Category: Faculty Wellness & Preparedness

Stephanie Fiore, Assistant Vice Provost

I’ve been thinking a lot about joy lately and, in particular, the desire to find real joy in our teaching work. Joyful work can be energizing, inspiring, and affirming, while joyless work can be enervating, tedious, and dispiriting. I’m not talking, of course, of perfection; in teaching, as in all things, there is no such thing. What I’m thinking about here is instead a soul-satisfying sense that you are doing the work you want to do and that you are doing it well. As teachers, it means also that you see the impact you are making on your students. Perhaps they are learning new things or are discovering new passions, all because you have introduced worlds to them that pique their curiosity, answer questions, or challenge them to think deeply about important and interesting issues. Maybe they are able to pursue a successful career in the field of their choice because you mentored them along to excellence in some real way. Or perhaps you have learned new things from them, and it has re-energized your own thinking and process of discovery. All of these moments can be downright joyful, yet I have discovered in my role at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching that some faculty do not live the joyful and purposeful life of teaching, but instead live that part of their professional lives with trepidation, dread, or ambivalence. I’m here to tell you that, if you have not found that joy in teaching, it is within reach, by thinking hard about how to teach in a way that motivates students and helps them to learn. 

Dean McManus, in his book Leaving the Lectern describes his journey to joy. In his earlier faculty days, he wore his lab coat to lecture to hide the sweat stains which were a natural result of the anxiety and dread he experienced in teaching. Research was natural to him; teaching was not. When he reflected on his teaching, explored new ways to think about his teaching and how students learn, and then worked at implementing new teaching practices, he found that his students learned, and were even excited at the learning that took place. 

A student walked into the computer room, greeted another student, and said, “Man, that pattern looks nothing like what I got yesterday.” He apparently pulled out his map and the two students proceeded to discuss what the differences in the two patterns at different times meant. And they knew what they were talking about. To me they were expressing self-assessment of their learning. I leaned back in my desk chair with a limitless smile, punched my fists at the ceiling, and hissed to myself, “Yes-s-s-s-s!” They had learned it. I was doing something right. Oh, the joy of it! The pure joy! (McManus, 2005, p.97).

McManus points us to the steps he took on his journey of instructional transformation: accept risk, use feedback, reflect, adapt and be flexible, establish a partnership, accept that you are teaching in a different world, and welcome the joy (McManus, 2005). 

At the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, we can be your partners in this journey. We have consultants who can sit with you privately and discuss your teaching challenges or your ideas for innovation. We have a multitude of workshops, trainings, and discussions about teaching where you will have the opportunity to discuss teaching with other faculty from across the university, learn what the evidence tells us about how people learn, and explore strategies to improve student learning. You will find resources at your disposal, either on our website, at our lending library of books on teaching and learning, or simply by asking us for them. Most of all, you will find an ear, support, and someone who understands your desire to feel joy at work. 

We are waiting for you. Come join us at the CAT!

Stephanie Fiore serves as Assistant Vice Provost at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Image by lena dolch from Pixabay

Stephanie Fiore, Ph.D.

It’s summertime, when children all over the country will be squeezing lemons, adding sugar and water and sitting outside on the curb selling homemade lemonade. Think for a moment about lemonade. Isn’t it remarkable how something so sour can turn into a refreshing, sweet drink, one that conjures up visions of relaxing in the sun or picnicking with family? Before you go on that picnic, take a minute to think about how you can make lemonade out of any sour moments that happened in your classes this academic year. Did you have activities that flopped, readings that students just didn’t understand (or didn’t read at all), disappointing results on exams or underwhelming papers written by your majors? Did you experience hot moments in the classroom that you didn’t handle very well, or awkward interactions with students with whom you had trouble connecting? Did you find yourself short on time so that you had to rush headlong towards the end of the semester, dragging students on the ride with you? Were your student evaluations less than encouraging, or perhaps downright painful to read?

We all have times like these in our classes; sometimes, we have whole semesters that feel like this. I remember struggling through a class one semester that I had taught many times before with great success. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t smooth out the bumps and I was exhausted from trying at the end of every class. Those sour moments can be enervating, distressing and confusing. But they can be catalysts to great teaching too. We can reflect on those moments and take action to prevent them from happening again. If we put them in our rearview mirror too soon, we lose an opportunity to make lemonade and we risk becoming perpetually stuck with recurring sour moments.  

Here’s my recipe for making pedagogical lemonade:

1. Identify the issues that are of most concern to you. When you think back on your semester, which issues stand out?
2. Squeeze those sour moments for information. What went wrong? Can you pinpoint moments when things went sideways? To help you think about it, try reflective writing, reviewing your own notes, examining student work, and reading student evaluations for clues.  
3. Do your research. On almost any teaching topic, there is a wealth of helpful resources to help you find solutions. Start reading! Check out Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s resources or those at any number of teaching centers across the United States. Search for assistance in online faculty development sources such as Faculty Focus, or the Teaching Professor newsletter. Think about investing some time this summer in reading some foundational texts for higher ed instructors, such as How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching or Tools for Teaching. (Some of these resources may be available through your university library.) Or just Google it. And don’t forget, your teaching center has consultants available all summer long to help you think out solutions.
4. Take Action. After doing your research, commit to making one or two changes to your classroom in the fall semester and then do it! Don’t try to change everything at once; incremental change is the best course of action for long-term success.

Not such a tough recipe to follow, right? Before you stretch out with that hard-earned lemonade, start working on this recipe. Perhaps next semester you’ll find that the sweetness of teaching overpowers the sour.

Stephanie Fiore, Senior Director, Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Happy new academic year, everyone, from the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT)!

We often start a new calendar year in January with a list of resolutions. I was committed to making more time for myself. I’m sure you said you were going to exercise more, stay in closer contact with friends, or just not stress the small stuff. I know when I make those resolutions, I do so with the best of intentions, but I also know that even small changes require that I make them a priority, or I may not succeed in pulling them off.

Now that we are starting a new academic year, what are your resolutions, and how are you going to make them happen? Have you reflected on your professional practice and how you are going to continue to grow? Have you thought about changes to your teaching that you might want to implement? My resolution is to reach out to as many departments as I can this year to discuss with faculty how our wonderful staff at the newly renamed Center for the Advancement of Teaching can support them with their pedagogical and instructional technology needs.

My challenge to you is to consider making a commitment to incorporate new reflective practices into your teaching. In his landmark work on reflective teaching, Stephen Brookfield argues that we should reflect on our teaching practice using four lenses. Most of us already use two of these lenses. We look at ourselves through our students’ eyes when we read our SFFs, (although I suggest also checking in with your students throughout the semester to get feedback on your teaching). We may also use our own experiences as learners and as teachers (what Brookfield calls our autobiographies) to inform our practice.

But there are two lenses that we rarely use and that can add richness to our work, and here’s where a teaching center can help. The third lense is to look at our teaching through our colleagues’ eyes. That can be done through peer review of teaching, but it can also be done simply by discussing our teaching with other faculty, something we rarely have the opportunity to do. One of the greatest benefits to attending the teaching center’s seminars and workshops is the opportunity to talk to other faculty from across the university about what is happening in the classroom, online, in the studio, or in the lab.

The fourth lense that Brookfield cites is to look at our teaching against what the theoretical literature tells us about how people learn. There is a wealth of information out there. If you join us at our seminars, workshops and trainings, we’ll give you resources to explore, or you can join us and your colleagues to read and discuss a book on teaching. You can also peruse the many resources we have available for you online. Some good reading can get the ideas flowing and make us sit back and think about whether there might be alternative paths to helping our students be successful in our courses.

Join me in making a commitment for the new academic year. Choose one way of reflecting more deeply on your teaching and make that resolution stick! I think you’ll find that it enriches your work and helps your students to learn.   

Next month Temple University’s Teaching and Learning Center and General Education Program will co-sponsor a book group for faculty on Dr. Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education. In this series of essays, Edmundson wrestles with the problem of teaching in a consumer-driven climate and criticizes universities for becoming “corporate cities.” He upholds an unapologetic view that “real teachers are an endangered species in the academic ecosystem” and most faculty are in a rush to escape from the classroom into esoteric research.

TLC’s Assistant Director Johanna Inman weighs in on one topic raised by Edmundson: the value of a college education.– – – – –

Last month President Obama caused a minor uproar in the arts community by stating that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” Realizing the negative attention his remarks would likely receive, he followed the statement with, “I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”

These comments are not particularly shocking to anyone following higher education’s reputation in the political or public sphere. In fact, art history could have been replaced with any number of other college majors that now compete for notoriety on lists such as Forbes’ Least Valuable College Majors or Kiplinger’s Worst College Majors for Your Career. The current national discourse on higher education equates the value of college in terms of dollars spent, and the effects are evident. Students enter college with a consumer mentality, viewing education “as a passport to a desired job rather than a learning experience.”

In this context, Dr. Mark Edmundson, University of Virginia professor and author of the book Why Teach?, is right to be concerned. Where is the value in a degree that is bought rather than earned? When we talk about the value of a college education, we should be talking about the value of an experience where students learn to ask hard questions, accommodate diverse perspectives, take intellectual and creative risks, and embrace learning through failure. A college education used to be valued, Edmundson writes, as an experience for “seeking knowledge so as to make the lives of other human beings better” — something he hopes to reestablish.

Furthermore, Edmundson argues that a college teacher’s “job is not to help our students acquire skills, marketable skills, bankables” but to make “moments of transformation possible.” I too believe the real value of a college education lies in its potential to be a transformative experience, because it transformed me. Like other teachers, I followed my passions regardless of financial payout and became a teacher because I wanted to make the world a better place.

But, let’s take off the rose-colored glasses for a moment. Many students do not have the luxury of spending tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on the vague notion that a four-year degree will provide the transformative experience that Edmundson describes. Many need a college education to get a job to then pay off the loans that financed college. It’s unfair to criticize them for it, and unless we appreciate the validity of these motivations, we miss the opportunity to change them.

As teachers, we have little control over changing the cost of higher education, so let’s focus on what we can change: what our students learn when they get here. Let’s commit to creating a learning experience that is valuable — in our eyes and in theirs. A college education has the potential to be a transformational experience, but transformation rarely occurs without student buy-in. In order to reach more students, we must make it completely explicit to them what they are learning in our classrooms, labs, studios, and offices, as well as how it will help them meet personal goals in career and life.

A college education has the potential to transform students through improving their ability to think critically and creatively; to communicate verbally, in writing, and through images; to make and support arguments with evidence and to challenge unsubstantiated claims; to care for and contribute meaningfully to civil and global society; and most importantly, to continue learning long after they receive their degree. This is real transformation, but these are also marketable skills that any smart employer would find attractive. I am optimistic that when educators focus on student learning, we can unpack both what we want for our students and what the students want for themselves. With this learning-centered approach to teaching, we will find common ground for the real value of a college education.

Let’s Exchange EDvice…

How do you help students value the learning process as more than a credential or letter grade?

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“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

—John Dewey

Reflective teachers regularly dedicate time to evaluate their teaching practice. They consider the scope of their pedagogy — from the structure of the course to the classroom community — and reflect on how their specific teaching decisions impact their students’ learning. As they analyze their teaching, they consider how they might approach particular tasks or challenges in the future.

As we conclude the semester, this is the perfect time to reflect on your classes and consider teaching decisions for the spring.

Building a Reflective Practice

Below are useful questions that can guide your reflective process. The questions are organized around the four main components of teaching, as outlined by Dee Fink:

• Design of instruction: Have you clearly defined the learning goals you have for your course? Do the assessments in your course measure the goals you have for student learning outcomes? Do the activities you facilitate (lectures, discussions, readings) create experiences for students to reach those goals?
• Course management: Did your schedule of readings, activities, and assignments work well? For instance, do all of your assignments fall at the same time, or are they evenly spaced out? How do you organize assignment deadlines and manage grading?
• Knowledge of subject matter: Is there new scholarship in your field that you would like to explore and perhaps address in future iterations of your course?
• Teacher–Student interactions: What are the different ways you interact with students? Are you “the sage on the stage,” a facilitator of learning, or something else…? How do you relate to students during outside of class during office hours and via email?

Other opportunities for reflection through the Teaching and Learning Center

All TLC programs are designed to encourage reflective practice in a community of peers, and to orient colleagues toward learning-centered approaches. While many of our programs entail two or three meetings, the Provost’s Teaching Academy (PTA) is the TLC’s most substantive opportunity for reflective practice and development as an educator.

According to Donald Schön, reflective teaching practice is best supported by collaboration and dialogue with peers. He recommends that educators engage in individual and group reflections and take advantage of opportunities to learn from experts and peers.

The PTA offers just such an opportunity. Now in its fifth year and with a cumulative roster of more than 70 members, it is one of the TLC’s signature programs. The PTA brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of faculty members and academic administrators who are uniquely knowledgeable about the research on how people learn and best practices, and who serve as mentors in teaching and learning.

Each new cohort makes an impact on the educational culture at Temple University. We invite you to apply for the summer 2014 cohort.

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This post was co-written and edited by our communications extern, Alexa Mantell, Assistant Director Carl S. Moore, and Pamela Barnett, Associate Vice Provost and Director.

This blog will only allow those with a Temple University account to comment directly on the blog. If you do not have a Temple University account, we would still like to hear from you.