Hello, and welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week, Beckie shares a teaching-center director’s tips for encouraging professors to use its services. And Beth passes along one reader’s perspective on how to introduce students to a discipline. We also highlight new findings about how students’ peer groups affect their ability to wade through misinformation, and put a new program to improve physics education in context.
Getting Professors to Participate
For many teaching centers, appealing to instructors — beyond the usual suspects — is a persistent challenge. After all, on most campuses, the programming such centers offer is optional.
The trick, said Laura Baudot, director of the Gertrude B. Lemle Teaching Center at Oberlin College, in Ohio, is often “getting people to participate in conversations about teaching that don’t feel threatening to their loyalty to their discipline.”
Professors, of course, spend many years developing disciplinary expertise. Many of them might worry that a center will elide important distinctions. Some instructors, Baudot said, fear a center will impose a top-down view of teaching. They may be afraid that a center will rely too heavily on the scholarship of teaching and learning, which some feel is dominated by what she called “the humanistic social sciences,” like psychology and sociology, and will ignore knowledge from other domains. And they may fear a center will chase — and push them to adopt — every passing fad.
The best way to combat those concerns is to address them head-on, Baudot believes.
Professors, she said, are “not critical thinkers for nothing.” In academe, skepticism is a professional value.
One way a center can show it respects disciplinary differences is to encourage professors to learn directly from their peers. Oberlin’s teaching-fellows program lets professors connect with a seasoned colleague in the same discipline or a related one, or with an instructor who has experience in a particular technique. Professors can go through a matching process or connect directly with the fellow they want to work with, Baudot said.
The scholarship of teaching and learning has also looked into the challenge of convincing professors that teaching centers can speak to their disciplinary contexts. This paper, for instance, examines a different approach: having centers work directly with specific academic units.
As for the concern that a center might get swept up by a trend, Baudot has found it helps to acknowledge that teaching is a complex set of practices that cannot be reduced to a single, correct approach. For instance, she thinks that critiques of the lecture format sometimes ignore what a gifted lecturer can do. Taking a broad view of what good teaching can look like encourages buy-in. Professors are also more open, she said, when a teaching center encourages them to critically examine various teaching innovations.
“I want faculty to feel like the teaching center is legitimate,” Baudot said. And not just so they’ll show up at the center as an end in itself. These days, many professors feel their work is looked down on by the wider world, Baudot said, and building a community on their campus can help them feel more respected. It can also help them face common challenges, like teaching students who enroll with varying degrees of preparation — and who face an uncertain world after they graduate.
Do you run, or collaborate closely with, a teaching center? How does your center encourage faculty members to get involved? Do you avoid the teaching center on your own campus? If so, why? Share your story with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and I may include it in a future newsletter.