September 10, 2021
This week I draw from an article by Beckie Supiano. Ms. Supiano’s article titled “Teaching: How to Find Your Teaching Buddies” (09092021 Chronicle of Higher Ed) discusses the benefits of community for support and inspiration as teachers. While interdisciplinary collaboration is the vogue, we tend to evaluate scholarship and teaching through the lens of what one does on their own. In my mind, student learning should be the key measure and that is best attained through collaborative development of teaching approaches and tools. While collaboration can occur through workshops, conferences and publication (and social media), I feel the most productive collaboration results from local colleagues working together to evaluate and improve courses and curricula. I believe teaching collaboratives can assist our faculty members with a primary focus on research to improve their courses through other faculty members that devote a greater amount of their energies to teaching “lending” activities and materials. I know of two excellent examples of such teaching collaboration in the CNS, the general chemistry and introductory biology teaching teams. These two teams are now working together to bridge the chemistry-biology divide, a long-standing dream of mine.
Beckie Supriano’s post:
“Teaching well is intellectually demanding. It can be emotionally draining. And that’s all true outside of pandemic conditions. But professors are rarely the first or only ones to encounter a particular challenge — and they don’t have to go it alone.
Regan A.R. Gurung emphasized that point as a speaker during a Chronicle virtual event I moderated recently. I followed up with Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the center for teaching and learning at Oregon State University, after the panel and asked him to expand on his comments for this newsletter.
If you want to connect with other instructors who can help you think through challenges large or small, here’s what he recommends:
- Look for a teaching or education journal in your discipline. Some disciplines have dedicated journals with scholarship on teaching. Reading those, Gurung said, is a way to keep up with the field — and also figure out who’s producing this research. If your discipline doesn’t have a stand-alone journal on teaching, one of its journals might have a section of articles on teaching, which could play a similar role.
- Turn to your disciplinary society. Many disciplinary associations have an arm or subcommittee related to teaching. Its members, Gurung said, could be a great resource.
- Propose a conference session. If your discipline doesn’t have a journal or association subcommittee on teaching, Gurung said, consider starting one. One approach he’s seen succeed: Propose a session on teaching at a national conference. “The moment you have that,” he said, “that is the beacon for people to flock around if they care about teaching.”
- Use Twitter. Twitter can be overwhelming. But a curated teaching feed can be a great way to listen to — and join — conversations on teaching, Gurung said. “There’s rarely a day,” he said, “when I don’t scroll Twitter for five minutes and find something that makes me think, or that I want to read about.” He encourages his graduate students to use the platform, if they don’t already, and to look at his own follower list. Professors new to Twitter might start, he suggested, by following the authors of teaching articles they’ve learned from. From there, they will be able to see whom those scholars interact with and follow anyone who fits the bill for their own needs.
Have you used those resources — or others — to build yourself a teaching community? Share your experience with me, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and they may appear in a future newsletter.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Build in breaks. Be candid — within reason — with students about your life circumstances. Those are among the strategies for reducing the risk of burnout that the online-teaching expert Flower Darby offered in this advice piece back in January. Given the continued uncertainty of the fall, it’s worth revisiting now.”
I admit I am quite jealous of the general chemistry and introductory biology instructor teams. I would very much enjoy working with other instructors teaching the same or related courses. I will need collaborators if I am ever to use Twitter as a resource (just saying…). I am a member of a group of biochemistry for non-majors instructors developing a concept assessment instrument, which has been very rewarding. Further, TILT provides an awesome venue for cross-disciplinary interaction between instructors, Teaching Squares facilitated by Jennifer Todd and Tonya Buchan. I highly recommend taking part in this program. I have greatly benefitted through collaborations with Instructional Designers in TILT and CSU Online to improve several of my courses.
As we finish up week 3, I for one will pause and reflect on where I was and what I was doing the morning of 9/11/2001 and what we have learned and not learned in the 20 since.
Cheers, Paul
Paul Laybourn (he/him/his)
Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Director, W2R S-STEM Program
Director, NoCo B2B Program
Director, REU Site in Molecular Biosciences
paul.laybourn@colostate.edu
970-491-5100
