Teaching

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.

The Purpose of Introductory Courses

Last week I wrote about how the University of Notre Dame had revamped its core curriculum in order to create a more coherent general-education experience for undergraduates. I asked readers to weigh in on a key question that dogs many general-education courses: Should they lay the groundwork for a deeper dive into a discipline, or should they try to connect that discipline’s way of thinking to broader societal questions?

Caitie Finlayson, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia, wrote to say that she “completely redesigned” her “World Regional Geography” course two years ago. The old approach, she found, promoted a “novice-level understanding” of her discipline consisting of terms and facts.

“I now approach geography as experts understand the discipline,” Finlayson wrote, “focusing on connections between regions and an in-depth understanding of core themes. Students now spend the bulk of our class time applying textbook concepts to real-world problems, like Syrian refugees or a loss of biodiversity in the Pacific.”

Finlayson’s new goal is for students to develop the “ability to think like a geographer,” she wrote, “seeing global issues in a spatial context and understanding the connections between places.” She even wrote her own, open-source textbook. You can check it out here.

The Power of Group Dynamics

When people work in groups, the interactions among them play an outsize role in how well they separate truth from fiction — even when they all have access to the same information online. That’s the conclusion of a recent study that examined the group dynamics of graduate students sent on a scavenger hunt that asked them to draw on both online information and prior knowledge.

“If educators understand these group behaviors,” the study’s authors write, “then they can better support students in evaluating online information and educate students about the negative impacts of group discussions on identifying authentic online information.”

You can read the full study, published in the journal Heliyon, here and a write-up from the University of Missouri at Columbia, where the researchers are based, here. Want a primer on what else research has uncovered about our ability to suss out fake news? We provided one in this previous newsletter.

Helping Students See a Major’s Potential

A recent announcement from the American Physical Society caught our eye, in part because it listed a number of challenges physics faces. Among them: preparing the majority of its majors who do something after college other than pursue a graduate degree in the field.

I’d never particularly thought of physics as a discipline that needed to make a sales pitch about its own practicality. It’s a STEM field, after all! Still, professors I spoke with this past week told me they often have to convince students — and their parents — that the discipline can lead to good job opportunities, largely because similar options, like engineering and computer science, sound more career-oriented.

Individual departments — and the discipline at large — have taken a number of approaches to preparing physics majors for a variety of careers. You can read more about that in my story from this week.

Does your discipline also worry about students’ tendency to major in something that sounds like it will lead to a job? How do you convince them that your department offers broad preparation, not a dead end? Share your experience with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and it may be featured in a future newsletter.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Beckie and Beth