Applying for faculty positions at teaching institutions: interpreting research culture and opportunities during an interview

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on how to look at a teaching institution to find out if serious research is possible on campus. One main point was that you can’t diagnose whether or not you will be able to run your research program at a teaching school until you have some direct experience with the campus, like you’d get during an interview. So, in this post, I discuss how to handle plans for serious research during the interview.

When interviewing, keep in mind five main points about research at teaching schools:

The culture of research on a campus isn’t predictive of how much research that you personally will be able to get done.
Before you interview, you need to be able to envision what your research program will look like and how it will operate, so you can know if you will have what you need to flourish.
At most teaching campuses, you’ll have few to no specialists in your field. So you should market your research program not with the potential for scientific discovery, but instead with the great opportunities that will be created for students.
The more specific you describe your plans, the more opportunity that others have to identify a perceived mismatch.
Ignore advice on how to succeed on a particular campus unless it comes from someone who is very successful at that institution.

(A sixth point might be that you can throw all of the preceding ideas out the window, if you happen to be the proprietor of a blog about doing research in a teaching institution. I haven’t interviewed yet since starting this site; if I am able to land any interviews this year, this could be interesting.)

The best way to figure out whether or not you could run your research out of a particular campus is to have a series of long, frank conversations with the faculty in your prospective department.

Those conversations aren’t going to happen; you can’t be that frank and I doubt your interviewers will be either. Your interlocutors may be wholly frank, but it’s not always possible to tell if this is the case. Be honest, but omit unnecessary details.

Let’s say you arrive for your interview with a very specific idea of what your research program will look like, and what it will take to succeed. Or, let’s say you don’t have a specific idea but you are open to a variety of approaches. In either scenario, you’ve got a problem during the interview. You won’t be able to spend the 1.5 days on campus smoking out all of the details about how you would run your research program.

There is a lot of ground to be covered in an interview. You’ll be expected to talk a lot, answering questions that the department has about you. Many of these questions will be about teaching, some will be about your research, and more about how you engage students in research. You also will be expected to ask a lot of questions. However, the majority of questions that you ask should be about teaching, because the institution is, after all, focused on teaching.

Remember that your ideas about research are probably very different from the people who have worked on this campus for a while. Your definition of being an active scholar is probably different from theirs. You lack the campus frame of reference. You can’t accurately perceive that frame of reference through a mere conversations. It actually takes years to figure out a campus.

You can attempt to construct a makeshift understanding of the campus research culture by reconciling what you hear and see on an interview with external information. You should be aware of what everyone is teaching, research specialties, and levels of research productivity. You can’t look at everyone’s CVs, but you can look at their websites and do a literature search before you go on an interview.

Then, you can search for consistencies and incongruent conceptions.

In my experience, the people who spend the most time talking about research during an interview are the ones that do the least amount of research. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. Most people are excited to learn about your own research and see the interview as a learning opportunity, and this is true regardless of one’s research activity. Some people who aren’t serious researchers think that they are, and want to have a heart-to-heart talk about what it takes to do research on campus and how to overcome obstacles.

For the most part, the others in the interview are trying to convince you to take the job, assuming that you get the offer. So, they are working to make sure that you have a realistic view of the situation while also understanding the available opportunities and resources. This sales job by the department is based on their incomplete understanding of what your research program requires. The more the department knows about what you need, the more they can inform you about the advantages and drawbacks of this particular position. However, the more the department knows, the more likely they will identify ways in which the job won’t work for you.

Keep in mind that what a person chooses to discuss doesn’t communicate personal priorities. Most people are trying to provide interviewees with as much information as possible, in a positive light, to be able to help everyone make the best decision. Some might be emphasizing a sales job to convince an applicant to come, and others might be trying to be evaluative of the job candidate to see if they have the right answers. Everybody is different.

I have always made a point to ask a couple questions of many different people in the department, and it’s been very informative to see how responses vary among individuals. It might be “How do you find students to work in your research lab?” or “What is it like working with the grants office?” or something about the level and predictability of small-scale internal research funding.

Moreover, I often asked, “What is expected before coming up for tenure?” This is a totally reasonable question that everyone would expect to be asked, and it’s expected that you’d ask it several times with different people. This is an open-ended question that can help you identify individual priorities and perceptions of internal challenges. (Also, highly inconsistent answers are a very bad sign of a fractured institution.)

Be sure to listen to questions you received. For example, when I interviewed for my last job, nearly everyone asked me at one point or another, “What do you think about the idea of having a graduate program in the department?” It didn’t take long to identify the majority and minority factions in the department. This was an indicator of a division within the department that I learned about during the interview. It was complicated and I didn’t have all of the facts, but I saw that the role of research in the department was a fractious issue, and I went in with that concern in mind.

You’ll never get to understand the individual priorities that each professor has during a search. Most faculty are just looking for a colleague who can teach well, get research done with students, be effective, is easy to get along with, and won’t leave for another job. Some faculty might be concerned that junior faculty will raise the bar on research expectations. Some faculty will want new people to relieve them of teaching or service assignments of which they’ve grown weary. Others might want a friend. Too often, people want to have their own pet statistical consultants. These little quirks vary and you can’t really predict or control for them.

Regardless, you should realize this much: very few faculty at teaching institutions are actively excited about hiring junior faculty who are planning to have extremely robust research agendas. Most people at teaching campuses see those big research ambitions as a poor fit, and think that those people belong at R1 universities.

So, there is little to be gained by explaining that you have big research plans, if you have them. Of course you need to communicate that you will be getting research done with students, publishing, and plan to land outside grants. But you don’t want to make an overly big deal about research.

Why not? Having a research-serious departmentmate doesn’t really help any other faculty in the department. Some people might see it as a net drain, if the new researcher is taking away the best research students, buying time out of teaching and forsaking service for research. Even faculty who are strong researchers don’t have much incentive for bringing in additional researchers. They’ll just compete for limited resources from the Dean’s office and steal the limelight. (Those don’t matter for me, as the resources are already so limited that another mouth to feed can’t hurt me, and the research limelight on my campus is dim for all.)

Am I overstating the lack of interest in research in job candidates at teaching campuses? I don’t think so.

I’m as gung-ho for research as anybody on my campus. But whenever we get to make a new hire, is it important to me that this new person builds a productive research lab? Not really. I would like it because it would help enhance the overall research climate in the campus, but we have many more pressing immediate and long-term needs, dealing with the curriculum, departmental service, advising, vetting out jerks and finding someone who is truly student-centered. If a productive research lab run by a new hire isn’t my own priority in a search, it’s probably not a top priority of other reasonable people who aren’t working to actively promote research on teaching campuses.

Here’s another quirk of teaching campuses: Because research is mostly a solitary endeavor (because each campus typically has only one person in each specialty), then the professors on campus who talk a lot about research are prone to be seen as narcissists or out of touch with others. If you talk too much about your research during an interview, then you risk sounding like one of those narcissists.

If you’re asked about your research ideas or plans, give a 30-second summary. Elaborate when asked, but you shouldn’t be giving a reply that takes more than a minute or two unless you get clear verbal or nonverbal cues to continue. That’s true for almost every question, but it’s particularly important to remember to be brief about your research.

After you’ve done your best to understand the research culture during an interview, then you need figure out how, or if, you research can fit in on the campus. Remember that the absence of a research culture doesn’t preclude the establishment of a productive research program. It just means that your productive research program wouldn’t matter much to anybody, or it might even be threatening to others.

While all kinds of support is wonderful, it’s perfectly fine if your research program is greeted with ambivalence.

How can you tell whether an agenda for serious research will be greeted with antagonism? It’s not easy, and I got it wrong when I was interviewing.

At a distance, if you were to look at my current and previous departments, it would be easy to make the mistake in thinking that research would have been more possible in my old job. People in that department published more often, and there was a lot more talk about research. The university was able to give every professor a few thousand bucks per year for research, paid for travel to conferences, and there was a university-funded student research program in the summer. What was less obvious to the casual observer is that there was clear antagonism to big-time productivity. There was one big-league researcher in my department, and he kept all of his research almost secret.

At my current job, you might think that research is impossible. We have scant startup funds, very low rates of faculty publication, and no internal support for research or travel (though this year is an exception). However, a productive research program is far more possible in this job compared to my old one. Anybody who can build a highly productive research lab is more than welcome. That welcome doesn’t translate into more space or resources, but everyone is happy and that kind of thing is strongly encouraged. I didn’t realize this would be the case until I was well established into the job, and I’m very glad it has turned out this way.

How can you figure out if a teaching campus passes the anti-research smell test?

You need to pay attention to subtle cues, see how people talk about one another and their priorities. If you don’t mind not getting a job offer from a place hostile to a highly productive lab, you could ask straight out, “How would you feel if I ended up getting big grants, reduced my teaching load down to two courses per semester and spend lots of time training research students and writing manuscripts?”

Or you could ask, “When is too much research a problem?” When approaching this issue, remember that you don’t want to be seen as overly optimistic, or naïve, or not interested in teaching.

In sum, you need to be all about teaching, and that makes it a tricky dance to learn about true research opportunities. Because every faculty member needs to be dedicated to teaching above all else, you need to communicate this priority in the interview. I’m all about teaching and my students, but I’m also all about research. That idea is really hard to communicate in a short interview. You communicate your priorities with your words and your actions, and people expect them to match.

To be successful in research, you need to forge your own path. This is particularly true at teaching institutions.

To be continued: specific things to do, and specific things to avoid, throughout the job application process.

Stop using “silverback” to describe scientists. It’s sexist.

Some people have taken to referring to influential senior scientists as “silverbacks.”

This practice should stop.

I’m writing this at a scientific conference, and I’ve heard it several times in independent contexts, in a non-ironic use. I also heard this term at the last three conferences I’ve attended in the last few years by both European and North American researchers. I’ve learned that at least one university has a lecture series called the “silverback” sessions.

I don’t know the specific origin of the term, or when it emerged as a regular term of use. Regardless, I don’t like it.

For those unaware of the behavioral ecology of non-human apes, a “silverback” is an older, large-bodied and behaviorally dominant male gorilla, characterized by silver fur on its back. With respect to at least certain aspects of a social group of gorillas, silverbacks are in charge. Their dominant status emerges from their age, size, interactions with others, experience and ability to advance in the social network of their group.

What’s the problem with the use of the term “silverback?” I don’t have a problem with the practice of using analogies from the behavior of other species to be applied to our own, as long as they’re appropriate.

Labeling influential senior scientists as “silverbacks” is a bad idea for one big reason:

It is sexist.

Female gorillas are never silverbacks. By using the term “silverback” to as a synonym for “influential senior scientist,” one is implying that women are not, or cannot become, influential senior scientists.

This objection isn’t about political correctness. It’s about recognizing the influential women in our midst, and showing respect for them. (Most people with issues about so-called political correctness are those who have trouble showing respect for others.)

What can we do? Join me in calling out the sexism of this word when it gets used. If you hear it in conversation, perhaps you could mention that you don’t think it’s a good use of the term because it excludes women?

(Most of my contemporary scientific heroes are women, after all.)

I’m a less-influential not-that-senior scientist, so I’m not in the best position to bring this issue to the forefront. Maybe we can bring this up with some big-time men and women to take up this issue?

Have you heard this term or is it a new one to you? Any additional observations, ideas, or suggestions?

Applying for positions at teaching institutions: identifying opportunities for serious research

Are you looking for a job at a teaching institution but and want to pursue an aggressive research agenda? Are you advising grad students or postdocs who might move into a job at a teaching school? Here are some opinions.

Let’s get two important points out of the way, that you should consider before applying for a job at a teaching school.

First, if you dislike teaching, don’t apply. This is in your own interest. As I’ve written before, if you’re going to move “up” from a job at a teaching university to a job at a research institution, you’ll have to be awesome, and to do that, you’ll have to be great at the job, including teaching. The people who leave teaching schools for research universities are the kind of people who get awards for their teaching. I have yet to see a person who doesn’t like teaching to be truly great at it, even though some have claimed it’s possible.

Second, if your primary goal is research fame, you’ll never become famous for your research while working out of a teaching institution, at least in the sciences. Even if you’re doing rockstar-level work, you won’t be a rockstar until you go elsewhere. And to move elsewhere, you need to be a great teacher. You can get excellent research done at a teaching school, but earning broad respect for your research is difficult, and fame is pretty much out of reach. A couple of my research heroes built their research careers teaching institutions. But are they broadly famous in their fields? Not as famous as they should be based on their achievements.

With those two caveats aside, let’s say that you’re focused on research and you are open to working at a teaching school. What do you need to know to figure out of a school can support your research agenda?

Before attacking that question, first let’s address a fundamental difference in culture and terminology between teaching schools and research institutions.

At most teaching-centered schools, “research” and “research active” means something different than you might expect. A typical “research-active” faculty member doesn’t necessarily publish often, and might not even be pursuing external funding. Someone with a reputation for being a strong researcher on campus might be unknown as a scholar off campus. At teaching schools, if you’re “research active,” that means that you’re doing scholarship and sharing it in some form, which in the sciences could mean training students in the lab, getting them into doctoral programs, and presenting research at local and undergraduate conferences.

What I just pointed out isn’t negative, or a dig against teaching campuses. I’m merely clarifying what “research” means at teaching campuses. If you don’t evaluate schools through this lens, you could be in for a rude surprise.

So why do teaching schools perceive research so differently than the broader research community? Isn’t research simply research? We all are used to the notion that standard measures of research success are publications, citations, and funding. Right?

At teaching institutions, it’s easy to lose focus from what happens in the scholarly community in your own field. People spend plenty of time teaching, and tenure decisions are based on what people on your campus think of you. It’s easy to focus your lens exclusively on campus culture. At any teaching campus, very few people have a well-established research presence in their international scholarly community. To do a great job, you just need to teach well, get a few pubs in minor journals, and sell yourself well on campus. It’s what most people do, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s the culture on many teaching campuses. Some of the top-notch scholars on a campus may produce little in the way of papers, but produce many new scholars. Sending many students off to good doctoral programs is, arguably, a bigger contribution to the field than publishing some papers on your own. (I s there an oversupply of scientists? Hell no.)

When you read job ads, draft your application, and interview on campus, remember the teaching school lens. If a job ad gives equal verbiage to the importance of teaching and research, and the need for excellence in both, then the be aware that teaching campuses use an entirely different measuring stick for research excellence than the academic community in general. You could be called “excellent” at research on a teaching campus but have very few publications. Most teaching schools, except some well-endowed privates, do not solicit external reviews of scholarship. (My campus actually forbids committees to contact off-campus experts for evaluating research in tenure packages!)

If you hear that that serious researchers are welcome, or that serious research is expected, what does that typically mean? That means you’re expected to have multiple publications when you come up for tenure and that you attempt to gain external funding. That’s serious research at a teaching campus. A scientist with one paper per year in a decent journal is considered to be mighty good at most teaching campuses. At very well-funded private teaching campuses, there may be higher expectations that go along with a lower teaching load. If the base teaching load is three courses per semester or higher, than it’s unlikely that “serious research” means anything more than a few pubs (though you’re usually expected to try to get a grant). If you think this is an unacceptably low level of productivity (in others), or if you think this is a sign of mediocrity, then you don’t belong on a teaching campus, because you’d get resentful of your colleagues right away.

You’ve got to be able to distinguish productivity from quality, and the fact that someone can be a great researcher while producing at a level that would be unacceptable at an R1.

What’s the best indicator of genuine campus research expectations? Look at the people who are recently tenured. What do their CVs look like? That’s what expected, or maybe just one little notch higher.

Regardless of what a campus regards as “research,” every 4-year teaching institution expects serious research at some level. All individuals are expected, at least pre-tenure, to sincerely pursue a scholarly agenda and publish. The research expectation for tenure might be just a single publication before coming up for tenure, as it was at my last job. The expectation might be 2-3 pubs before tenure (in my current position). That level of productivity might be laughable from the perspective of a research institution, but it’s serious business on a teaching campus. And when you’re teaching 3-4 full courses per semester, and your job counts on having these courses go very well, it ain’t easy.

Let’s say that you want to pursue a serious research agenda at a teaching institution, and by “serious research agenda” you mean that you want to maintain a level of research activity that will keep your CV looking like it could belong at an R1 institution. You want to publish a few papers per year and you want your research to be recognized, cited and make a difference in your discipline. Is this possible? Yes. It is common? No. Is it possible at the job to which you’re applying? Maybe. Let’s consider how you can tell if it’s possible.

If there are genuinely well-recognized researchers in the department to which you’re applying, then that’s great news for you. It’s possible! You could be one of them! That’s a wonderful sign. The flowchart ends with “sounds like a good place for research.”

What about the other branch of the flowchart? What if a department doesn’t have any productive researchers? Could a new hire run a productive research lab in a department that doesn’t have strong researchers? On some campuses this is a definite possibility; on others, it won’t be possible. How can you distinguish the former from the latter? That’s really tricky. It depends on what you think you need to run a successful research program, and if it can fit into the bounds of the institution.

A successful research lab on a teaching campus doesn’t look much like a successful lab at a research institution. Success in research at a teaching campus needs to take an entirely different route than the one that you saw in grad school. (This is a whole other long post, but here’s a start on the concept.) The things that typically result in success at research institutions just can’t happen at teaching campuses. You probably won’t have other labs with which you can collaborate. You won’t have a serious research student for more than two years, tops. You aren’t going to have postdocs to do analyses and writing on your projects, and you won’t have any single person working consistently in the lab during normal working hours. Maintaining an atmosphere of an active R1 research lab would be a full-time job, if it were even possible. You’ve got to develop a research lab that works for you on your own terms, and you need to find a campus that provides you what you need, which is individualized to what makes your program work.

What do I need to keep my lab running? Once in a while I am contacted by a colleague who wants to “visit my lab” and spend time with my “research group.” I can’t help but chuckle to myself. My lab is more often empty than not, filled with a bunch of samples that need work. When it’s not empty, it’s full of undergraduates who are more focused on studying for their exams than they are on bringing their research towards publication. (Don’t get me wrong: my research lab is critically important space, and I need more of it; I just use this space differently than R1 labs.) My students are my highest priority, but the route that I take is to emphasize productivity of my research program over providing detailed and careful mentorship to my students year-round. This might be heresy in some teaching institutions, but I think it’s a strategy that serves the interests of my students the best.

With my lab looking like I just described, how do I get research done? During the school year, aside from a few small contributions by students apart from coursework, work gets done by me. (I can’t pay students to work in my lab, and all of my students need to earn money, so they typically have outside employment.) I got to spend a few weeks at the scope this spring, to finish up a very cool project, but I’d say that 98% of my work is me sitting at a computer.

During the academic year, I’m analyzing data, writing manuscripts, and feeding collaborations in a variety of ways. This work is sometimes done best when I’m not at work. I can do some things well from home, but I might work elsewhere away from campus or home too.

The source of my data arrives in the summertime. I go to the rainforest for a few weeks, and I have 1-4 students working there for the full summer. This work, along with other small projects here and there, generates more samples and data than I can handle throughout the academic year. My manuscript backlog is substantial, and if science is going to happen predictably, year after year after year, then nearly all of that work has to be done by me.

I sometimes feel like the early British explorers of the Antarctic who brought sledge dogs but didn’t know how to use them, so they ended up pulling the sleds themselves while the dogs were running alongside without any burden. This isn’t the way things really are, and my students do make great contributions, but most of them are not yet equipped to write manuscripts and if I equipped them, then far too few of them would ever come to press.

In sum, what is it that I need from my institution to get research done? I have the freedom and flexibility to be able to focus on writing. The campus culture doesn’t expect me to provide a sophisticated mentoring agenda for every student who comes into my lab, and I’m evaluated on the basis of the output (of students) rather than the methods. The bottom line is that I am sending students on to graduate programs, and that I am producing scholarship with student authors, and that I am bringing in grant money. That is valued, and I’ve never gotten any guff about how I go about making that happen. That’s how my campus allows me to get research done.

How can you apply my personal anecdote about my own campus to figuring out how other campuses can support your productive research program? You need to identify what route – or routes – exist for research success and whether those campuses enable those routes. You need to be able to envision exactly what you need to be successful, and then see if that is possible within the job. This takes an understanding of how you run your lab and how you get stuff done. This might be hard to figure out if you haven’t done it yet.

What is the worst indicator of whether a campus can support your research? Whatever they tell you. Having administrators that support research in concept is important. However, whatever they imagine you need, and whatever they want to provide, may not be what you truly need. You have to figure out what you really need, and I think this is highly individualized.

For example, if your program relies on the upkeep of some model organism, are there technical staff or work-study funds to pay someone to maintain your critters without you having to worry about it? If your work relies heavily on some fancy piece of equipment, is there one of those on campus with a service contract that you can use for your research? If you need to go two weeks at a time to a collaborating lab during the academic year, do you have the flexibility to schedule your classes to make that happen? If you need relatively untrained students to do repetitive work in the lab, are there funds or people that enable that to happen predictably or consistently? If you have a field site six hours away for your project, does the institution have a van that you can use to take students out and do you have a student population that can afford to go away for extended work?

A lot of professors who aren’t getting much research done at teaching institutions are frustrated because their institutions lack what they need to get done – not just in terms of equipment, but in terms of flexibility. There is often a structural mismatch between a professor’s research ambitions and what is possible on campus. You want to avoid that mismatch. You can do that by being flexible in what research questions you ask and how you go about answering them, or you could do that by finding the campus that can give you what you need. (I’ve done both; the latter was more by accident than design.)

Is the way the job is structured able to give you the time and resources that enable you to focus on research? You can’t tell that from a job ad. Unless you know exactly what your research program is going to look like, you can’t even learn that from an interview.

Last, can you be a serious and well-recognized researcher on a campus that doesn’t even seem to care about research at all? You definitely can. It doesn’t matter what people say or think on your campus. If your campus gives you the time, space and resources to make you successful – whatever it is that you need – it doesn’t matter what the campus culture is at all. Talking about research on a teaching campus won’t do your research program any good. You just need to, privately and in an individualized fashion, get it done.

The hardest part about being a researcher at a teaching campus is that this part of your job is very solitary. To be successful on a teaching campus typically means that you’re doing it on your own, and with collaborators who aren’t with you on your campus. This is radically different from what you experienced at research institutions in which you worked with a lab group. Even if your buddies worked on different projects, you still had one another.

How do you run a productive research program over your career in which you won’t have a peer, or highly trained mentee, working on directly related questions? Your specific answer to this question can tell you whether or not a job at a teaching institution can support your research agenda.

How can you tell this from the institution’s website and from the job ad? You can’t. Which is why you need to apply, and then find out if you land an interview. To be continued.

Efficient teaching: how to use the course management system

A wise friend of mine once advised me: the most valuable resource is our own time.

Consequently, I have emphasized efficient teaching tactics. Efficient teaching is effective teaching that doesn’t take a lot of your time. There are many routes to being an effective teacher, and some of them require far more time than others.

Many have advocated using web-based course platforms to increase teaching efficiency.

I’ve been a user of Blackboard, Moodle, and WebCT, with varying levels of experience. These are course management systems (CMS). A CMS can be mighty powerful once you’ve learned how to use one. All kinds of activities in your class can be conducted smoothly within the CMS. Some folks call them the LMS, with the L standing for learning. (I’m not going to imply that by managing a course online, I’m actually managing learning, so I’ll stick with CMS.)

If I were asked for advice how about how to use the CMS efficiently, what would I say?

Ditch the CMS.

I wouldn’t be equipped to recommend otherwise, because I have no idea how to use the CMS efficiently. If you’re not running an online course, then I don’t see why you’d need to a CMS unless you’re looking to lose time and make yourself miserable.

If you really learn how to use a CMS, by making an investment, then it can pay off. If you’re not ready to make that investment, don’t feel bad about it. If you’re using a CMS, and it seems like a time sink, don’t feel bad about dropping it.

I’ve seen others use the CMS effectively and have it an immersive part of their course. I’ve worked closely with a high school science teacher who runs a paperless classroom, with absolutely everything on Moodle. He puts up reading, assignments, quizzes, exams, and avenues for student-student interactions. That’s exceptional, meaning that it is an exception. He put a lot of front-end investment into this system, and it only started paying off because he is teaching the same curriculum, with little change, over several years. That’s wonderful, and it’s a great experience for his students as a part of building technological literacy.

I haven’t dedicated that kind of time to make the CMS work. I haven’t identified a specific benefit that I would obtain from doing so. I can teach my courses efficiently without having to use the CMS, so that’s what I’m doing. Would my teaching be more effective with the CMS? Perhaps. I’m not sure. It wouldn’t be more efficient, at least without a big front-end investment that I’ve yet to make.

Some students love the CMS; some are as annoyed by it as I am. Some people simultaneously love it and are annoyed by it, like they feel about some family members. We can’t choose our family, but we can choose against the CMS.

The main reason that students love the CMS, from what I have gathered, is that they can access their grades quickly, they know their grade in the class at any given moment, and have quick access to the files for their lectures. The CMS gives them a feeling of control over the course. They can log in at any moment and have the resources of the course at their fingertips.

From my viewpoint, those reasons are not connected to effective teaching, and may even hinder teaching effectiveness. The CMS might help students overemphasize grades over genuine learning, and memorization over exploration and deep understanding, depending of course on how you use the CMS. Whenever a student asks me to use the CMS for the course, it’s because they want a digital copy of a presentation I did in class, or because they want their grade more quickly. Those, in my view, are horrible reasons to use the CMS.

A number of faculty in my department have been using the CMS to connect clickers to grades for the course. It works for them. The clicker/CMS combo can be used to take attendance, spot quizzes, and even entire exams. That’s not a bad selling point. If you’re teaching a particularly large class, then the CMS/clicker combo can help with classroom management. However, if you’re only using clickers for immediate pop questions (“formative assessment” as they say), then you don’t need the CMS, unless these questions have grades connected to them. I have noticed that faculty members that are heavy CMS also spend a lot of time on teaching outside of the classroom. I don’t know where the threshold lies that CMS use saves time rather than costs time. For me, I suspect, I’d never hit that threshold no matter how much I teach or how big my classes are.

Another reason that I forgo the CMS is that it increases student expectations of constant availability, and for you to provide information more promptly than should be reasonably expected.

I tell my students that I’ll get back to them within a business day after they contact me. My response time is typically is far more rapid, but I don’t want my students to build the expectation that I am at their beckoning.

I want my students to think that business is conducted during class hours and office hours. Why do I want this? First of all, I think it’s healthy for the students to be able to rely on themselves to work on the course material. I am not focused on customer service, I’m focused on learning. Learning inherently requires some struggle with content, and I want my students to struggle so that way they can learn. If I clearly explain to students, during class hours, exactly how I expect them to struggle with the class material, then we can update their progress in class and office hours.

Having students expect things of me beyond class time and office hours is horrible for my own time management. If I’m teaching multiple courses simultaneously, I need to be able to put my work on those courses on my calendar, and not work on those courses when time isn’t budgeted.

It’s harder to compartmentalize your work on your course when you use the CMS, because the expectation of the students with a CMS-heavy course is the same way that other social media are used, opportunistically and frequently. Just because other parts of our lives are replete with social media, we don’t need to mimic this pattern with university coursework. There is a social burden for all of us, including our students, to frequently access information online. Do you want be a part of the problem or be a part of the solution?

In short: If the CMS works for you, great! If not, don’t feel guilty about it.

The CMS should be used to find solutions to problems in your teaching that increase efficiency. If you don’t foresee that the CMS will help accomplish this goal, don’t feel bad about not trying. If it feels like it’s not working for you, don’t feel bad about not giving it up. If it is working for you, before you recommend it for others, be sure that you have a specific and useful reason for your recommendation that is directly relevant to your colleague’s situation.

Before you pigeonhole me as a latter-day-Luddite, keep in mind that for the last year, I’ve been the “Digital Ambassador” from the Chancellor’s office to my university, tasked with promoting the use of technology to improve teaching effectiveness. (I haven’t been an effective ambassador, but I clearly am interested in integrating new and useful technology into teaching.) So, I am entirely open to using technology in the classroom. I’d like to emphasize that I’ve been an ambassador for technology in the classroom. I don’t want to extend it far beyond the classroom. Outside the classroom, I want students to engage with nature, with books, and with one another. There are some great tech tools out there that make teaching better. Is the CMS one of those tools? Not in my, albeit limited, experience.

Field courses need more units

Field courses are critical for the development of scientists in a variety of disciplines.

This fact is self-evident to many. For those whom it is not, then Chris Buddle has already written a great post explaining exactly why field courses matter. He also has some top-notch specific tips on how to run your field lab.

In this post, I’m not talking about an outdoor lab section during the semester. I’m thinking of a course that is based somewhere away from the university, in a field location apart from a university. These are immersive experiences, that don’t last a whole semester, but include a semester’s worth of work in a shorter period of time. They are taught in a way similar to how courses in the block system are taught.

It’s getting harder to find these courses within universities. Why is that? I think there are a number of complex intertwined factors. I’d like to single out one of those factors:

At many universities lacking a strong tradition of field courses, students don’t get enough academic credit for their field courses, and faculty don’t get enough credit to teach these courses.

This creates a disincentive for faculty to offer such courses and for students to enroll in them. This isn’t the only reason field courses have experienced atrophy, but I think it’s a big piece.

You might ask, “What atrophy? We have plenty of great field courses at my university over the winter break and in the summer!” I might then, ask you, “How many semester hours of credit go with the courses, relative to the hours of instruction, and how much credit do faculty get towards their annual teaching loads?”

Field courses are often undervalued relative to traditional courses taught within the university. This undervaluation reflects not just the funds allocated towards operating the courses, but also the work of the students and faculty. After chatting with some colleagues at an international field station, I’ve discovered that some of the faculty teaching field courses are working out of generosity, because they’re being undercompensated. Moreover, the students on field courses are participating even though they’re not earning the academic credit that should be associated with their effort on the course. I’ve discovered more often, though, that faculty aren’t teaching field courses because it’s not worth their time, the way that their universities account for their time.

I do realize – and have witnessed – that some field courses could actually be light on academics and hard work, and could amount to a vacation for all people involved. (Taking an undergraduate course traveling throughout Costa Rica is definitely not my kind of vacation.) For a course to receive appropriate credit, it’s only reasonable for there to be some degree of accountability so that everyone involved knows the hours of specific directed academic work that were conducted by the students on the course. However, this entirely point is a red herring because the potential for a no-work vacation-like aspect of courses is independent of the field. Lots of on-campus labs and lecture courses lack rigor, perhaps more often than field courses.

Here’s my relevant anecdote: Just weeks into my first tenure-track position, I put together a new course proposal that I brought to a departmental meeting. The proposal was well-vetted and approved by my chair, who was a lab-oriented scientist. The proposal was for a standard field course in Tropical Biology, in a few sites in Costa Rica, during the university’s January break. The proposal was straightforward, without any hitches, resembled excellent courses with which I was familiar, and followed standard practices. Running an entire class as a field course, with a few pre-departure sessions, was a novelty in my department at the time.

The department thought the course was great. However, they wanted it to be offered as a three-unit course, not as a four-unit course, as I had proposed. I looked at how much time was being spent on the course, how much work was scheduled for the students. I also looked at university guidelines for the hours of instruction and lab activity are supposed to be associated with units.

My proposed four units was a lowball, because the amount of class time and field activities with the course far exceeded a typical 4-unit course, even if the time frame was relatively short. This notion didn’t sway my department from the request that the proposed course run at three units.

Most of my new colleagues simply thought that the duration of the course shouldn’t merit four units. They wanted me to lengthen the course by several days if I wanted a four-unit class. I said if I did that, then I wouldn’t have any time for my own field research, and that also wouldn’t be fair to the students who would be doing much more than 4 units’ worth of work. (Alternatively, I could have organized the course for students to be working fewer hours per day, which I rejected a recipe for mischief, as I’ve seen in other undergraduate course traveling around Costa Rica.)

They asked, what’s my priority? Teaching or research? Do you have a problem with spending all of winter break teaching a four unit course? I thought to myself, I do have a problem if it’s far more than four units worth of work for myself and for the students.

Essentially, my department rejected my argument, not with any specific rebuttal about the value of units or how much work or time was spent on the course. They just didn’t like the idea that students could earn four units over such a short period of time. I think they didn’t realize how much I’d be working the butts off of these students on the course. They didn’t think I’d be running a field course with twelve solid hours of work per day. I’ve seen such courses, and in my view they’re the most successful ones.

I dropped the proposal.

Instead, I resolved to make as many field opportunities as possible for research students.

To date, I have yet to teach my own field course in the tropics, though I often have a very minor role in other courses offered through other institutions. And I am now an instructor on a field course operated by a field station.

I thought my experience in getting mildly shafted on the units was rather unique, but then I was chatting with a variety of people and realized that this limited-units situation might be the norm rather than the outlier. One of my field station buddies just finished teaching a demanding field course this summer. The students just went home.

I asked her if the summer course counted towards her academic year teaching load. She said it did, that the field course counted for half of a regular lecture course.

I saw her course in action. They were traveling around for multiple weeks, and working in earnest 12 hours per day, if not more. Even if you run the numbers so that all activities are considered as a “lab” rather than a “lecture,” then it’s obvious to everyone that the students should be earning a full lecture course credit for the experience, and also that the instructor receives full credit for a teaching a full course. Clearly, from where I sit, this course was far more work, cumulatively, than any normal lecture course during a regular semester. Yet she only got a half-course credit.

She said that she was turned down for full credit for the course, and she taught it anyway. Her circumstance was similar to my own, but the difference is that her students benefited from her decision to sacrifice herself.

I told her I was surprised that she decided to do it. (We’ve never had problems sharing our unsolicited opinions with one another.) If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t be teaching it again unless everybody involved got appropriate credit. She had wonderful reasons for teaching the course. She provided amazing opportunities to a group of students that she likes and at her university. If she didn’t do it, those opportunities wouldn’t exist. If our job is to inspire and change the lives of our students, then her field course epitomizes her success as a teacher, from what I saw.

I also saw how much time she had put into the experience: far more than any normal course, and for half of the credit. That’s not only unfair, it’s also unsustainable. I can’t imagine anybody sensible person doing a more than a full course’s worth of work for the credit of a half-course on a regular basis.

Why do these field courses not get enough credit from universities? This might be overly simplistic, but I suspect it’s because most faculty – who don’t teach these courses and probably have never taken one – don’t understand them. Perhaps we could invite them along to join one of these courses for a few days and then evaluate if they’re worth the credit. If they’re not willing to invest their own time into sizing it up, then they should be willing to abandon their objections. The understanding of these field courses is inherently experiential.

I don’t know whether, from campus to campus, the problem is more often at the level of the department, the college, or the dreaded and dreadful curriculum committee. Perhaps if students finishing up a course wrote a summary of exactly what they did, and what they learned, and how it fit into the calendar, it would make a difference.

In theory, the numbers should be the numbers. But at some places, the number of hours in lecture and the lab (or field) aren’t enough to satisfy critics, who might find other reasons to oppose full credit, with the tacit bias that fieldwork isn’t as valuable as labwork.

Have any of you helped gain adequate credit for a field course in a system that had undervalued them? Does your university offer strong field courses, and if so, are they accompanied with a robust credit structure for students and faculty?

–

Tips o’ the hat to Alex Bond, Chris Buddle, and Cat Cardelus for digital or corporeal conversations on the topic.

Attending conferences as a professor from a teaching institution

We are hitting the peak season for conferences.

For those of us from teaching-centered schools, we have an extra challenge with conferences that can make the experience less pleasant.

At conferences, social status matters. Having your unknown or lesser-known teaching institution under your name on your ID badge can be a social obstacle.

Some people may disregard others on the basis of the institutions on their nametags. If your nametag says LargeR1 University on it, more people will talk to you than if your nametag lists a school that sounds like it lacks a substantial research community.

To some people at a research conference, if you work at a teaching institution, you matter less. I’m not saying this to be bitter or accusatory. I’m just recognizing the way things are and discussing it in daylight. It’s hard to deal with a problem if you don’t recognize it.

If you’re thinking about working at a teaching campus, then you should be aware that networking with other researchers who don’t know you from your work may be more difficult because of where you work. Also, people who do know you, when they realize that you’ve taken what they perceive to be a non-research job, might also treat you differently as well. Even though any faculty job is scarce nowadays, many researchers will feel sorry for people who they think settled for a job at a teaching institution.

Of course, the majority of people out there are wonderful and don’t have this bias. But it isn’t a rare bias, and it’s something that we need to understand so that we can deal with it.

Why do I think that the institution on your nametag influences perception? Well, I it’s obvious. You don’t have to be a sociologist to figure that out.

Moreover, before I moved to my current position I used to work for an equivalently obscure institution. However, this institution was named such that a good number of people, who were not very familiar with California, were apt to assume that I worked for a well-known university just up the road. Sometimes I clarified things, sometimes I let it ride. Regardless, the point is that since I moved to a campus that can’t be mistaken for a research university, I’ve seen changes in how people treat me based on my institution. I never realized I had it so good when people falsely assumed I was a professor at a research university.

People attend meetings for a variety of purposes. They go to learn about new things, to see old friends, to make new friends, to “network” and build collaborations, develop skills, find a job, and maybe tack on a vacation. I might have missed some reasons. (I don’t know when “network” transitioned from being a noun to being a verb, but I don’t like it.)

If you look at those purposes I just listed, I suspect you’ll find that some people might harbor this notion: Professors at teaching schools don’t help fulfill a number of these purposes.

If you have a teaching school on your nametag, some folks might think that you might not be worthwhile for schmoozing. I’ve seen others, as well as myself, passed over for initial schmoozing not on the basis of what we work on, or how well we publish, or who we work with, but where we work. It’s rough, but I suspect that’s the way it is.

Why aren’t we schmoozable? Some might wrongly assume that we aren’t conducting cutting-edge research, so they can’t learn anything from us. It’s unlikely we’re going to hire postdocs, we aren’t taking on Ph.D. students, and some might falsely assume that we aren’t equipped with the facilities, time or expertise for collaboration.

Is that overly harsh? Probably. I’ve never entered into an interaction with the presumption that others are biased against me based on my institution, but I’ve had plenty of conversations in which that presumption of lack of bias has been promptly invalidated.

In all of the conferences I’ve attended, where have I felt the least welcome? The Ecological Society of America. It’s also typically the biggest of the meetings that I have attended, so it might not be discipline-specific. It’s not timed well to fit my summer research and travel schedule; I typically only make the time if I’m invited to give a talk in a particular symposium. Regardless, it’s clear that some ecologists, at least at this meeting, are big on status. I’ve been around long enough that I know plenty of people who attend the meeting, from a variety of contexts. The last few times, I’ve had great fun and have been compelled to turn down as many social invitations as I am offered. However, it’s still quite transparent that I get overlooked by some people because of where I work. Perhaps it’s even worse at meetings like the Neuro conference, or with the ~~Sophophora~~ Drosophila people, or the physiologists. I have no idea, as I don’t go to those meetings. Maybe professors at teaching colleges get the heavy schmoozing treatment at those meetings.

I don’t have any authoritative advice on how to handle the issue, but I wanted to bring the concept up, and I’m wondering how others perceive this issue. For those you at teaching campuses, does my experience and opinion seem too extreme or do you feel this issue too?

How I approach meetings with this issue in mind? I try to not make it an issue as much as possible. Nowadays, my work is known within some sub-subpopulations well enough that there are occasional people who are excited to meet me and hear what I have to say. So I’m not overly concerned about being wholly marginalized, anymore. I try to be gregarious, especially reaching out to grad students who might not yet feel at ease at meetings. It’s fun to introduce people with shared interests who don’t yet know one another. Most people are interesting if you get to know them, and so I try to get to know people.

This might by cheesy but I sometimes use “California State University” on my nametag as shortcut for my campus name. I don’t do this to hide my little-known campus, but to avoid the boring conversations about where I work. I’m just tired of answering questions about teaching while I’m at a research conference. I didn’t put much thought into the decision, but that’s also how listed my affiliation on the masthead of a journal that I help edit.

As it’s often argued, first impressions matter. For my own part, I mostly recall a string of horribly embarrassing first impressions that I must have left on others. Nowadays, I don’t want the first impression to be that I’m the guy at an obscure teaching college. At an academic conference, my impression should be that I do awesome research, and that I also have a lab filled with awesome students.

Am I worth schmoozing? Definitely. I have skills, access to resources, insights, connections and all that stuff. And, if you’re looking for doctoral students, I have the best damn students that you might ever hope to bring into your lab. Each meeting I’ve attended in the last few years, I’ve emerged with a few cool collaborations in the works.

Ultimately, those who think that I’m not worth their time aren’t worth my time. If my skin were less thick, I’d have a hard time at conferences. Also, working long-term at a field station where I’ve made friends from all over North America and beyond has helped. I would have a hard time at meetings if my network was just composed of old friends from grad school. I don’t go to meetings because I have to, but because it’s tremendous fun. (This season, I’ll be at the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, in a joint meeting with the Organization for Tropical Studies. I’ve never not had fun among other tropical biologists.)

You might be thinking, maybe the level of respect/attention/schmoozing is entirely independent of institution, and just depends on how well known you are from publications other parts of your reputation? Clearly, if people directly know of your work, that might trump the institutional effect to some extent. However, if you’re meeting someone outside your subfield, with whom whose work you’re not familiar, then my hunch is that institution matters.

Anyway, if or when you bump into me at a meeting, I don’t fuss about whether or not I might get dissed. We are often busy trying to get from one room to another, trying to find old friends who we’ve promised to meet for coffee, and catch a person who we really need to see. I’m just there to have fun, learn about other people and their work, share the cool stuff I’ve been doing, be proud of my students, learn science and if the stars align I develop new collaborations. (Heck, mention you read this post and I’d be glad to buy you an overpriced convention center beer.)

If I’m not schmoozing people in high places, that might only be because I don’t need to do so. My job doesn’t require that I am known by, and work with, famous people. My work doesn’t want me to aspire to fame, because if I were successful, then they would guess that I’d leave. So meetings are just for fun in my book, as I’ve got no ladder to climb.

I suppose that, if I was stressed about getting a postdoc, or a tenure-track R1 job, or tenure, or promotion, or a fancier job or a big-time collaboration, that I’d overlook people like me too. So I don’t resent anybody for it. But I can address the situation by making it clear that I am worthwhile, not just as a nice guy but also as one who can be a great asset in our scientific endeavor.

Have you been on the receiving end of being ignored because you weren’t working in a research institution? Do you avoid meetings because they’re not as fun as they could be? Do you think my perception is off, or I am oversensitive? Do you think there are actual things that could ameliorate the issue (if it exists)?

First, let’s remove all the desks

Let’s say I were a provost or president, and had some hundred thousand dollars lying around that needed to be spent on an initiative to improve undergraduate education. (This isn’t an unlikely budgetary scenario.)

I’d spend all of it on furniture.

Starting with the smallest classrooms in the university and going up in size until I run out of money, I’d sell off all of the single-person desks as surplus, and replace them with smallish round tables that seat 4-6 students and chairs that go along. This wouldn’t diminish classroom capacity by much, if at all, as long as the chairs are well positioned. The fire marshal won’t be bothered by it, either.

If there were some money leftover I’d spend it on professional development. However, you can lead a faculty member to professional development but you can’t make them drink the kool-aid.

Most of us prefer teaching our lecture courses in a classroom full of desks pointing at us, rather than in a room with students seated at tables facing one another. Why is that? There are many reasons, I suspect, but at the root is the fact that we were taught this way in university, and it’s also the way we learned to teach. It’s familiar to us, and we might be disposed to thinking that it’s better.

There’s a lot of research to suggest that sitting around a table is much better for learning, especially when the course is designed to incorporate frequent student interactions. This is even true in a content-rich class like an introductory majors biology course.

Wouldn’t this move just be administration forcing on faculty top-down decisions without faculty input? Isn’t this too autocratic? You could see it that way, sure. Keep in mind that, right now, the status quo is being forced on faculty without their input too. I doubt faculty were consulted before all the current desks were purchased for all of the classrooms. (Don’t worry, I won’t become an administrator, so I won’t be one of those people who takes hare-brained ideas and scales them up without building consensus.)

Perhaps the way we teach is structured by the environment. Maybe, if we give faculty a room full of students positioned to interact with one another, then we’ll get lessons designed that take advantage of this interaction to improve learning. Maybe professors who are tired of lecturing will discover that they have more fun guiding learning rather than delivering content.

If you haven’t taught several semesters to a classroom full of tables, instead of students facing forward, then I recommend withholding judgment. Once your classes are designed for students to work together solving problems, instead of listening to the delivery of facts and ideas, then students may learn more from the course. I haven’t had this opportunity myself, either, but I am getting sick of having my students have to rearrange chairs at the start and finish of every time we meet.

I bet most professors wouldn’t like the change, at least at first. But, what happens in the classroom isn’t for us, it’s for our students. And there’s no real evidence out there indicating that this change would harm students, and at worst it would only slightly inconvenience faculty members who dislike the situation, but might empower others to make effective changes in how they teach. As new faculty come to campus, when they build their courses they’ll know about the tables and design their classes in mind.

Have you taught in a classroom like this? Do you teach lecture courses in a lab, that allows this kind of interaction, maybe? How mad would you be at your admins if your big lecture hall was converted to tables? Would you change your teaching, if you were paid a little stipend or given more time to work on your curriculum?

On not liking teaching

Some hubbub has emerged over an opinion piece published over in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few days ago, entitled: “I don’t like teaching. There, I said it.”

You should go over, give it a read, and please let me know what you thought, before I let you know about what I think about it.

I’m not writing this response so that I can contribute my own $0.02. I’ve written this response because I hope to move the conversation beyond the myopia of the entire discussion involving the article, which only tracks the myopia of the piece’s author.

On one side, you have a predictable argument: “If she doesn’t like teaching maybe she should have a different profession.” On the other side, you have a predictable response, “If she’s teaching well, she doesn’t have to like it because that’s her own business.” Another predictable counter to the initial criticism is that teaching is only one part of the job of a professor.

The preceding statements are all correct, and they are not contradictory. And they’re all mostly pointless. Instead, we might want to look at the nature of our profession, and why this particular pseudonymous author doesn’t like teaching even though she’s chosen this line of work.

For starters, I don’t know many people that received their Ph.D. because they were interested in teaching and who were primarily interested in teaching at the university level. If this is one’s primary motivation in completing a dissertation, what are the odds that the dissertation will be completed, and what are the odds that the person will do a good job?

I have to admit that, if I were in a position in which I had doctoral students, I would be reluctant to take such a student into my lab because that student would lack the ganas that is required for success in grad school. You just don’t do research on something for five+ years unless you’re passionately into it, and that isn’t going to come from a desire to teach at the university level. If students go into grad school with love of teaching above all else, will these students ever publish their theses?

Being a professor may or may not someone’s greatest passion and a personal calling as a career. Regardless, being a professor is a job. You do something and you bring in a paycheck. In my view, it’s a friggin’ awesome job. No matter how you dress it up, though, it’s a job, even if you love it.

Most people don’t like their jobs. You wouldn’t judge your supermarket cashier, your plumber or your associate director of human resources based on whether or not they like their jobs. You care if your plumber replaces your fixture promptly, professionally, and at a good value. Your interactions would be more pleasant if he enjoyed his job, but that’s not your concern. Your plumber might not like being a plumber. For a bunch of people, this is what life is like, to a good extent, and our default mode is to not enjoy our moment-to-moment existence. (To be clear, the last plumber I interacted with was talented, friendly, pleasant and seemed to be enjoying life.)

Maybe my plumber was doing the same thing that the pseudonymous author of the Chronicle piece does. Maybe he doesn’t like plumbing deep down but he has to convince his clients that he likes it because that’s the only way he gets referrals and keeps his job. Heck, I’d be glad to offer a referral, and if he seemed like a gloomy gus then that might not be the case. I’m not sure. Smiles do matter. I would wager a small bet that my plumber, deep down, is happier than the author of the Chronicle. I doubt he’d write an article for a plumbing trade journal about not liking plumbing.

Would my plumber be a better plumber if he enjoyed his job? Over the years, I would think so. It’s hard to have pride in one’s job over the years if one doesn’t enjoy it. Why stay current with the latest plumbing technology? Why focus on quality control, and why not get a job done in the minimum amount of time and effort required as long as you can get away with it with the client? Yes, I do want a plumber that enjoys his job. Other than my empathetic concern for all other people, I don’t care if my plumber enjoys his job. However, I’m willing to bet that the happy plumber will be the more effective plumber in the long run.

The author of the Chronicle piece writes that if one likes teaching for the wrong reason (“because one loves the spotlight”), then this person might be a worse teacher than a person who doesn’t care about teaching at all. That’s a Ray-Bolger-scale strawman argument that I’ll choose to ignore.

The author implies that she’s a perfectly fine teacher, just as she is perfectly fine at cutting the grass, changing diapers and doing the laundry: “You don’t have to enjoy something to do it, and you don’t have to enjoy something to be good at it.”

In short, the author dismisses the notion that happiness leads to doing a good job. If you know how to go through the steps to do laundry or make risotto, then you don’t have to enjoy it to do it well, right? Isn’t teaching the same way, if you do what it takes to be effective in the classroom you don’t have to enjoy it to do it well, do you?

Is teaching so special? Do you have to enjoy teaching to do it well even though that’s not true of many other tasks?

I think that might be the case. A good performer that could fake enjoyment might be just as effective, perhaps. What evidence do I have? Oh, I don’t have any. I’m not even particularly concerned about being right, that’s just a hunch.

This question itself – is teaching different because excellence requires a passion – is the center of the banal discussion of this article that I’d like us all to get past.

This whole discussion has been based on a linear thinking about teaching. You enjoy teaching or you don’t, and as a result you are good at it, or you’re not, or there’s no relationship between enjoyment and effectiveness.

Instead of asking whether enjoyment of teaching is required to be an effective teacher, how about we ask:

Does effective teaching lead one to be happy?

It seems this is not true for the author of the article. She argues that when she’s an effective teacher she doesn’t enjoy it. This means that effective teaching doesn’t make her happy.

Now, that’s her real problem.

And, I suspect, it’s her students’ problem too.

Ignoring the parts of teaching that none of us like (grading, grade grubbers), do I like doing most of the other stuff? Not really. Do I derive deep enjoyment from crafting a particularly good lesson? No. Do I really like developing a new laboratory exercise that involves inquiry for students to learn a central important concept in my discipline? Not much.

I don’t need to hide behind a goddamn pseudonym to say that. You know why I don’t need to hide? Because I deeply enjoy teaching. I love it.

How can I love teaching if I don’t enjoy doing all of the parts of it?

I don’t love the process; I love the outcome.

My brain is adequately wired, and has enough experience, that I can be driven by delayed gratification. Among the list of great feelings are having taught a great class and a having taught a great course. Even better is when you’ve spent the whole semester teaching an academic scientific concept, and at the end, students tell you that you’ve made a difference in their lives.

You’re damn right that’s enjoyable.

If that’s not enjoyable, then I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you. If students aren’t telling you that you’ve made a difference, then you might want to reconsider what constitutes effective teaching.

So how are mowing your lawn, making risotto and picking up trash different from teaching? You do the first three for yourself. When you teach, you are not doing it for yourself. You’re doing it for others. That’s the difference.

Let’s look at the author’s risotto example more carefully. According to her, if you know how to follow the steps, then you can make a great risotto. (By the way, if you are making risotto with all of that stirring instead of using a pressure cooker, you’re nuts. Seven minutes under high pressure and the risotto is perfect without any stirring. Get yourself a pressure cooker pronto if you don’t have one, and let me know if you need any tips.)

So, she claims that that she can make a good risotto without enjoying the process if she follows the steps. That’s true, but who is eating this risotto? It’s my bet that she is. If she’s making this risotto and not tasting it, then she’s probably not going to be focusing on doing a great job.

If she’s making risotto for others, and she’s not eating it herself, would she still make good risotto? You bet she would, if she actually cared about the people for whom she was cooking. If it was her spouse and kids, she’d make it super-tasty, take the time to mince the garlic just right, and all that. If it was just some schmo who she was feeding in a soup kitchen, maybe she wouldn’t make as good of a risotto. She might be able to, but does she go through the effort? I doubt it.

I love making a great risotto, though I don’t do it often. I’ll spend much more time in the kitchen making the risotto just right because that makes it so much more enjoyable. Do I inherently enjoy peeling and mincing garlic? No? Do I like peeling, seeding, and cubing a butternut squash? Not particularly. Do I like making a special trip to the store that has the particularly good parmesean? Of course not. But I do it, because I really like the risotto. I don’t find the cooking process objectionable, and I love being able to make a wonderful meal.

If you were to ask anybody who knows me very well, they’d say that I enjoy cooking.

So, now let’s look at the teaching of our pseudonymous non-liker of teaching, which can only be evaluated based on what she says and chooses to not say. She implies that she’s a perfectly fine teacher even though she doesn’t enjoy teaching. She’s only teaching because it’s her job.

Even though she’s teaching just fine, she still doesn’t enjoy it. Effective teaching, even when done efficiently, takes plenty of time. If she’s not enjoying the product, then how does she go through the motions to teach so well? Let’s take a look at what she thinks goes into effective teaching:

Effective teaching is, after all, a set of behaviors. What students need from us are clear presentations, careful selections of course material, engaging discussions—in short, the right behaviors.

If she thinks that this list above comprises the top requirements for highly effective teaching, then no wonder she doesn’t enjoy teaching.

I’m willing to wager that if she were to cook some risotto for me, I would find it passable but not delicious.

What do I think is highly effective teaching? Here’s a starting point.

If you’re going to enjoy teaching, then what brings you the most enjoyment is successful teaching. If you think that a rote set of behaviors, disconnected to your own emotions, makes you an effective teacher over the course of your career, then you’ve squandered your time failing to change the lives of your students.

Juggling summer parenting and research

Some people think that when kids are old enough to go to school, that parents get more time available to them.

For US academics, the opposite is true. Most scientists lose time for research when their kids transition into kindergarten.

Preschool is, or can be, year-round. However, once kids get beyond preschool, K-12 education takes a huge break in summertime. In summer, you’ve got a childcare issue smack in the middle of time when you aren’t teaching and is best for field research, travel and focusing on long-term projects.

Of course, summer is also arguably the best time to play outside with your kids, travel as a family, and hang out with friends for barbeques and stuff like that.

Today was my kid’s last day of school until late August. I get to spend more time with him, but also, this is a challenge for getting research done.

What can you do with your kids who are out of school?

stay with the kids and have fun playing with them
stay with the kids and attempt to work on occasion
enlist your kids as research participants
sign the kids up for day camp
ship your kids away to faraway camp for the whole summer
share your kids with extended family and friends
release the kids into the neighborhood village
go on vacation with your kids

How both parents make a living matters a lot. If one parent has a stereotypical weekday job, with some weeks of vacation, then the academic-job parent may end up spending a lot more time with the kids in the summer, but there are constraints on travel and recreation because of one parent’s job.

If both parents are academics, then there’s a lot of flexibility in the summer, but there also is a need for both parents to be able to focus on research and find a way to care for the kids. I suppose tag-teaming could work, but for the whole summer?

I know many couples that have an academic spouse and another that works consulting or some other gig that could be flexible and maybe even part-time. That lends itself to a variety of possibilities. And then there are those of us academics who have a full-time partner at home. That isn’t a carefree existence, but flexibility and planning for childcare and travel does sound a lot easier.

This much is the case, regardless of your situation: You just can’t take a full summer off if you have an active research agenda. You’ve got to work, at least part of the time, and you’ve got to do something with your out-of-school kid during that time.

How have I handled this with my family, over the years?

When my kid was a baby: I was parenting full-time and stopped research for several months.

When my kid was in preschool: As a field biologist, I’ve got to get into the field. This was easy enough to do, when my spouse could deliver the kid to preschool when she was working. A couple times, my family traveled to my field site (which happens to be a big vacation destination as well) and we then traveled around. We also took vacations elsewhere, sometimes around an international conference in a cool place to visit.

When my kid is on K-12 summer vacation: In previous years, I would be free from the university for almost a month before he got out of school. This was a perfect time to go to my field site with students to get research projects started. Then, I’d come home as my kid was getting out of school, and then it would be a mix of the options above. Some weeks, he’d be in camp. Some, he’d be with me. One week per summer, he’s out of town spending quality time with my spouse’s mom. We also would travel on a genuine vacation.

This summer: I went to the field for a couple weeks while my kid was finishing school. Then, I came back from the field, and I am taking him out to be my technician/assistant/collaborator. I have a few projects with which we can work together and get real stuff done. He’s 9 years old, and I don’t expect full long days in the rainforest conducting meticulous measurements, but we’re going to work together and hang out for a couple weeks, and my kid will be a real scientist by the time he’s done.

My students are already established in their projects, though I imagine they still want more input and participation from me to some level. So, I’ll be busy with mentoring my students, but this is also the first field season in which I’ll be truly combining research and parenting.

Once I return my kid from the field, then he’s at camp for a couple weeks while I am attending a conference and joining a working group, and then I’ve got a week with my kid, then I teach a field course, and then we go on a genuine vacation as a family for a few weeks, and then school starts back up. It took a lot of planning. I’m dizzy and the summer has only started.

Despite all the work in the summer, I am committed to spending some time traveling on vacation to somewhere new, as a family, whenever we can. (That can be expensive and difficult, but much of that is fixed by doing a home exchange.) My priority, in every decision I make, is the happiness, fun and well-being of my kid and spouse. Trying to make that compatible with everything else is the hard part.

How’s your summer juggle? Do you have a set routine or do you have to plan every summer differently? Do you get even half as much done as you hope to get done?

Pretending you planned to test that hypothesis the whole time

Our scientific papers often harbor a massive silent fiction.

Papers often lead the readership into thinking that the main point of the scientific paper was the main point of the experiment when it was conducted. This is sometimes the case, but in many cases it is a falsehood.

How often is it, when we publish a paper, that we are writing up the very specific set of hypotheses and predictions that we had in mind when we set forth with the project?

Papers might state something like, “We set out to test whether X theory is supported by running this experiment…” However, in many cases, the researchers might not even have had X theory in mind when running the experiment, but were focusing on other theories at the time. In my experience in ecology, it seems to happen all the time.

Having one question, and writing a paper about another question, is perfectly normal. This non-linearity is part of how science works. But we participate in the sham of , “I always meant to conduct this experiment to test this particular question” because that’s simply the format of scientific papers.

Ideas are sold in this manner: “We have a question. We do an experiment. We get an answer.” However, that’s not the way we actually develop our questions and results.

It could be: “I ran an experiment, and I found out something entirely different and unexpected, not tied to any specific prediction of mine. Here it is.”

It somehow is unacceptable to say that you found these results that are of interest, and are sharing and explaining them. If a new finding is a groundbreaking discovery that came from nowhere (like finding a fossil where it was not expected), then you can admit that you just stumbled on it. But if it’s an interesting relationship or support for one idea over an other idea, then you are required to suggest, if not overly state, that you ran the experiment because you wanted to look at that relationship or idea in the first place. Even if it’s untrue. We don’t often lie, but we may mislead. It’s expected of us.

In some cases, the unexpected origin of a finding could be a good narrative for a paper. “I had this idea in mind, but then we found this other thing out which was entirely unrelated. And here it is!” But, we never write papers that way. Maybe it’s because most editors want to trim every word that could be seen as superfluous, but it’s probably more caused by the fact that we need to pretend to our scientific audience that our results are directly tied to our initial questions, because that’s the way that scientists are supposed to work. It would seem less professional, or overly opportunistic, to publish interesting results from an experiment that were not the topic of the experiment.

Let me give you an example from my work. As a part of my dissertation, in the past millennium, I did a big experiment in which I and my assistants collected a few thousand ant colonies, in an experimental framework. It resulted in a mountain of cool data. This is a particularly useful and cool dataset in a few ways, because it has kinds of data that most people typically cannot get, even though they can be broadly informative (There are various kinds of information you get from collecting whole ant colonies that you can’t get otherwise.) There are all kinds of questions that my dataset can be used to ask, that can’t be answered using other approaches.

For example, in one of the taxa in the dataset, the colonies have a variable number of queens. I wanted to test different ideas that might explain environmental factors shaping queen number. This was fine framework to address those questions, even though it wasn’t what I had in mind while running the experiment. But when I wrote the paper, I had to participate in the silly notion that that experiment was designed to understand queen number (the pdf is free on my website and google scholar).

When I ran that experiment, a good while ago, the whole reason was to figure out how environmental conditions shaped the success of an invasive species in its native habitat. That was the one big thing that was deep in my mind while running the experiment. Ironically, that invasive species question has yet to be published from this dataset. The last time I tried to publish that particular paper, the editor accused me of trying to milk out a publication about an invasive species even though it was obvious (to him at least) that that wasn’t even the point of the experiment.

Meanwhile, using the data from the same experiment designed to ask about invasive species, I’ve written about not just queen number, but also species-energy theory, nest movement, resource limitation, and caste theory. I also have a few more in the queue. I’m excited about them all, and they’re all good science. You could accuse me of milking an old project, but I’m also asking questions that haven’t been answered (adequately) and using the best resources available. I’m always working on a new project with new data, but just because this project on invasive species was over many years ago doesn’t mean that I’m going to ignore additional cool discoveries that are found within the same project.

Some new questions I have are best asked by opening up the spreadsheet instead of running a new experiment. Is that so wrong? To some, it sounds wrong, so we need to hide it.

You might be familiar with the chuckles that came from the bit that went around earlier this year, involving Overly Honest Methods. There was a hashtag involved. Overly honest methods are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg about what we’re hiding in our research.

It’s time for #overlyhonesthypotheses.

Letters of recommendation for a faculty job: teaching observations

How do you get a (teaching) job without experience, and how do you get (teaching) experience without a job?

Sure, graduate students teach. However, graduate students typically don’t get to own their own curriculum, nor do they have the often have the chance to teach a full lecture course. The same is true for most postdocs.

That makes applying for faculty positions at teaching-centered institutions kind of tricky.

Search committees are aware that for most applicants, genuine opportunities to teach substantially are hard to come upon. It would look good if a grad student or postdoc landed such an opportunity and did well, but search committees are aware of the fact that many potential top notch faculty members just don’t have a lot of teaching experience. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it is a mitigating factor. Some people on search committees would love their applicants to have long and serious adjunct experience, but others also might prefer to think that their top candidates have not been driven to adjuncting for lack of finding an awesome postdoc. (People are filled with all kind of irrational biases, after all.)

What can job candidates for a teaching-centered institution do to make sure that limited teaching experiences are represented as well as possible?

Here’s one suggestion: Make sure that at least one of the letter-writers will spend more time writing about teaching than research, and that the prose demonstrates specific and direct knowledge of the candidate’s teaching, gained from observation.

Here’s another suggestion for applicants: Make sure that all of your letter-writers are familiar with your teaching and interactions with students. Ask them to stop by and watch you as you are teaching a lab section. Even if they only watch for five minutes, remarks about your teaching will have much greater credibility if your recommender explained from personal observation. (Also, if you’re mentoring undergrads, make sure that your advisor knows exactly what you’re doing with these students and can describe your specific role in the successes of these students.)

Consider what it is like for a member of a search committee, wading through a mass of applications for a tenure-track teaching position. The committee doesn’t want to waste its time with someone who hasn’t communicated a sincere interest in teaching, and ideally will find someone who already has some real experience. Committee members want information about the teaching of applicants that is validated and supplemented by recommendation letters. Talk by an applicant is cheap, but a recommendation constitutes evidence.

It is huge if recommenders spend a two solid paragraphs, or more, explaining things that the applicant does while teaching, how they personally observed that you are an effective teacher. I haven’t been on an academic search committee in several years (as my university hasn’t really hired any scientists in several years), but to my recollection these kinds of remarks are scarce.

The first time I applied for faculty jobs, one of my letter-writers wasn’t a tenured faculty member, but was a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer who was responsible for coordinating labs which I taught. I saw him teach a bit, and he was crazy good. As he was my boss of sorts, asked him to drop by when I was teaching. He had some great constructive input for me, and we continued to talk about teaching once in a while. I didn’t cultivate this relationship with the purpose of seeking a letter of recommendation, but when I realized that he would be a great letter-writer I didn’t hesitate asking him. I think his letter made my application stand out. That was one recommendation letter that wasn’t from a fancy-dancy big name person, and making that choice on my part told the search committee what my priorities were.

If your letter writers are research-focused people, it couldn’t hurt for you to ask them to watch you teach for just a little while. It would be good research on their part for the letter they wil be writing. If these people don’t have the time to do this little favor, then I don’t think you could count on them for taking the time to write a solid letter, which should be taking at least 45 minutes and perhaps much longer.

And, of course, the letter that gets sent to a teaching institution should look different than a letter sent to a research institution. If you’re applying for both kinds of jobs, then you’ll have to break it to your letter-writer that they need to draft up two letters.

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

Month: June 2013