Professors Share: The Moment That Changed the Way I Teach

For many professors, teaching is the most time-consuming — and rewarding — part of their job. It’s also one that few instructors have had much formal training in, leaving many to learn through trial and error.

One good shortcut, then, is learning from the experiences of others.

The Chronicle asked a few professors known for their teaching to tell us about an experience that changed what they do in the classroom. Here’s what they said:

Cathy N. Davidson

Distinguished professor and founder and director, The Futures Initiative

The Graduate Center, CUNY

Like many college professors, I find the rhetoric of “outputs” and “outcomes” artificial, a fake metric that feeds the bureaucratic machine. Six or seven years ago, I mentioned this in one of my undergraduate classrooms at Duke University. I said something like: “You will not find any trite and clichéd ‘outcomes’ on my syllabus.” One of my students responded, with sincerity, “Will I find serious and meaningful ones?” This was a brilliant student who asked with such earnestness that it made me question my assumptions. We ended up having a superb class discussion during which I realized that most students have no idea what they are supposed to be learning in a classroom beyond the “content” level, nor do they know why the content is valid in and of itself nor what use or application or purpose it will have beyond the final exam. I now frequently ask my students to collaboratively think about what outcomes they would like from a particular class and compose their own learning outcomes. Here are three of the best outcomes I’ve encountered (and they are anything but trivial and bureaucratic).

1. Learn to respect one’s intellectual life and education as a precious gift that no one can steal from you.

2. Become a lifelong advocate for public support of public higher education because you have witnessed the way it has changed your life.

3. Stay alert to surprise. Many times — in class and out — the best learning outcomes are the ones you never expected.

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Bryan Dewsbury

Assistant professor, department of biology

University of Rhode Island

As a graduate student, green to the art of teaching, I was handed a lab syllabus and basically implored to use my gregariousness to do no harm. The students I taught, at Florida International University, were largely first-generation college and/or immigrant students. I struggled to connect with them about the social reasons that influenced their presence in the classroom, both in terms of career choices and the unique ways in which they navigated being a college student. My struggles made me realize that I didn’t know them as people, and my teaching in that form was the mere delivery of a syllabus full of content. I interviewed every student in the class, asking them the reason for their career pursuit, and in the process learned their personal stories and recognized how little I knew about their cultural backgrounds. I then embarked on a months-long reading journey that helped me better understand their cultural and immigration histories, many of which were formed in nearby communities. From that point, I was able to design a course that spoke to their lived experiences but also provided opportunities for them to exhibit agency and find their voices.

That has always been my first experience truly learning what it means to be inclusive of the student voice. Since then, I am humbled, even in my large classes, to find ways for students to continue to tell me their stories, and to design an educational experience that helps them, and me, become better versions of ourselves.

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Rajiv Jhangiani

Psychology instructor and special adviser to the provost on open education

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (British Columbia)

It was my very first semester of undergraduate study in Canada. I had moved halfway across the world (from India) as an international student and, although I was doing well academically, I was still struggling to adjust to life in a new country and cultural context. It wasn’t the big things that the tourist brochures and academic advisers had warned me about that tripped me up. It was the little things — having to learn how to operate a photocopying machine and a rotating combination lock, or remembering that the bus numbers remain the same for both directions of a single route.

My instructor for introductory psychology noted that I was quiet in class, read my biography (an early assignment in his class), and asked me to stay after one day. He asked about how I was doing outside of college, extended himself as a resource, emailed me periodically to check in, wrote me a letter of reference as I applied for my first job, and later even bought a painting from my mother (an artist who moved to Canada the following year). In short, he modeled compassion, kindness, and generosity. I will never forget my vivid realization at the end of that first semester that this was the career I wanted to embark on and precisely the kind of difference I wanted to make. So today when I begin my interactions with students from a place of compassion and trust, I trace this approach to him. His name is Michael MacNeill, and I will forever be grateful.

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Laura J. MacDonald

Director of the Hendrix College STEM Scholars Program, and assistant professor of biology

Hendrix College

One of my most important moments of realization occurred when I attended the Conference for Undergraduate Educators sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology. That’s where I attended a symposium about inclusive teaching practices, where I heard a talk by Bryan Dewsbury. Bryan’s talk got me thinking about how implicit biases might be preventing me from interacting authentically with the underrepresented and disadvantaged students I — and many others on my campus — wanted to help most. As part of his talk, he suggested that we take an implicit-bias test, which I did as soon as I got back to my hotel room. The results stunned me: They showed that I had an implicit bias against people of color. I felt ashamed because I’d never thought of myself as racist.

Talking with Bryan later, at the symposium and in the months that followed, I realized that my implicit bias wasn’t a character flaw; it came primarily from my background. I grew up in a primarily white town and didn’t have much opportunity to interact with people from diverse backgrounds. But I also realized that this background was still shaping my behavior. I started noticing, for example, that even during a trip to the grocery store, I rarely greeted people of color. None of this was intentional, but, over time, my perspective started shifting.

The following semester, I walked into my cell-biology course on the first day and I saw that, in a crowd of 40 students, my seven students of color were all sitting together in the back row, segregated. Since then, I have used more problem-based learning activities to help facilitate interactions between students of color and their peers, and I’ve continued to work toward developing a more inclusive space — both in my classroom and in the sciences in general.

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Carl Wieman

Professor of physics and of the Graduate School of Education

Stanford University

For me it wasn’t really a single event. It grew gradually from my reading and digesting research. However, I do remember two particularly memorable events that happened about 30 years ago. The first was when I asked students to compare how far two trains would coast up a hill if they were traveling the same speed and had different masses. I gave them this question on a homework assignment and then on the first midterm. Most of them missed it. So I explained the correct answer in lecture and promised them they would see it on future exams. I put it on both the second midterm and the final, and many students still got it wrong!

The second event was that I started measuring just what students were retaining from my lectures. I gave a quiz with a few questions at the end of the class. These were testing memory of some basic but slightly subtle points I had explained in lecture. I found that only about 10 percent got any of these questions correct. After seeing such clear data that my students were learning almost nothing from my beautifully clear lectures, I became much more comfortable trying other forms of teaching — I obviously could not do any worse! And in fact I was able to quickly show that when I covered the same material using active learning, the students scored nearly 100-percent correct.

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Robin DeRosa

Director of interdisciplinary studies

Plymouth State University

A few years ago, a student named Tiffany Richards came into our office to say that she was dropping out of nursing and needed to develop what we then thought of as a fall-back option. She was excited about developing a major in “Patient Advocacy,” blending her substantial nursing history with new courses in social work and psychology. As she told me her story, I was stunned to find out that this sunny, luminous young woman had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor that would prevent her from becoming a practicing nurse. We worked together to reassemble her credits in a kind of backward-design process that transformed how I think about the process, not so much of “declaring” a major, but of arriving at one. After working with Tiffany, I realized that most of my students had personal challenges, changes of heart, and late-career awakenings that rubbed up awkwardly against our habit of forcing them into well-worn grooves early in college in order to assure their on-time graduation. By letting learners be more flexible in how they thoughtfully assemble credits and more active in how they achieve coherence in their studies, we get a triple win: We accommodate nontraditional learners as they work to complete college efficiently; we remove needless barriers that institutional rigidity throws at students who are faced with a wide range of human hardships and unexpected events; and we increase learners’ agency and ownership over their educations.

Thanks to Tiffany, our interdisciplinary-studies program has made many structural changes to better fit the real lives of our students; we believe that innovation is about listening to learners, and it’s helped them continue their progress. Students who find themselves failing out of a major in senior year are able to sit with us, find value in the parts of their studies that were successful, and reconfigure their credits so that graduation will lead them to a fulfilling next step. Tiffany passed away a few months ago; she knew how special she was to our program, but I am not sure she really understood how much she transformed the structures of learning that our students encounter with us.

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Bonni Stachowiak

Director, Institute for Faculty Development

Vanguard University of Southern California

Host, Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

The most significant change to my teaching came about through becoming pregnant in my early 40s. It was a high-risk pregnancy, and I needed to be more aware of my body than I had been, before that. Was I remembering to breathe deeply? Where was I holding my stress? Had I eaten within the last few hours? This experience also had the effect of mellowing me out, according to more than a few alums.

These changes in how I carried myself (and quite literally carried our first child) enabled me to have greater empathy for my students and not to take things as personally. While I still have a strong desire for my classes to connect more deeply as a learning community, if we experience “off” days, I am more able to recognize that this is most often not about me.

Now, as a parent of a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, the experience of being a mother continues to shape my teaching in significant ways.

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Jesse Stommel

Executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies

University of Mary Washington

My first semester of college at University of Colorado at Boulder. I was eager as can be. One of my professors that term, Dr. Martin Bickman, had a requirement on his syllabus that all students had to come to office hours at least once throughout the semester. I did. In the first few weeks. I told him that my favorite book was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and he sent me away with a list (mostly in my brain) of more stuff I should read. I still haven’t read everything on that list. What he sent me away with more than anything is the vision of myself as a student who would be taken seriously as a reader, scholar, and thinker. In his course, Dr. Martin Bickman — Marty — didn’t grade. He asked us to grade ourselves. And the work was hard. He invited us to reflect on our own learning. He taught us about metacognition and introduced us to the notion of a “dialectical notebook,” using a legal-ruled notebook with incredibly wide margins that we all purchased for the course. We’d write about our reading, about our learning, and then we’d write about what we had written.

In my first semester of teaching as instructor of record, I took a pedagogy course with Marty. He taught us to reflect on our own teaching in the same way — to constantly inspect and wonder at even the smallest of choices we made as teachers. That same semester I taught with Dr. R.L. Widmann — Ruth — who is my dear friend to this day. She taught me about collaboration. How to talk (and sometimes not talk) about the teaching we do together. She taught me that teaching doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) a solitary experience. We bring each other, other teachers, students, into the work.

That first semester that I was a teacher, Marty taught me how not to grade, and I’ve never graded since. Instead, I ask my students to grade themselves. Ruth taught me to trust myself as a teacher, even when I wasn’t quite yet a teacher. To find my way into the work. To ask myself hard questions. And to do that work together with friends, my colleagues, my students.

Is there a particular moment that changed your approach to teaching? We would love to hear about it. Share your story here, and it may be featured in a future issue of Teaching, our weekly newsletter about teaching and learning. Want to get the newsletter in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.