When the leaders of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor envision the world their graduates will inherit, they see a future brimming with political, social, and environmental volatility. If students are going to succeed, they will need to be nimble—able to handle complexity and to reinvent themselves, says James P. Holloway, vice provost for global and engaged education.
The institution puts money behind its aspirations. In preparing for its bicentennial, in 2017, it has started a splashy campaign called the Third Century Initiative, using $50-million from its budget. Half of the money pays for multidisciplinary efforts to solve complex societal problems. The other half supports an ambitious competitive grant program to improve undergraduate teaching.
One type of award, of up to $50,000, is intended to encourage faculty members to embrace risk and experiment with new ideas in the classroom. Some of the grants have helped professors use visualization technology to teach civil-engineering students how to react to surprising events on construction projects. Others have supported students working on entrepreneurial projects in the creative arts.
The other type of award, for up to $3-million, encourages professors to adopt teaching experiments more widely. A team of professors from seven colleges, for example, will use a $3-million grant to recast the training of about 4,000 health-sciences students. They will learn how to work in cross-disciplinary teams, a system favored by many health professionals. About $9.5-million in grants has been awarded in total.
But money has only been part of the story, Mr. Holloway says. “What these programs do, fundamentally, is create attention,” he says. “There’s a message of legitimacy.”
Professors hear that it’s OK for them to try new teaching approaches. And encouraging them to vie for grants gets their competitive juices flowing.
More important yet, he says, are the conversations that are sparked. “Even when the program is gone, you created the capacity to share these ideas. The real impact is the residue of knowledge.”
Experts at other universities have marveled at the size of Michigan’s commitment. But a grant as small as $3,000 can send a powerful signal to faculty members and allow them to pay a graduate assistant to flesh out new approaches.
Scholarship is often a professor’s top priority, especially at a research-intensive university like Michigan. In 2012 it augmented its tenure-and-promotion policies to encourage committees to give “full recognition” to candidates who had created new instructional methods.
Bread-and-butter resources like Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching are also a part of its bid to improve teaching. Grants, coaching, and conversations all help get the attention of busy faculty members. “You need a lot of different strategies,” says Matthew L. Kaplan, the center’s interim director.
“We always say faculty time is the scarcest resource.”
