e-mail conversation with the instructor of the course about my observations. I don't know whether he will make any changes in the way he teaches (he disagrees rather strongly with me about the value of having memorized large numbers of facts), but it was a discussion that we could not have had without my having taken his course. FOR THE NON-CHEMISTS, a different example. Last year I took a 3-credit course that focused on the book "Campus--an American Planning Tradition" by Paul Venable Turner, taught by an art historian. This class was very different in style from ones I'm used to, with only 20 students, and almost the entire class time devoted to discussion by the students, with minimal guidance by the professor. I learned some tricks (like requiring the students to turn in notes on the reading, to make sure they did it, or requiring them to bring in 5 discussion topics to each class meeting) that I may use in the desktop publishing class I teach. I also saw a different style of evaluating writing than the one we have been using in the technical writing class I teach, though I doubt that I can use it, since it took about an hour of her time per 3-page paper, and my tech writing class has 25-45 students who each do about 50 pages of writing in 10 weeks. I would have to spend full time doing nothing but reading student papers. I had several short chats with the professor after class, and she commented that she had not talked about teaching in such detail with another faculty member in years. FOR BOTH: For the past 9 years, I have been averaging taking about one course a year (really taking, with full intent to learn the material, do all the homework, and take all exams). Some of these courses have been related to my research (the molecular biology course to improve my work in bioinformatics), some have been for my teaching (a course in traditional lead type-setting to prepare for creating a desktop-publishing course), some have been to keep up in my field (grad courses in computer science or computer engineering), and some have been for recreation. Taking a course is about 10 hours a week of work (supposed to be about 15, but I'm a little quicker than most of the students). If we believe the fiction of 40-hour work weeks, this means about one quarter of my time for 1/3 of the year, or about 8% of my 9-month appointment. (Of course, since the university doesn't recognize taking other courses as any part of my professional duties, this has come entirely out of my "free" time.) ----------------------------- If there is a point to this long, rather rambling message, it is that one of the best ways for us to renew our teaching and to have the sorts of collegial discussions about teaching that are now missing, is for us to return to being students occasionally. Strongly encouraging faculty to take one course a year as students would go a long way toward making teaching community property once again. The cost in faculty time is fairly high, but I think the rewards (both for the individual and the community) are worth it. Kevin Karplus karplus@cse.ucsc.edu http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus Due to budgetary constraints the light at the end of the tunnel is being turned off. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 13:55:58 +1000 From: Helen Nave Subject: Re: research vs teaching, and evaluation thereof I think that the differences in educational systems across different countries need to be taken into account in this discussion. In the U.S.A., does "University" mean "research institution"? That is the impressiona I am getting. Here in Australia, all our Universities are both teaching and learning institutions. There are research centres which do no formal teaching (eg C.S.I.R.O.), and there are places which do no research (TAFE's (where courses in anything from being a mechanic to painting are studied, but not the usual university courses, and they are no where near as competetive to get into). The University of Queensland offers study in medicine, engineering, science, arts, dentistry, physiotherapy, human movements, education, economics, law, commerce, vet. science, to name a few. There is no common year throughout the university, although engineers have a common first year before choosing their department, and arts and science students may major in a couple areas out of many choices. Research and teaching is done in all departments of the university. Helen Nave ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 14:09:01 +1000 From: Helen Nave Subject: Re: contract research On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, Jack Martin Miller wrote: > > Having jobs for ones students over the summer is a great way to attract and > keep the better students --- other universities also try to hire our > students and convince them to move. > As a compulsory part of the engineering degree at this university, students must do 60 (in used to be 90) days work experience - effectively wiping out any holidays except those at the end of first year. This can be done at an engineering firm, or at a place of research, but must be under the supervision of a qualified professional engineer. Helen Nave ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 07:47:19 PDT From: Michael Pavelich Subject: Re: Incentives? Re John Wells' question of where is the support for inproving teaching? In the engineering community, the Educational Research and Methods (ERM)Division of ASEE ai find to be a great support group for improving teaching. The folks there are full of ideas, are open to newcomers, offer excellent workshops/publications. I suggest you try to get to an ASEE or FIE meeting this year and join up with us. As to support on campus, many schools have "Offices of Teaching Effectiveness" whose sole purpose is to help faculty work on their teaching. I don't know if there are any such in gumbo land, but you could contact the national organization of such offices(POD). David Graf at Iowa State is the the POD organizing officer dgraf@iastate.edu. POD also puts out some of the better monographs and books on college teaching. My typing this brought a tactic to mind. A way to begin the change toward a more balanced reward system for profs is to push for initiation of campus-wide teacher development offices. If your campus has one, the push would be to support it and to help mold it into one that understands and promulgates the scholarship of teaching. This would be a grass roots way of changing the system. There are professional "Faculty Development" folks out there who are very good, really understand the scholarship of teaching. We need to support them and use them. Mike Pavelich CSM ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 10:29:12 -0400 From: Jack Martin Miller Subject: Re: Who Should Teach/Who Should Research? >Abolish tenure, pay teachers to teach, in teaching only institutions >and pay researchers to research. in research institues > If >someone does well at both, pay them what they're worth. and they get to teach in universities, since that is what universities are about - neither fish nor fowl -- this strange meld of the two -- call in "renaisance person" if you want, it isn't perfect, but it works much of the time. Make it better, Yes, abolish it as Scheer's suggestion would do - No. > >That is simple. > >The questions then become.... > >1) What is a good teacher worth, and what is a good researcher worth? As I said, the two extremes belong in different instituions, and the middle ground is the University The question becomes "What is a good teacher and researcher worth" > >2) How can we measure what is "good"? that's the rub > >Please comment. > >********************************************************************** >Robert J. Scheer Sounds like the perfect way to drive the best people out of the system. Jack Martin Miller Professor of Chemistry Adjunct Professor of Computer Science Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S 3A1. Phone (905) 688 5550, ext 3402 FAX (905) 682 9020 e-mail jmiller@sandcastle.cosc.brocku.ca http://chemiris.labs.brocku.ca/staff/miller/miller.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 09:56:58 CST6 From: "Henry L. Welch" Subject: Re: Who Should Teach/Who Should Research? > Robert J. Scheer writes: > > Abolish tenure, pay teachers to teach, and pay researchers to research. If > someone does well at both, pay them what they're worth. > We operate on a system here at MSOE that is free of tenure. Our promotion and reappointment systems (currently separate entities) are geared primarily toward demonstration of effective teaching, but do provide rewards for research, consulting, and industry sabbaticals. Sure, our system is not perfect and is frequently considered for evolution, but it works. The faculty here do not feel the need to work themselves into the ground only to here that they've been denied tenure and have to start the process all over again or somewhere else. We further do not allow faculty to rest on their laurels. Since you are regularly up for reappointment you must continue to teach effectively. If you aren't staying current that will show in the reveiw process. If you aren't successful at teaching that will show as well. Teaching can be evaluated and rewarded by its own merits. In terms of teaching load (and other duties) most of the engineering departments use a microscopic workload evaluation that takes into account number of students (30 or less per section), number of sections, number of lab sections (all taught by faculty), and level of design content in the course as well as other factors such as whether the course or text is new. Release time is frequently granted for administrative duites, course development, and other approved projects. The typical 40 hour load evaluates to about 2.5 classes per term. I have plenty of time to keep current on the literature and the new technology and to become involved in industry related projects or at conferences each year. ALL of this is rewarded, as it should be. Grant writing is also supported through a full time staff that takes care of much of the overhead of applying for, matching, and administration. (This is often underutilized.) And the intersting part about all of this is that this is viable economically. We are private so we only collect publice funds as they apply to individual student financial aid and grants. Our tuition is competitive with other private engineering schools in our geographical area. We've been doing this successfully for over 90 years. I see no reason why more research oriented universities and institutions cannot develop similar systems. ====> Henry <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Dr. Henry L. Welch, P.E. Phone: 414/277-7326 (W) Associate Professor 414/375-8763 (H) EECS Department Fax: 414/277-7465 Milwaukee School of Engineering 1025 N. Broadway welch@warp.msoe.edu Milwaukee, WI 53202-3109 "Life's a bitch and then you're reincarnated." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 13:48:50 -0500 From: Alton Banks Subject: Re: non-science majors;class size >Kevin Karplus said > >Perhaps the mistake here is in trying to teach a group of over 300 >students. Why are the non-science majors being treated like cattle? >Perhaps this has something to do with their antagonism toward science >and scientists? If science students take a literature or history >class, are they confronted with enormous lecture halls? > >By making our big classes so big, we have made them more difficult to >teach well. Perhaps we should consider teaching more, but smaller >classes. > ******************************************************* I would argue that universities since the 60s have, through their desire to provide a "higher education" to everyone who wants one, provided an environment in which-given the resources- large classes are necessary. At NCSU we teach about 2200 students in the first semester of general chem. and about 1000 in the second semester of our "science students" series. These are classes of 250-300. Given the number of faculty available, there is little alternative, save for having each faculty member teach 4 or 5 sections (of approximately 50-75 students). A DIFFICULT PROBLEM TO RESOLVE, YES ? Alton Banks ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 14:40:56 EDT From: Richard Felder Subject: Large classes I would echo my friend and colleague Alton Banks' comments about large sections. Except for a few misguided administrators who equate "productivity" and "efficiency" with "quality" in a teaching program, most departments that teach huge sections do so under constraint, not because they want to. The alternatives are hiring lots more faculty, which is generally impossible because of both finances and space requirements, or imposing impossibly heavy teaching loads on the existing faculty, which creates serious morale problems and can damage both teaching and research program effectiveness. Large classes don't have to be poorly taught, however. If effective use is made of individual and small-group exercises in class, and if good interactive instructional software is properly used as an adjunct to lecturing, then the quality of learning can be almost as good as that achievable in small classes (and better if lecturing is all that happens in the small classes). BUT, to use those alternative instructional methods effectively, you have to know what they are and how to implement them without losing control of your class. That information is available in the engineering and science education literature and also in the general education literature if you know where to look for it, and you can also get it at workshops and meetings of such organizations as the American Society for Engineering Education, as Mike Pavelich noted. Unfortunately, in most science and engineering departments at research universities few faculty members (if any) read the education literature or go to education workshops or conferences, and teaching in both large and small classes consequently remains business as usual--professor talks, students listen (or don't listen), and the information being presented doesn't pass through anyone's brain. Hence Boyer's argument for the different scholarships. If SOMEONE in each department can spend the time and energy to find out how to do all that stuff, and then do it without being directly or indirectly punished, and then help interested colleagues learn how to do it, the drawbacks of large classes immediately start to diminish. What is needed to make all that happen? Lyle Feisel has done an outstanding job of telling us, in my opinion: Establish a meaningful evaluation system, clarify institutional values and back up the values with action, not just rhetoric, and be creative about providing rewards to faculty members willing to carry the burden of the required changes. It will be nice if the right people are listening. Rich Felder felder@eos.ncsu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 15:44:00 EDT From: "Peter Gold, Penn State U." Subject: Re: Large classes I envy Prof. Banks and his general chemistry lectures of 250-300 students. Ours are close to 400 and even as we telecommunicate a 600-seat lecture hall is growing on the drawing boards. I am currently teaching about 260 in the first semester of physical chemistry. His colleague, Prof. Feder, tells us that the use of individual and small-group exercises and good interactive instructional software can make up for the large class sizes. We are beginning to experiment with the former on a small scale in our first semester of general chemistry but find it difficult to see how we can extend it to the entire class. I have looked long and hard to find suitable instructional software for general chemistry but have yet to find anything that fits our needs; also very little of what I have seen is "interactive" in any real sense. Even if we did find something I doubt that our computer labs have the capacity to permit extensive use by our students. I have found nothing useful for physical chemistry. We do go to meetings now and then and read the occasional education journal; we sometimes even talk to our colleagues in Education. We have not seen a lot that seems applicable to chemistry classes at our scale, particularly for the higher- level courses. If Profs. Feder and Banks have, we should like very much to hear of them. ------------------------------------------------------------------ L. Peter Gold phone (814) 865-7694 Chemistry/Penn State Univ. fax phone (814) 865-3314 152 Davey Laboratory internet LPG@PSU.EDU University Park, PA 16802 ------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 14:58:29 -0600 From: "Preston J. MacDougall" Subject: to effect change: think outside the box The suggestions to effect change seem much to focused on the individual faculty member. Attention should be paid to the educational institution as a whole, as well. After all, alma mater is singular. I also think that student evaluations, usually done before a course is complete (!), are a poor way measuring teaching effectiveness. When I think back about which Professors I rated highly when I was an undergraduate, I realize that I put much too much emphasis on glitzy, superficial lectures. Similarly, Professors that I did not rate highly, taught in greater depth and had greater lasting impact. To take these two factors into account, why not base part of a school's funding on the tax returns that their graduates file to Uncle Sam? With some actuarial help, and government cooperation, such a system could be designed to reward schools that educate their students "effectively". <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Preston J. MacDougall Assistant Professor Department of Chemistry Box X-101 Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, TN 37132 ph: (615)898-2741, FAX: (615)898-5182 e-mail: pmacdougall@mtsu.edu <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 17:00:00 EDT From: Richard Felder Subject: Re: Large classes I've responded privately to Prof. Gold's questions about group work in large classes and interactive software for chemistry, since these issues are a bit removed from the conference topic. If any of you are interested, send me a message off the listserver and I'll send you the same information. Rich Felder felder@eos.ncsu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 17:25:34 -0400 From: William Church Subject: Re: Course for Non-Science Majors Ultimately, one must ask if he/she is making >a major contribution to the total education effort and if he/she is happy >with what he/she is doing. If the answer is "yes" then probably everything >is going to work out provided you did not decide to do this until after you >got tenure. Hardly anyone ever complains about someone who is doing at >outstanding job regardless of the job. >John Hogg >Professor of Chemistry >Undergraduate Advisor >Texas A&M University >> Why does the tenure system propogate this kind of hypocrisy -- but that is another discussion --- or is it? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 16:01:37 MDT From: Reed Howald Subject: Re: Large classes A person can be a good teacher, a good researcher, a good parent, grade papers, etc., but not all at one time. The answer to large classes, effective teaching, and classroom discipline is team teaching. There should be two or three teachers in any lecture room with over 200 students all the time. This is also the answer to the two classes of professors problem. Your good researchers and your best teachers should be assigned the job of working together in teaching the large introductory classes, each contributing in their strongest areas. Cooperative education works for students - It can give teachers a better understanding of each other also. Unfortunately this does not fit with the "this is my course" philosophy of many teachers. Most students can be taught to work together in 10 hours of instruction. I believe that even most faculty can be taught. Our colleges and universities work after a fashion now because we do know one method of teaching that really works - direct apprenticeship. For the Ph.D. degree we require a 4 year or longer apprenticeship with a proven researcher in the field of study. We get a good yield of students committed to research and to the field of study - people who will work the long hours to do excellent research work and teach whatever well motivated students they encounter for recognition from the discipline in spite of the general lack or recognition from college and university administrations. The yield is too great in that there are not enough research and/or teaching positions to employ all the committed researchers produced, but we tamper with that part of the edifice of science at our peril. Where we desparately need improvement is in science teaching in the K-13 area. I strongly endorse interfacing is science laboratories at all levels to give students more experience collecting more data with less labor. Team teaching of all large classes and mor use of cooperative education will help. Internet connections will be very helpful in providing the contact with other scientists which science teachers need and which has been completely absent in high school teaching and marginal even at large universities. We are not going to succeed in getting school boards, college trustees, or university administrations to change and reward the four areas of Boyer equally or even equitably. Fortunately that is not required for change by the committed people we are now recruiting into the teaching profession. Support from their colleagues will be enough, and this we can accomplish now! Sincerely, Reed Howald Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Montana State University Bozeman, MT 59717 "uchrh@earth.oscs.montana.edu" ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 17:16:30 -0500 From: barton jan Subject: Re: Felder Paper This is a welcome and reasoned view. Janice Barton. On Tue, 17 Oct 1995, Robert L. Lichter wrote: > I've been trying to follow the blitz in this adventure. It's akin to > running a symposium with speakers and respondents all talking at once, and > in fact is one of the limitations of an Internet-mediated exchange. Thus, > I haven't had an aopportunity to look in detail at the megabytes of > bandwidth that have come close to saturating storage. Nonetheless... > > With one or two exceptions, I have seen no references to what the whole > educational exercise is all about: > > ---------------- > | The students.| > ---------------- > > The issue, in my judgment, is not whether faculty teach well. > > The issue is whether students learn. > > Genuine measurement of that is a long-term process and is a multivariable > function. > > Breaking faculty activities artificially into "teaching vs. research" is > arbitrary and misleading. There are over 3,600 institutions of higher > learning in the U. S. alone (this is an international discussion so I won't > presume to know what the global total is!), each with its own history, > tradition, resources, focus, type of student, type of faculty. It is folly > to expect all institutions to adopt the same model. Each will find its own > way. Each will blend research and non-research approaches to facilitating > students' ability both to learn and ultimately to develop the tools that > will allow them to take independent responsibility for their own learning. > To argue that research by itself hampers or strengthens teaching misses the > point. If the research (_including_ that at the doctoral level) achieves > the above _student-centered_ objectives, then it is effective teaching. If > it does not, then it isn't. But by the same token, all the pedagogical > techniques and faculty teaching evaluation methods in the world are vacuous > if they, too, don't facilitate student learning. > > Incidentally, let's be clear about what we mean by "research." It is not > only the generation of new knowledge, but also the submission of that > knowledge to public presentation after critical evaluation by scholars in > the field. As a learning tool it should not be confused with "discovery > laboratories" or the like. > > RLL > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Robert L. Lichter, Executive Director 212-753-1760 > The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. rlichter@panix.com > 555 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022-3301 > ------------------------------