David Gooblar
It was at the end of a fascinating hour, an hour in which some of Temple University’s finest professors shared some of what made them such great teachers, that Stephanie Fiore, the Assistant Vice Provost of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, asked one final question. “What words of wisdom would you offer to other professors who want to improve their teaching?”
The occasion was the Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s annual luncheon to celebrate Temple’s award-winning teachers. The guests of honor were the 2018-19 recipients of the Great Teacher Award and of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Awards for Distinguished Teaching. Also present were a number of Temple faculty and staff eager to hear what these excellent teachers had to say about their approach to helping students learn.
The responses to that last question were instructive in their variety, underlining that there are a number of ways to become a great teacher.
For Matt Wray, Associate Professor of Sociology, there’s an important distinction between teaching content and teaching students. “As graduate students, most of us were trained to teach content—theories, concepts, terminology, research methods and findings, and so on.” But just because a professor knows all of the content does not mean that students will learn it all. To focus on students “takes more time and patience and understanding. Above all, it takes sustained dialogue with students and active listening on our part to hear what it is students know, what they don’t know, what they want to know, and how they know that they know it.”
Lawrence Kaplan, Professor of Medicine and an Associate Dean for Inter-Professional Education at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine, also counseled a focus on students. But Kaplan was careful to note that he guarded against assuming that all students wanted to follow the same paths that he followed. “My responsibility in medical education is to help students become the best physician that they want to be—not to turn them into me.” He aims to “help each student’s individual self-discovery,” and admitted that he loved to see “the light bulb moment when they see how the details of what they are studying is applied in the care of patients.”
But chasing such moments can lead professors to try to do too much, warned Nancy Morris, Professor of Media Studies and Production. Morris reminded professors that sometimes wanting students to know everything can come at the expense of depth. “I think in general we all want our students to grasp the full breadth of class themes, to be well-versed in all class topics, and to engage with a range of readings that provide different approaches to class topics. But attempts at breadth can be counter-productive.” The solution, Morris said, was often to take material out, “in order to make class time not feel rushed, to not have to sacrifice exploration for superficial ‘coverage,’ and to encourage students to delve into readings rather than (at best) skimming them.”
For David Schuff, Professor of Management Information Systems, the question made him think of how he conceives of a course’s full progression. “I try to think of a class as having a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. That helps me focus on the content that is essential to the ‘story’ and eliminate the rest.” He’s found that thinking of a semester as a story—with a narrative pay-off—helps students stay engaged for the whole course. “Students can see how each piece of content in the class serves the end goal (i.e., what I want them to be able to do when they finish the course).”
There was a lot of nodding, both in the audience and on the dais, as these professors gave their answers. Judith Litvin Daniels, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Education for Anatomy and Cell Biology, noted that such effective approaches to teaching weren’t magic bullets. “Becoming a good educator takes time,” Daniels reminded us. It takes years of trial and error, of paying attention to teaching as a discipline, to reach the heights of these award-winning professors. “If one has the passion and devotion to imparting knowledge, and if one is self-aware, then in time one grows into an accomplished educator.”
If there’s one thing everyone at the event agreed upon, it’s that such commitment is worth it. As Wray noted, “it’s not an easy path, but the rewards are pretty great.”
David Gooblar is the Associate Director for Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (Harvard University Press 2019).