Please don’t hold out-of-class review sessions

Some professors are so dedicated to the success of their students that they are generous enough to hold review sessions before an exam, outside regular class hours.

This is a tremendously poor idea, for one big reason and one smaller reason.

The big reason is that it is inherently unfair to the students. Not every student is equally available to make it to an additional session outside class hours. Holding a session that not all students are available to attend confers an advantage to the students who are more available for the times designated for a review session. (This rationale is similar to the one fort why we shouldn’t offer extra credit.)

Students are aware that these review sessions are a moment of the big reveal about what is going to be on the exam, where professors give hints about what is important to study and what is less important. Even if this isn’t true, this is the widespread perception. I know that when I was a student, not attending one of these sessions was a huge disadvantage.

Therefore, students will go to all extremes to attend a outside-class review session. I know students who have skipped out on their work obligations to make such a session, and I also a student that once missed an important and difficult-to-schedule medical appointment for this kind of session.

A standard lecture course at my university has about 45 contact hours. If that’s not enough time to cover the curriculum and prepare students for exams, then the solution isn’t to add another hour of optional class. Instead, the curriculum, or how it’s taught, should be fixed so that everything that students need for exams can happen within the time scheduled for class.

Students who might feel that outside-class review sessions are unfair are likely to not complain. Such a complaint would arouse the ire of fellow students, would be particularly upset if the gift of a review session were revoked because of a spoilsport.

I ask: why is such a review session needed? It is because the students haven’t learned as much as they needed to prior to the exam? If that is the case, it is the result of deficiencies on the part of the instructor or of the students. If it’s the deficiency of the students, then those who didn’t invest as much as others don’t need an extra boost, just like they shouldn’t receive extra credit. If the failure of students to be adequately prepared for the exam is the fault of the instructor, then adding extra optional class time isn’t a professional way to fix pedagogical shortcomings.

The smaller reason to not hold out-of-class review sessions is that this practice increases the emphasis on high-stakes testing and further drives students to obsess about what is on the exam rather than learning the material comprehensively.

Let’s face it: students who attend these sessions and ask questions are, predominantly, focused on discovering what questions will be on the exam. They may very well be seeking knowledge and understanding about the course material, but their focus is to do well on the exam rather than to learn. Moreover, I believe that’s the focus of faculty who offer such sessions as well, to help students do well on the exam by providing even more preparation. That’s an admirable goal, but all students deserve equal and fairly distributed access to such opportunities.

So, what’s the harm with offering a review session that gets students to study more than they would otherwise? Here’s the harm: it gets them studying for an exam. If students are cramming for an exam, they’re not learning in the long term. Instead of spending time focusing our teaching on getting students to jump through the hoops of exams, we could design our classes for substantial and long-term engagement with the material. The more we freak students about exams and focus on them, the less they will engage in genuine, self-driven, inquiry.

What faculty really need: Time

What faculty need doesn’t always translate into what administrators think faculty need.

Administrators overseeing faculty, who do their jobs well, find ways to help faculty do their job better. With respect to research, I imagine that administrators want to increase the quantity and quality of student research, increase the number and quality of publications, and increase the funds coming into campus. At many places, of course, the latter reigns supreme.

What should faculty get to make these things happen? What we need, more than anything else, is time.

Sure, organize a grantsmanship workshop for us. Okay, pay for me to go to a conference. It is useful to have an allowance for supplies. I get to hire a student work with me? That’s very nice. I get a little stipend if I submit a grant? That’s okay, I guess.

All of those things are for naught unless I have the time to make things happen.

The basal necessity for all faculty to get research done is having the time to do it. Without that foundation, don’t even bother doing anything else.

Though some consultants make their living telling people how to write grants, a workshop won’t make you write a great grant. That skill is acquired by writing grants, serving on panels, and collaborating with people who are great grant getters. Those things take a lot more time and focus than a workshop. A workshop is a start, maybe, but unless it’s backed up with time, it won’t result in a great grant.

Working with students takes plenty of time. Writing grants, collecting data, and writing manuscripts takes plenty of time. If you were to ask most of us what we need, we’d probably put time at the top of the list. That’s probably true for everybody in academia, regardless of field or how much money we have. Either we have lots of money and need the time to do the work we planned, or we need the time to write the manuscripts and grants that are necessary to bring in money. Either way, time is always at a shortage.

I understand why administrators might be reluctant to give reassigned time to faculty to do research and mentor students. It seems against the mission of the institution to pull the out the batters from the top of the lineup so that they can leave the classroom to work with fewer students. Also, there’s a pull to be egalitarian in the distribution of resources even though some faculty will waste the time given, and others will be productive. So, time can’t be given out willy nilly. But if you really want faculty to deliver, find the ones who will do solid research and give them the opportunity to do so. (Tip: the ones who will deliver in the future are the ones who have already shown the ability to deliver.) Some people will never deliver, no matter what they get. Some already deliver, and will deliver better with more time.

Time is money. And faculty time, compared to other things, isn’t cheap (though it’s cheaper than it should be considering how poorly paid adjuncts are). If you have quality faculty doing excellent research and teaching, then giving them the opportunity to allocate some of that teaching time to research/mentorship is what will deliver.

Making the most of a daily commute (guest post)

Amy Parachnowitsch is an ex-pat Canadian scientist, who studies the evolutionary ecology of plant-animal interactions and floral traits. She is halfway through a 4-year assistant professor position at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Maybe it is the recent discussion about field sites both far and wide (both highlighted here) that has got me thinking about distances and research/work. Or maybe it just because I’ve been sitting on a bus trying to make the most of my newly acquired commute. Whatever the reason, I have been thinking about how travel, whether daily or to your field sites, can affect how you arrange your work.

A little context: this summer I moved from the town where I work to one an hour away. There were a lot of personal reasons that went into the decision but one of the main factors was my work flexibility compared to my husband’s. Unlike him, I can use the commute to work and have shorter days in the office. A good theory but now I’m actually testing it during the one hour (each way) I spend on a bus. Right now my days are about two hours shorter in the office than they were when we lived a ~15min bike ride away.

So far, I am seeing some pluses to the arrangement. When I’m in my office, my time tends to get fragmented during the day by various interruptions. An hour on the bus is long enough to pull something out and get somewhere with it. One of the big benefits is that I am not completely connected; I do have a smart phone but I keep my computer off-line. So far this has functioned to give me some solid writing chunks during the day. There is lots of advice out there about writing daily and it has always seemed like a good idea to me. But this commute is the first time I’ve been consistent with a daily writing routine—we’ll see if it results in more submitted manuscripts as I hope. Another long-term advantage is that it will also be much easier on the family when I go away for conferences or research (we have a 4-year old). Even short trips were difficult for my husband to manage both child-care (e.g. dropping and picking up from daycare) and a long commute. Although I did a number of work-related trips from Uppsala, there have been opportunities that I haven’t taken because it was too much to ask of my very supportive husband. All in all, it will probably take a while for us to fully realize the advantages of the move but I am hoping that it will make me more effective and freer to participate in the things that interest me.

The disadvantages are of course the commute itself. I’d rather bike or walk to work than ride the bus. It will also mean that staying late or popping by my office or lab is more difficult. On the small scale—a long daily commute can have some of the advantages/disadvantages of long distance fieldwork: when I’ve left for the day, I can’t go back. The change won’t be so dramatic for me because I was already limited in doing ‘off-hour’ work by my child (and commuting husband). And unlike data collecting, I can always bring a lot of my work home with me. But I’m not sure how my shortened campus time will function once the semester is in full swing. I’ll get a better feeling as the fall progresses if there are any hidden costs to regularly leaving early. Commuting also changes the timing of the kind of work I can do during the day because now there are many things that I won’t be able to do in the commuting hours such as meetings, lab work, extensive literature searches, adding web content to lectures, etc. I think it will take more time to know if this is a plus or minus for me.

Unlike your field sites (or lack thereof), choosing where you live seems more a personal choice and might be limited by many factors (e.g. city university vs. college town). But as I have experienced from moves in the past, where you live can also effect how you work. Gone are the days when I could do that one last thing before rushing off to pick my daughter up from daycare. I don’t know if this will make me more disciplined with my time in the afternoon or more likely to give up a task earlier so I don’t have to stop in the middle of it.

Overall, I think I will be very motivated to keep my commute productive because the alternative is really long workdays. With a young child, I think it is especially important that we have some time together each day. If I spend 8 or so hours in my office, I’ll rarely see her.

I’ve known lots of different styles of professors: those that are always in their office, those that leave early to pick up kids, or come in late because they work better at night. One of my colleagues even commutes on a weekly basis from Norway. Ultimately, academia is a job where your accomplishments often matter more than the time you do it and we’re generally given a lot of freedom to arrange how we work.

I’m curious about other people’s decisions. How do you schedule your day and what do you find to be most effective way to do your work? Does where you live effect how you work? Do you use your commute to work/think about work or is it a time-out in the day? Above all, any advice from long-distance commuters would be greatly appreciated!

“Time management” is just a way to sell how-to books

Time management books are like diet books. They’re both full of detailed and sophisticated ways to do something so simple, they can be explained in a short blog post.

Using time effectively is important, and being healthy is important. Everybody knows how to do them. Many just people fail in the execution.

How to behave healthfully? Don’t eat too much, don’t drink sugar, and move around a lot. Burn more calories than you take in. How calories get processed and burnt is extraordinarily complex, and there are many things about metabolism that we’ve yet to understand but the laws of thermodynamics are pretty clear about how to lose weight. The execution is the very hard part. There are all kinds of biological reasons that make carrying out the simple tasks difficult.

How do healthy people make this happen? They have routines in which they eat well and exercise. It is a habit, just a part of everyday living.

The same applies to time management. How do people get stuff done? They actually do the stuff that they need to do, when they need to. They don’t waste time.

It’s that simple. You don’t need to buy a tomato timer or find out who moved your cheese or whatever. Those methods exist for the purpose of making money by those who wrote books. You just gotta to what you gotta do. You have to be in the habit of making the right decision to not procrastinate, and to focus on what needs to be done at a given moment.

Just like a fad diet, if you sporadically manage your time effectively, it doesn’t become routine as a result of extended and concentrated effort. Then, a time management plan is doomed to failure.

Being healthy, and managing time effectively, are part of a lifestyle. Either you do it routinely, or you don’t. If you don’t, then you just compel yourself to do it for a long period of time until it become part of your regular existence, or you never will.

There’s a lot of talk that academics really need to manage their time in minute detail to be productive. In particular, I’ve heard lots of folks claim that you have to be able to work on big tasks (manuscripts, grants) within small chunks of time (like 15-30 min between meetings, classes and appointments). And this is particularly important for parents whose time is more divided.

I say hooey to all that. If I don’t have a couple hours, at minimum, there’s no use for me sitting down to work on a grant or a manuscript, or some other momentous project.

Does my inability to do big stuff in small periods of time keep me from getting stuff done? No, not at all. I just need to identify those blocks of time and use them, and make them if they don’t exist. The blocks might be in the evening after my kid goes to bed, or early in the morning if my spouse takes my kid to school and I get to work early, but that’s when it happens. I have also made sure to defend large chunks in the middle of the day for research, and I’m fortunate to that have that opportunity.

For this strategy to work — like any time management plan — you’ve got to actually sit down and do the stuff that you gotta do. It’s as simple as that. Don’t browse the internet, don’t check up on something that doesn’t need to be checked upon, and don’t jump into social media by default. Just get your stuff done. Some people do it, and some people don’t. Those who don’t get straight to work when they need to need to find the way to get into the habit. Simple as that.

Once you have those habits, then the rest of time management should easily fall into place. I would guess.

As for myself, I have not yet developed those good habits, even though I recognize the importance of doing so. If I was better, I wouldn’t have written this blog post. Now, I’m heading to the gym. And tonight, I’m hoping to send our New Year’s Cards.

Service obligations attack!

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

I’ve rarely overtly turned down service opportunities, but I’ve been able to finesse my way out a number of times.

That good run just came to a screeching halt.

Now, you may call me Senator McGlynn. I think they give us rings that our subjects may kiss.

There are different ways of taking shared governance seriously. On my campus, that is manifested with meetings every other week, for about two hours.

I’ve sat in on a couple of these meetings in the past. They have been about 42% self-aggrandizing blather by a small number of people, and 50% chiming in to affirm the importance of the blathering, accentuated with 3% of stuff that actually matters. I’ll have to go there often enough to catch that 3%. (The remaining five percent is the discussion of Sternly Worded Letters in the form of Senate Resolutions.)

Why did I agree to this momentous time suck? My department has lost so many people, and had no hires in so long, that we’re almost down to negative tenure-line faculty members. The other people in my department also have plenty of unsavory service duties and if I turned this down, then it’d be unfair to my colleagues, and I wouldn’t be pulling my share. If I said no, I’d be kind-of a jerk, if not a kind of jerk. Not a kind jerk, surely.

There is also an upside to taking this on. In the last few months, the stars have aligned and my Dean, Provost and President are all openly supportive of research and the mentorship of student researchers. I mean, they are so supportive that they’re actually putting money in that direction. There are probably some recalcitrant faculty that won’t want resources (especially reassigned time) going to research, and they might mount a last stand in the Senate. It would be handy to be there when it happens, even if the guy who runs the Senate is the biggest advocate (and example) for faculty research on campus.

I’ve been spoiled for years now, by not having to go to these kinds of meetings like I used to have to go to on a monthly basis at my old job. This time, I’ll have the wisdom to not ever attempt to reason with the unreasonable. The bottom line is that I’m very pleased that there are faculty who are heartily fighting the good fight to have control over our own university and our own curriculum. They are the ones protecting our students from administrative forces that want to push our students out of our classrooms and into online courses, and they are the ones that are fighting to keep the the campus from devolving into a career tech institute. What happens in Senate is important. I just wish I didn’t have this little part-time job in the sausage factory. But I’ve been eating the sausage for years, so it’s time I did my share.

If this is all I have to complain about this week, then life ain’t so bad.

Percent effort measures are a bunch of bunk

Many jobs come with an official “percent effort” job description, indicating how much time to spent on different kinds of tasks. Typically, effort in faculty jobs is divided among teaching, research, and service. There might be additional categories, such as “extension” in an agricultural department, or “administration” for those who have been suckered into taking on that kind of role.

It’s no secret that these percent effort numbers are mostly hooey. It’s not like we’re lawyers who bill time in fifteen minute intervals.

Not only do “percent effort” guidelines fail to correspond to how we spend our time, I don’t even think they correspond to how our job performance is evaluated. For instance, at a research institution, if the job is 25% teaching, does that mean that 25% of the tenure decision really banks on teaching performance? I doubt it, because teaching really doesn’t matter at research institutions.

In my last job, at some point we needed to formally decide on a percent effort allocation within the department. We had to decide how much of our job description was “teaching” and how much was “research.” Oddly enough, this was either a chair-level decision, or a chair-level decision that was delegated to the department for consensus.

It was expected that our research percentage should be smaller than teaching, and greater than zero. There was a lot of leeway, as I recall. I don’t even remember, exactly, what my department decided. I think research was set to 25%, but it could have been as high as 30% or as low as 15%. I do remember being disappointed at the lack of interest in upping the research fraction, but as an untenured faculty member I didn’t speak up, much, on this particular issue. (I probably said too much, nevertheless.)

Things are weirder in my current institution. The way our faculty collective bargaining agreement is constructed, there is absolutely no research in our formal workload, even though there is a clear research expectation of all tenure-line faculty. Somehow, without any workload allocated to research whatsoever, faculty members with no genuine research agenda may have trouble attaining tenure or promotion. How exactly does this works, I don’t understand.

The way I do understand things (which might an under-understanding), we are responsible for working 30 work units (WTUs) per academic year. Six of these WTUs are advising and service: three per semester. There is a set of formulas that are used to calculate how many WTUs are assigned to each kind of task. In general, an hour of instructional time in a lecture course throughout a semester is a single WTU. (Labs are worth less; that’s a whole ‘nother post.) A typical lecture course is worth 3 WTU.

So, a typical courseload is four lecture courses each semester. There are ways to reassign some WTUs away from teaching and towards other administrative, research or service roles. Anytime we need to shift out workload from the classroom, dollars need to be identified to purchase the time connected to those WTUs. How much does a WTU cost? Well, that depends on the source of funds. That part I do understand, and it still doesn’t make enough sense.

How is it that our formal agreement with our employer, to work 30 WTUs per academic year, necessarily requires research when none of these 30 WTUs are tied to research? We aren’t even expected to bring in external grants to buy out WTUs for research, though they’re quite welcome and we are expected to try to get external grants. I just don’t understand it. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the formal percent effort allocation in our job is out of touch with reality.

If you’re teaching well, even if you’re doing it efficiently, 12 WTU of teaching and 3 WTU of service is a mighty big full-time job. But we are all expected to do research, somehow, in our spare time outside of employment. That’s the only explanation that makes sense given our current system.

This is why percent effort formulas are a bunch of bunk.

On the speciousness of “work-life balance”

Too often, people are apt to advise one another on how to live their lives. I’m not intentionally adding to this body of work, but remarking on it. I don’t intend to offer any advice in this post.

Let’s consider two pieces of career and life advice that we often hear.

Standard Piece of Advice #1. Choose a career that you love.

You need to pay the bills, but this should happen with a job that you immensely enjoy. Ideally, we love our job so much that it’s like a hobby. (And it’s that way for me. Science – the whole process – is a wonderful hobby. There are some parts I like more than others, but it’s a smashingly entertaining enterprise.)

Standard Piece of Advice #2. Don’t let work get in the way of living your life.

There was a well-written post about this written by a recently tenured Harvard professor about “how to stop worrying and love the tenure track.” The author, Radhika Nagpal, had a useful list to advise readers about how to not let the pursuit of tenure consume our lives and make us unhappy. Second on the list of seven items was to stop taking advice from others.

Depending on how well you follow Standard Piece of Advice #1, then Standard Piece of Advice #2 seems irrelevant, if not a little misguided.

Should we treat a tenure-track job like a 7-year postdoc? I imagine that this is a healthy attitude for Harvard junior faculty, considering rates of tenure. Is this a good idea outside Harvard? Well, I guess so. I don’t know if postdocs are expected to work with less effort than tenure-track faculty. If the phrase “treat the job like a temporary postdoc” should be read as “don’t let the job consume your entire life” then I suppose the advice is spot-on.

Is it important to make sure that you’re a complete person outside your academic job? Definitely.

Should you prioritize your loved ones over your work, and cultivate relationships outside of academia? Of course!

Should we expect researchers be complete people outside of their research endeavors? Hell yes!

Should we designate and separate working hours from non-working hours as a hard-and-fast rule? Should we make sure that we have a special amount of personal time each week that isn’t tied to research? Umm… I don’t think so.

If you really love research, then isn’t it okay to do it as a hobby?

Here’s what I’ve never understood about the “work-life balance” concept: Is not “work” a part of your “life?” Haven’t we academics argued for many decades that what makes our job cool is that we get to do exactly what we enjoy doing, and we can choose how we do it?

Isn’t my choice to pursue a useful, fun and challenging academic endeavor part of my own life? By trying to create a balance between “work” and “life,” then doesn’t that make work something we do when we are not fully living?

I reject the work-life dichotomy that governs thinking about how academics decide how to invest time into their research.

It seems to me that the methods to achieve “work-life balance” don’t seem to entirely add up.

I don’t want any work-life balance. I want the scale to be tilted to 100% “life.” My job is one of the few that allow me to do that.

When I’m doing research, when I’m mentoring students, and when I’m teaching, I don’t want to have that always placed into the “work” box because it’s part of my life.

At least some of us in academia have argued is that the job is wonderful specifically because the things we do for the job can have personal meaning, tangibly change the world and other people’s lives, and are often enjoyable. That’s something I shoot for. That’s a part of my life. Yes, it’s a source of employment, but I refuse to put it in the “work” box separate from my life.

How about we just shoot for “life balance?” For some of us, that means “research-family-health balance.” For others, it’s “university-family-pet” balance. Maybe it’s “university-political activism-family” balance for some of you.

My wife and kid matter everything to me, and as a corollary, so do my own health and happiness for their sake. That means that I can’t do research, teach, (and blog), in a manner that isn’t good for any of us. In all of my decisions about research, teaching and anything else about my employment, all of my decisions take them into account first, as well as myself.

Does my job demand that I spend a huge amount of time on teaching and research? Yes. But I happen to love it, and that’s why I took this job.

Does my job require me to do more teaching and research than is needed for me to have a balanced life? Not at all. Does anybody expect this level of work from me? Maybe, but if they do, I can tell them where they can stick their outrageous expectations.

I am not employed by my University in the summertime. I’m not on their payroll. That means that my summer is mine. How am I spending it? Mostly on research, and mentoring student research. And a little teaching about ants. At the moment I’m on vacation, and enjoying it tremendously. I’m writing this for fun. I’m not writing it for my career. Is this “work?” Maybe, but that my job is one in which I don’t wish to create that work vs. life dichotomy.

How the heck can I have “life balance” if I’m writing this while away on vacation? Well, the spectacular setting and circumstances in which I’m writing makes it quite possible.

Maybe the phrase “work-life balance” is just a label. However, labels matter. If we academics do start to see our research and teaching as mere “work” in our own lives then we may have lost one of the few benefits that are tied to the profession. I’ll be the first one to point out that my employer is only entitled to about forty hours per week from me, and I’ll also probably be one of the first to exceed the forty-per-week mark partway through the week, if I have the opportunity.

Is it your right to consider a faculty job as a source of employment, to take a paycheck and perform your job description within forty hours per week? Definitely. I just enjoy it enough that I want to sneak in more when I have the chance. And when I do more “work” than necessary, I don’t worry that my life is becoming unbalanced. I’m just having fun.

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?

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

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?

It’s horrible to be able to do research in your own lab

I can get a little jealous of people who have research systems in their labs, or do fieldwork nearby. You can just run experiments year-round if you want. A manuscript needs a more data for the revision? Go ahead and knock that experiment out. If you want flexibility when you get to do research, then having research right at home works quite well.

Then, why is it that some of the most successful researchers that I know have research systems that are geographically far away from the university? And the people — at teaching institutions — with the most tractable, easy-to-use systems can have trouble getting stuff done? (I think there’s a whole other set of problems with model systems on small campuses, but that’s a whole other diatribe post.)

Being far away from your research system can be a recipe for success. Among people I’ve known, a marine ecologist might have to drive eight hours to the rocky coast. Some physicists have collaborative projects at big national or international labs on the far coast of the US, Europe, and Japan. Anthropologists have sites in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. Humanities researchers rely on archives that are in libraries in distant cities. Others might study ephemeral events that occur locally, with no control over the timing of the events.

There are also successful people who work locally, too. Regardless, it is very clear that having your research system on the other side of the world doesn’t preclude success, even if you’re based in a small pond. That strikes me as counterintuitive.

In my own circumstance, I think having all of my fieldwork based out of Costa Rica has been a great boon for my productivity. If I was able to do research in the local mountains or desert, I don’t think I’d really get anything done. I’d never compartmentalize the time that it takes to fully focus on the work.

I’ll consider this with a social insect analogy.

Some of the most “advanced” social insect societies (as some call them) have workers that demonstrate temporal polyethism. That is: workers are born as nurses, then are promoted to guard duty or nest maintenance, and then they spend the last phase of their lives doing the most risky task, foraging. It’s well described in a variety of species.

This temporal division of labor makes for higher productivity, as a result of higher efficiency and organization of labor. (This is at least true in large colonies with a lot going on. The jury is still out on species with small colonies.) A big ant colony would be in disarray if all individuals tried to do everything at the same time. And so would I.

If I tried to run a field research program while doing every other part of my job, I doubt I’d be able to get high quality fieldwork done. I’ve figured out, in a clearly suboptimal fashion, how to juggle writing, teaching, analysis, mentoring during the year, service, and all that stuff. I can’t imagine adding “data collection” to that list of things to juggle during the academic year.

(And, of course, my greatest responsibility and source of joy is being a parent. But this isn’t a Daddy blog, even though I wish such a genre existed. Even though I spend my time writing here about research, don’t be mistaken. I’ve already established that parenting and spousal duties are more important than everything else.)

When I finish a field experiment, it’s over. One project might build upon the other, but I work with discrete ending points, and that’s when I pull the flags from our field sites and pack things to go home. I’ve hired people to do things in my absence for bigger projects, but for most work, I don’t have the option of just returning to do more. If an editor or reviewer asks for another sample, you know what? They’re out of luck, and I’m out of luck. They can buy their own plane ticket to Costa Rica to get that additional data point, if they don’t want to publish the paper without it.

My field site.

This finality of data collection helps me to get stuff done. I have no doubt when I need to start analyzing and writing the manuscript. It’s as soon as I leave the country.

I never think to myself, “Here is a little something which is missing from this project to make it complete.” Instead, I tell myself, “I have to package this as a complete project, and accept the fact that there are some missing holes.”

There’s another reason that working far away lets me get more work done. When I go to my field station, I’m in 100% data-collection mode. We’re running experiments full time, and I’m usually working my butt off. And I’m working my students’ butts off. There’s no way I could give so much focus to work like that while I’m at home, because I’d have to get home and cook dinner, and I’d choose to hang out with my kid at times. When I’m in the field, my responsibility to home is an evening video chat date, which is sometimes missed on one side or the other.

There’s also no way that I would be able to get so much dedication and effort from the students in my lab, without taking them to a kind-of-remote rainforest. When you plop people down in a place where there is nothing to do but fieldwork and labwork, and that’s mostly what you get. (If you bring the right people. I’m getting better at that over the years, but there are always flukes. Flukes, you know, are a kind of parasite.)

I’d guess that work happens by students on site about 12 hours per day, in one form or another. You don’t get that kind of consistent work at that level for an extended period at home. (I lament that the internet has gotten faster on station, because those with an internet addiction have a hard time fully dedicating themselves to their work.) So, at the end of a field season, we have a relative ton of data, much more than I’d have than if I tried to work locally or in the lab.

Some lab work does happen during the academic year, mostly dealing with samples that we collected during the summertime. However, we reserve the academic year for writing manuscripts and preparing for the next field season. Data only gets collected in intermittent bursts, and that has been more than enough for my lab. The fact that I can’t collect data except when I fly to Costa Rica forces me to spend my time writing up the results. That gives me a lot of time to write without any other research-related distraction.

If I block away time during the academic year, it’s usually not to do lab work, it’s only to analyze and to write. When I do research while abroad, it’s only to collect data, and not to write. This temporal polyethism is what allows me to get stuff done.

Startup needs for researchers in teaching schools

When I started my current job, most of those who dropped by my office to say “Greetings,” first stopped short with a question: How did you get that monitor? (I have a big monitor. They no longer make them that big. I think it’s really helped me work more efficiently.)

I answered, “I asked for it.” It really was that easy. I gave up my printer for a big monitor. No biggie, I just brought my own printer.

When you start a new faculty position, you have to use the opportunity wisely. You’re over the moon that you actually landed the job, but don’t act too hastily. When you get the phone call, say that you look forward to discussing the offer very soon, don’t say yes. Once you sign on the line (it’s probably not dotted), you’ve lost all of your leverage for anything you want in the future.

Some schools leave things more open to negotiation than others. They’ll tell you straight out if something is fixed and can’t be changed. Often, things are flexible. You need to enter the conversation with the fact of negotiation. See what you’re getting as a starting point for discussion.

Salary is really, really important, because all of your future raises will be based on your starting salary. If you’re at a public institution, then salaries are probably public record. If you can’t find it online, then talk to a librarian at the university. These data matter.

You need to know what kind of ballpark startup you can expect. You should get this from the search committee rather than the Dean. You should find out what recent hires have got, and you should get at least that (depending on your specialty, maybe a lot more). Some schools will have a low five-digit offer and on the higher end some will have low six digit offer – and very wealthy campuses could shave something more. (This range sounds insanely low to faculty at R1 universities. Yup, I agree. Some places actually have startup that comes in four digits.) Sometimes people don’t like to talk with specific numbers. This isn’t the time to be shy. You don’t want to lowball your startup, and you also don’t want to get laughed out of the room for asking for an order of magnitude too high. Hopefully during your interview process you’ve built up enough rapport with your search committee, and your potential new chair should ideally be some help (if not your partner) on this as you go through the Dean.

What are the other things that you should or shouldn’t negotiate for? Here’s a quick review of the biggies, other than salary. Keep in mind that there is no grand wisdom in here, just a set of observations that plenty of others have made.

-Reassigned time from teaching. If it’s a teaching school, they hired you to teach. However, it will take a while for you to get on your feet and start up your lab. The longer you can prolong the reassigned time for you to focus on getting started and submitting grants, the better off you are. You don’t want to be a prima donna and ask for much much more than what others have gotten in the past, of course. You’ll note that I’m using “reassigned time” instead of release time. This is an important distinction in my book. “Release time” sounds like you’re getting out of a responsibility. “Reassigned” correctly indicates that you’re working just as hard on a different kind of assignment. Another thing that you should establish up front is under what circumstances, if any, funds are used for reassigned time in the future. If you bring in grants, can you negotiate for reassigned time even if it isn’t in the budget? Or, if you have to buy it with a grant, what is the rate? Especially at private institutions, the rate at which individual PIs are charged for reassigned time can be bartered. I’ve seen some people get outrageously great deals, only because they asked for them.

-Equipment and supplies. If your research requires a special piece of equipment that’s lacking, like a certain kind of mass spec, microscope, or whatnot, then this is your chance for the school to buy it for you. Keep in mind, though, that having equipment could be a curse rather than a boon. I have to admit that I can’t think of a fancy machine that would let me to things that I’m not already doing. You don’t want to admit this too readily, though, if that’s the main form of your startup. Often, once you get startup, you can spend it how you want. You can ask for cash for a big piece of equipment, but if you get it on the cheap or your needs change, you might be able to spend it in another way.

-Moving expenses. Sure, this is nice. But if you can convince them to shave money off of moving expenses to increase your salary, or reassigned time or something else, that is probably of more use to you.

-Space. If you want a better office or lab, now is the only time it’s going to happen, until someone retires or leaves. Nobody will get kicked out for you (usually), but if there is a variety of possible space then you should make your needs known.

-Staff. Will they guarantee that you have funds to hire a research assistant or tech? Small schools might be able to get you a paid part-time undergrad to work in your lab.

-Travel. To you, money for staff, travel, equipment and supplies all looks the same. But to the resource managers at the university who have to cobble together the funds for you, they aren’t. They need to get your startup from different pools of money with different rules. If you want to get money to travel to conferences, that might need to be specified up front. It also might not be possible, or might allow you to get a larger total amount.

-Duration of startup. Have you seen the Richard Pryor movie Brewster’s Millions? (This shows I am not young.) Pryor’s character has to spend a ton of money – all of it – in a short period of time. Most people who get startup are given a deadline to spend all of their money, and it typically arrives too soon. You’re so busy getting settled into your classes your first year, you can’t set up your lab on time. It’s likely that they’ll be pleased if you want your startup to be distributed over multiple years. That’s flexibility that you’ll appreciate. (I didn’t get the bulk of my startup until after I was tenured, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

There are a lot more details, and nuances about what kind of resources are better than others, but most of this depends on the specific circumstances of your particular needs and those of your institution.

Before your start your negotiation, there is a classic book about negotiation that I strongly recommend reading: Getting to Yes. This book will help you take away the adversarial approach to arguing over resources and instead help you find common ground. It should never be an argument, it should be a collaboration. Read this book before you get an offer.

Efficient teaching: after academic dishonesty happens

One of the most unsavory parts of the job is dealing with violations of academic integrity policies.

This is an “efficient teaching” post because dealing with academic dishonesty is a part of teaching, and there are many ways to handle it, some of which are more efficient than others.

Just sweeping it under the rug is not efficient, because efficiency is a ratio of teaching effectiveness and teaching effort. Doing nothing about academic dishonesty is ineffective teaching, because if that’s what you do, then you’re not doing your job.

I used to be bothered by the poor judgment of the students. If students are driven to cheat, how can I be an effective instructor? What did I do wrong?

I’ve gotten over that worry. It was cured with data. If you’re familiar with the literature on academic dishonesty (the wikipedia page is particularly good), then you are aware that cheating on exams and assignments is rampant in all sectors of higher education wherever you go. That’s just a straight-up fact. Every class you’re teaching, there’s someone cheating in it. Don’t even try to deny it.

(To get the obvious stuff out of the way: Buckets of ink have been spent on how to deter cheating and plagiarism. Often it’s real ink, in the form of useless handouts at professional development sessions. I work hard to design my courses to reduce the incentive for cheating and plagiarism as well as making it harder to get away with it. Every student of mine is fully, wholly, aware about what constitutes academic dishonesty, so when they do it, there’s no doubt that they’ve made an active choice in the matter. You should only pursue consequences for academic misconduct when it is entirely obvious to you, without any doubt whatsoever, that the misconduct occurred. Moving on to the meat of the issue:)

Events of academic dishonestly don’t make me even think about my teaching quality anymore, or fuss about the welfare of the perpetrators. Nowadays, the only reason that academic dishonesty pisses me off is that it’s a massive time sink.

Students who cheat are selfish because they’re wasting my time while I make sure the proper consequences are administered. I deal with this almost every semester at least once. It’s maddening.

When a student decides to foul up in one of my classes, in a stupidly obvious way that I can detect it, it has the potential to screw me up just as it does for them. It can suck away many good hours that would be better spent on students who aren’t cheating, and on manuscripts that are waiting for me.

The first time I intercepted academic dishonesty (while not as TA) was when five students were all plagiarizing together on a lab research project. It was overt, badly done, and they clearly knew it was the wrong thing to do. One student even brought in someone’s draft from the year earlier (with edits on it from the instructor of the prior year!) to pass off as their own and ask me for input. I spent days – literally – doing all the legwork, paperwork, documentation, interviews, and other crap associated with making sure that these students got their fair dose of justice. My department was very supportive of it, but it mushroomed, because the students escalated the issue. And then one of the plagiarists claimed I was racist. Hearings were held. This is what you do not want to happen when you’re in your first or second year on campus.

This turned into an inquisition because I set the stage to let the students make this happen. In this instance, I was initially dealt a bad hand, as the assignment was designed for plagiarism by the professor who designed (or rather, didn’t design) the lab curriculum. Regardless, I lost control of the situation before I even started. I took the well-meaning but misdirected advice of senior faculty, who mostly did nothing about the plagiarism in their midst, who in fact encouraged it by usually ignoring it or giving extremely light penalties. Most faculty handle academic dishonesty in a way that is designed to make themselves miserable in the process, either by guilt or by effort.

There is a completely fair way of handling the situation without wasting all of your time.

It’s alluring to let students off light, because if you don’t, they can make a big stink which involves lots of paperwork, conversations with administrators, and hearings. However, letting students off easy (aside from being an injustice) also invites more cheating. Once you get a reputation for busting people — and the reputation does get out there — you have deterring effect.

So, how do you appropriately nail cheaters and plagiarists without making it your life’s work?

Here are some handy dandy observations that you should be aware of before heading into this morass:

When a students are personally accused of misconduct, they will deny it. It’s a gut instinct to defend one’s self against external threats. They’ll even deny it when the evidence is incontrovertible. You could have a photograph of their arms with smuggled formulas, a cheat sheet in your possession, or the original version of an online essay from two years that perfectly resembles their own. You could have a misdirected email between two students explaining to one another exactly how they cheated on the last test. You could invite God into your office and have him testify that he saw the student cheating. All but the most incredibly forthright students will still absurdly insist they did nothing wrong.
The reason that students deny in the face of total proof is, in part, because this strategy often works. It’s amazing how consistent denial in the face of clear evidence can persuade administrators to dismiss or lessen a university-level penalty. (Many student affairs offices are filled with Poppy Harlows that have trouble watching students experience the consequences for their poor decisions, regardless of whether the events were horrific or banal.)
Once a student claims innocence, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, there’s nothing you can do to get the student to recant. They won’t recant because then they’d be guilty about lying about dishonesty, which is just as bad as the original dishonest act. They don’t want to get busted for that either, and they won’t trust you after they lie to you.
When students feel that they are cornered, they might lash out. This could result in pages-long diatribes copied to every administrator whose email address is on the university website. If the student has a wealthy parent who donates to the school, or is a member of a traditionally disenfranchised minority on campus, or has a disability, or stands out in some other way, then their claims of persecution might have traction. Some students might lawyer up. A couple years ago a student said I was biased against him because he wasn’t from an ethnic minority. Seriously. These irrational attacks by students may or may not help out the students in the long run, but one thing is for sure: it’ll take a lot of your time.
Everybody handles academic dishonestly differently, and in your department, there are faculty members who have policies and practices that don’t meet your standard. It’s not useful to try to get someone to change their policies, because they have made up their mind and if you show that you think differently, you’re just losing common ground with your own colleagues.
It’s a fine practice to think of your syllabus as a legal contract. It’s not, but if a policy is clearly stated in the syllabus at the start of the semester, the university thinks that it is the students’ responsibility to be aware of that policy.

In light of these observations, how I have I decided to handle academic dishonesty when it happens? I handle the matter in a way that maximizes the probability that it will work out smoothly and not result in a big waste of my time, while making sure that the necessary outcome happens. Keep in mind that I follow this course of action only when it is 100% clear that there was an intentional violation. (If it’s plagiarism, then I am sure of intent; see #1 and #2 below.)

I put unambiguous and detailed policies in my syllabi. I discuss (meaning, talk at my students) in detail on the first day of class, informing them that I don’t expect anybody to be academically dishonest, but it’s something that I have seen often and I need to take care of it when it does. This policy results in an assigned grade of F in the course for any academic dishonesty. (I make this an “administrative F” by writing a memo to the Student Affairs office, so that the student can’t repeat-and-cancel, by retaking the course to eradicate the F from the GPA. Your institution might now allow that to happen easily, though.)
We go through a short lesson (5-10 minutes) on what constitutes plagiarism, to ensure that they know what it is. I’ve also assigned a short web tutorial with a quiz at the end.
When dishonesty happens, do not immediately engage with the student. If it’s a plagiarized assignment, don’t contact the student. If you intercept a student cheating, then you should document as much as possible at the moment, and don’t start a conversation. Make a note of who is sitting next to the student, and write notes for yourself.
Mention to your chair that you have an academic misconduct incident and that you’re handling it. That will be an inoculation against a possible toxic student outbreak, which is what you’re trying to avoid.
Within the next day, you need to spend about an hour writing a memo. This memo will be addressed to the student, and cc’d to your chair and the other authorities to whom you are supposed to report academic integrity violations. In this memo, you state that you establish the fact that the student violated the academic integrity policy. You spend several sentences going into some detail about exactly how you know this is a violation. Don’t overexplain, and don’t nitpick into detail, but report that it the misconduct was unambiguous and overt (as it needs to be if this is your course of action). If you used turnitin or a similar service, do not specifically reference the originality report, but instead indicate that sections are plagiarized from other preexisting sources in a fashion that it is logically impossible for the student to not have committed plagiarism, and that the similarity transcends coincidence. Be clear that this letter is to inform the student that you have determined the fact of the dishonesty, and that this is not a matter of further discussion, and if the student disagrees with this finding of fact this may be rectified with a formal appeal. This memo will then tell the student the specific consequence – that they will be receiving an F in the course and also that you’re reporting this to the appropriate university body. Write that the student is entirely welcome to continue attending class for the remainder of the semester, but that that any further involvement will not effect the grade at the end of the semester. Write to the student that, if he or she chooses, a meeting can be scheduled. To protect the student’s interests, any future conversation should be conducted in the presence of another faculty member, and should be scheduled through the departmental office. Indicate that you don’t require such a meeting, as the outcome is already determined and is not subject to change based on any further information. Remind the student that you are required to follow this policy and that you are working to represent their interests as best as possible, and as long as there are is no further academic misconduct, you are not going to request that the university pursue further sanctions such as probation, suspension or expulsion. The memo should also indicate that you do not want to discuss the matter over email or the telephone, as these matters are best handled in person and with the involvement of other parties, if necessary. Ask that the student wait at least 24 hours to respond, and if the student wants to file a formal response, you’ll accept it in writing and send it in to the university along with your report. A written statement should precede any formal meeting about the matter.
Send this memo to the student’s home address by postal mail, and also send a copy of it to the student as a pdf attachment to an email.

Your goal here is to handle the matter while letting the student know that you’re on their side, and are only following the policy. Give them 24 hours to cool down. If they find you at the office and lie to you before the cooling off period is over, tell them that you can’t talk, and they should put down in writing their response. Their lies look stupider to them on paper than they do coming out of their mouths, and they recognize this fact. So, make sure their first rebuttal (if any) is in written form. Since plagiarists are repulsed by actual writing, this can dissuade many of them right at the start.

There are a few possible outcomes from the memo. The best one, for all parties, is that the student disappears and you never talk about it again, and you just give the F when turning in your grades. This has happens for me the majority of the time. The student might email me with an excuse, and I just email back saying that the letter is unambiguous about the policy. Then it’s done.

The second best outcome is that the student wants to meet with you to proffer an explanation. In this meeting, you’ll get excuses or mitigating factors. You listen and then firmly tell them that your policy stands, and that all misconduct has this outcome. If they persist, then you remind them that further misconduct, which includes being untruthful about misconduct, would result in a request for more serious sanctions. The student typically then will face facts and accept the F.

This whole approach, keep in mind, is designed to get the student to recognize the obvious fact of the misconduct and come to terms with it before they choose to deny it. Because once they deny it, they won’t take it back, and if they won’t take it back, then they’ll fight you on it. You want them to accept it easily. You have to be your own bad cop and good cop. I do honestly believe I’m representing my students’ interests, and I don’t want them to be unnecessarily harmed. However, I have to administer the consequences that I set forth at the start of class if I’m going to be fair to everyone.

It might be possible that the student will fight the F by filing a grade grievance, talking to the Dean of Students or your Dean or whatnot. At this point, there isn’t that much for you to do. You let the student continue to attend class like normal. You’ve already written your memo that explains what happened. You might have to write a more detailed statement explaining exactly how it is a violation, but this shouldn’t be too much work. And if there’s a hearing, you go. You’ve done everything you’ve could to give the student an opportunity to do the right thing after misconduct, and if they choose against it and continue to fight, then you just have the facts on your side and it’ll speak for itself. Getting deeply engaged in thinking about it can’t help you. You’re just doing your job. If the student lawyers up, then let the lawyer deal with your administration, after all, that’s why they get paid the big bucks. But hopefully, it won’t come down to that, and by handling it this way, I think you’re minimizing the chance that it’ll happen.

Life is not fair, but I can work hard to make my classroom as fair as possible. If a student is caught cheating in your class, or knowingly plagiarizes an assignment, and you don’t flunk them, I don’t even want to hear about it. It’ll just ruin my day. This is where others of like mind might post a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses, captioned, “I CAN HAZ CHEETING?”

Efficient teaching: exam writing vs. exam grading

Grading sucks. I hate grading. I guess even the best job in the world has its downside.

I hate grading because it makes me think about all of the less un-fun things that I could be doing at that moment. And I often do those things (like laundry, or dishes) instead of grading. Which only makes grading worse.

I’ve never actually given a scantron exam in a class that I’ve had the freedom to teach how I wanted. I haven’t had a massive class that’s required this approach (or a small army of student graders). I’m not inherently opposed to multiple choice exams, but I’ve mostly been in places where they were not appreciated, at least not in the kinds of classes I have been assigned.

One of the reasons I haven’t liked multiple choice exams is that writing a good one takes a lot of time. (And, even when I’ve used some of these questions on a paper exam, I find that they can contain a lot of hidden cultural biases that only come out when talking with students afterwards.)

If your exams aren’t multiple choice, then how can you do spare yourself grading hell?

You can’t. But you can lessen it.

Which is more annoying, writing an exam or grading?

This is just a working hypothesis. It’d be interesting to really know. But not interesting enough to delve into the education literature.

On one extreme, you could write an exam in ten seconds. It would ask:

Explain in detail the five most important ideas that you learned while studying for this class in the past month.

Very easy to write, very hard to grade.

When underthinking exam questions, then we could be in for a world of hurt when we have to grade the responses. You can’t necessarily create a perfect rubric up front, because you might get correct but unanticipated answers.

Students can put all kinds of crazy stuff down when you ask questions on exams. Sometimes, this crazy stuff is actually factually correct and directly answers your question. Even if the answer is not addressing the content that you were expecting the question evaluate?

Badly Worded Question: When the earth had more oxygen in the atmosphere, would the sky appear orange or not? Explain your answer with a sentence.

Correct answer: Yes. The sky would either be orange, or it would not be orange.

I have a really hard time marking points off a question which is fully answered correctly, even if the correct answer isn’t what I anticipated. (In fact, I promise I won’t do this to my students, as a part of a policy of transparency and fairness.) The onus is on me to write questions that directly get at what I need to know to assess their content knowledge and the ability to process it (Blooms taxonomy, yadda yadda…)

So, if you make sure your exam is airtight going in, then grading it should be easier.

But writing exams is no fun either. So we don’t write the best exams in the first place. Maybe the memories of painful grading are enough of a stick to make us write tighter exams.

hat tip to Prof-Like Substance for venting about grading.

A formal model for undergraduate authorship

The standard guidelines for authorship rarely address undergraduate-specific issues. Earlier, there was some interesting discussion about what it takes to make an undergraduate a first author, and the costs and benefits of working to make this happen. Since then, I’ve been made aware of a detailed and thoughtful article specifically addressing this topic, by Burks and Chumchal at Southwestern University and Texas Christian University.

If you’re thinking about investing the time into mentoring an undergrad through the long slog of the writing process, this fuel for thought is worth your own time to read. There is a great list of recommended strategies, which we only touched on in the comments before. Here’s a copy. The paper includes this decision tree:

a decision tree to figure out how an undergrad is an author

From: Burks, R.L. and M.M. Chumchal. 2009. To Co-Author or not to co-Author: How to write, publish, and negotiate issues of authorship with undergraduate research students. Science Signaling 2: tr3.

This article was sent to me by a reader who didn’t want himself to be identified. Thanks, anonymous correspondent!

This paper is spot on and provides a very useful way to structure a project even before you start. There are a few tacit assumptions in here, though, of which I’m not wholly convinced.

Publication with undergraduates makes it harder to get into a higher tier journal (potentially because of time constraints)
Lack of institutional support may alter the costs and benefits of involving students in research
The motivation for supporting student authorship will vary with tenure/promotion status

The paper also addresses whether or not students earn any authorship at all, and if so, what position. This part made me feel better, because it looks like my current practice mostly follows the recommendations. However, the authors suggest that if a project couldn’t have been completed without a student, then that students merits authorship, at least somewhere in the paper. Almost nothing in my lab gets done without students. What is the role of an undergraduate student who performs the role of a thoughtful technician? This student didn’t conceive the project, but they spent 200 person-hours working on it. They aren’t in a position to analyze or write (or, at least, I’m not in a position to mentor them on it). They collected nearly all the data but didn’t do much else. Are they coauthors? This is murky. The student has a good deal of ownership and the project would not exist without the student, but you did everything but collect data. I prefer to involve students more deeply, but sometimes this doesn’t happen.

This is still a dilemma for me. One of the pragmatic aspects that enter the equation is the professional trajectory of the student. Would the paper matter for them? This shouldn’t be a part of authorship criteria, but it’s hard to ignore.

Class duration and time for research

If you had total control, how would you block your teaching time?

Would you want classes to meet frequently for short periods of time, or infrequently but for a long stretch each time? What is good for your research? What is good for the students? Are the two mutually compatible?

One end of the continuum (the block system aside) is having classes meet 3-5 days per week, plus a lab. When I was in college, my intro science classes met in the mornings, 5 days per week, for an hour, over 10 weeks.

At the other end of the continuum is where I am teaching now. Most daytime classes are either MW or TTh, so they meet for 1.5 hours twice per week. There are almost no MWF classes. Since most faculty teach four courses per semester, this presents enough flexibility so that scheduling is not impossible, though I feel deep sympathy for the chairs that have to schedule.

We also have a many classes that meet in the evenings, as I teach on a commuter campus. Plenty of them meet once per week, for three hours. My teaching load has included these for the last few years.

Tonight, after my kid already gets home from school, I’m teaching for three hours. I only see these students once per week. This semester I do this on two nights per week. I miss evening activities with my kid, but it does lead to having more time with him at other moments, including my being able to pick him up from school those other days. I’ve arranged my schedule so that I’m available for parenting the evenings I’m not teaching, and my spouse sometimes has weekend commitments. I think it evens out during the semester, in terms of parental effort.

How do feel about it, in terms of my research opportunity? I’m liking it a lot. On most days, I have massive blocks of time that I can protect to allocate to time-consuming tasks. It’s great. I also don’t have to rush into campus those days, and I can take care of business at home. It also leads to an expectation that I might not be on campus in the day, if I am there in the evening.

How does it work out pedagogically? At first I was reluctant and concerned that it wouldn’t work out. After doing the same class several times, I’ve been converted to this schedule. First of all, preparing for a class is three times as much work, though that also is less frequent. That’s something to take into account. But assuming that you’re prepared, how does it affect learning? I think it’s a net gain. Actually, putting my own schedule aside, I’d structure all of my classes to meet in a 3-hour stretches on a weekly basis instead of more frequent lectures.

Why do I think this time format is better? Because active learning requires focus and depth. I was reluctant to teach these long infrequent classes because, let’s face it, after three hours of lecture your mind is pulp. You’re exhausted and parched, and the students are on overload. All lecture audiences slow down after 20 minutes.

Once I learned how to stop lecturing, and to teach using other approaches, we have time to learn much more deeply when we’re together. And I have enough experience running a classroom to keep students accountable in the intervening week, so that their brains don’t shut off during that time span. I realize that it’s nearly impossible, at least in the short term, to shift class schedules around for many political and practical reasons. This is, though, a good thought exercise to think about what’s best when you do have the choice.

Grad students in the sciences who teach for a living learn to balance their time while teaching long class sessions. Usually, grad students are teaching the lab sections. I taught three 3-hour sections per week to get my TA wage (for a wage around the poverty line) in grad school. So, that’s not that different from what I’m doing now as faculty. If grad students with TAships have time for a dissertation, then if faculty plan well they should have plenty of time for research.

If you’re lecturing, I think short classes are best, or least bad, for the students, because the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to absorb lectures for long stretches, even when they are engaging. But if you’ve abandoned the lecture, then long classes will give you the time to let students consider topics in depth and learn a lot more. And, on the plus side, having classes in big blocks will let you schedule research in big blocks, too.

Training vs. productivity. What’s your currency?

In a big lab, research gets done through the training of grad students and postdocs. The lab simultaneously fulfills its research mission and meets the “broader effect” agenda of developing the scientific workforce. Training and productivity are mutually compatible.

Granted, some PIs – often those that have the most effective training programs – do lots of independent work and their research happens separate from their students. Regardless, the training of students and the production of research aren’t in conflict.

Theoretically, this statement applies to labs in teaching schools. However, it’s not necessarily the case in practice.

I suspect science faculty – at least senior faculty at teaching schools – can be sorted into three pools:

Those who think that their main research responsibility is to mentor student researchers and provide them with high quality experiences to further their careers. The publication of research is an important and useful product of the research experience.
Those who think that their main research responsibility is to conduct and publish research and be a part of the scientific community. The mentorship of students and their future success as scientists is an important and useful product of the research experience.
Those who think that research distracts from quality teaching. If you can find the time for it, that’s okay as long as it doesn’t harm the students.

Is this an overgeneralization? It might be.

In an attempt to pin a theory on this (overgeneralized) concept, perhaps these perspectives form the axes of a triangular continuum (in ecology, like CSR theory or Holdrige life zones), “productivity,” “training” and “emphasis on the classroom.”

When new faculty start their jobs, maybe they start near the middle of the continuum space, or wherever the departmental culture requires for tenure. As they gain experience and a string of successes and failures of various kinds, they may gravitate to one of the corners. (I should add that an emphasis on training, research, or the classroom doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is better at that particular thing. For example, someone who says that student training is paramount might not necessarily serve their students well.)

Another theoretical framework could be taken from optimal foraging theory. Faculty members can have different currencies for their decisions. For example, when a bird is foraging, is it trying to collect the highest energy food, or trying to collect the most nutrients? Or is it trying to maximize net energy gain (and thus balance food collection with calories spent foraging)? Or is it trying to minimize predation risk? These are all different possible currencies that an individual could select when making decisions.

Faculty members have different currencies when pursuing their research agenda. Some will seek to maximize grant money or publications, others will seek to increase the quality of student training, or the number of students heading to graduate school. Some will be seeking to maximize scientific discovery, and others are trying to have the most fun possible. Some might be trying to maximize their free time to go play with their pets.

With respect to how research happens in the lab, I think there are two common currencies that undergraduate faculty mentors choose: One is Research Productivity (a composite of publication quantity and quality) and the other is Student Training (a composite of the number of trained students and their entry into top labs in grad school).

The choice of this currency isn’t made because people love productivity or student outcomes per se. Instead, they may love the exhilaration of research and all that it entails (in my case, ants in the rainforest and all their amazing little quirks), and they may love working with their students on a day to day basis and watching them grow and succeed (which cam be spectacular in a way that words fail to describe).

To put it a different way: do you want to do research for the sake of doing the research and all that it entails, or are you doing it as an avenue for training students to be an effective educator and improve student outcomes? These two priorities, of course, are mutually compatible. However, when making decisions on a day to day basis, what is your currency?

Both perspectives, in my view, are valid and useful for the missions of most schools. I posit that a department might work best when it has faculty with diversity of currencies, with mutual respect of each others’ differing choices. A successful department might not require maximal diversity, but needs at least adequate representation of the major functional roles. When you don’t have that functional diversity in a department, things don’t work as well.

To illustrate this principle, here’s a story, slightly modified to protect the innocent: At a field station, I once shared a bottle of rum with a colleague. (This has happened plenty, but only once did it lead to this particular story from at least 10 years ago.) He was mostly a research-for-research’s sake kind of guy, and he was working in a small college in which others focused on research as a vehicle for student training. He would have to have been a top-notch scholar on his campus, I imagine. He told me how he had trouble getting promoted to full professor, because his department didn’t approve of how he conducted his research program. He eventually received promotion, accompanied with a reprimand. Apparently, he needed to involve more students in his research. The odd thing is that he actually did include students in his research, quite a bit.

This probably seems like an odd story if you haven’t taught in a teaching institution. Similar toxic situations can evolve when newly hired research-active faculty may raise the bar on unproductive faculty, or in a department focused heavily on productivity, and some scientists take care to mentor a small number of students with lots of attention, at the cost of productivity. (And, of course, at research institutions, departments focused on productivity don’t appreciate faculty who want to focus more heavily on classroom teaching.)

Behavioral ecologists have found that animals may switch currencies, depending on the environmental context.

In a low research environment such as my campus, resources cannot be acquired without a moderate to high level of productivity. Frankly, since my campus doesn’t provide me with the resources (time, space, funds) to do any student research training whatsoever, it would be very difficult to accomplish this task unless it’s built on a backbone of productivity. Moreover, successes in student training are not specifically valued or rewarded by the institution (even if it is an explicitly stated priority), whereas bringing in grants is given high priority. So, I don’t have the option to focus primarily on student training, because if I did that too much, I would not have resources to support my students. Though I’m at an undergraduate institution, I need to run my lab like at a big university if I am to get anything done, because we don’t have any other way to support our students.

My own currency, then, is productivity, though this does seem to maximize student training, at least in my current low-resource environment. In an environment where faculty are provided resources to mentor student researchers (time for mentorship, modest supply funds, and a stipend or salary for student research), then a currency switch might make sense. This might explain why small liberal arts schools are known for placing so many students into top graduate programs, not just in relative frequency but in absolute numbers. There, an emphasis on a high quality research experience might serve the students best.

Perhaps the best environment for a budding undergraduate researcher is to be mentored by a graduate student in a big research lab. You will have access to fancy resources and that important pedigree, plus quality time with someone more experienced than you, and lots of feedback and an opportunity to learn. (So far, two of my former undergraduate mentees have moved on to faculty positions at universities, both of whom coauthored a piece of my dissertation. That’s a stronger record than with I’ve had since becoming a professor whose job it has been to mentor undergraduates.)

Perhaps NSF and NIH should include salary for an undergraduate mentee for every graduate student on a project? That might be the best, and a very cheap, way to make more scientists.

Making time by teaching efficiently

Science faculty need to be highly effective teachers.

Researchers need to be highly efficient teachers.

How are teaching effectiveness and teaching efficiency related to one another? What can we do to change this relationship to best serve our students and get research done? As a working hypothesis, I suggest the following:

Many variables affect the effectiveness of teaching. Among these variables is instructor effort. The more work you you put into a course, the more students learn. After a certain amount of work, there are diminishing returns. The shape of this relationship can vary, of course, and the function that I’ve invented for the figure isn’t authoritative by any means.

What constitutes efficient and inefficient teaching? How can we increase the slope of the function? Why work for a bigger slope?

If you can teach more efficiently, then your students can learn more and you can have more time for research.

Some highly effective practices are inherently inefficient. These include frequent graded evaluations in class, multiple revisions of written work, and guiding groups of students on independent projects. Other highly effective practices are more efficient. These include guided discovery lessons, frequent checks on understanding during class, “think-pair-share” techniques, and snap ungraded quizzes at the start of every class. Research shows that they are effective teaching approaches but they don’t have to take more time to prepare.

Some technology-intensive approaches can be effective and not necessarily take much time (clickers, moderated question boards, and perhaps “flipping”) while others may take more time to set up than the payoff is worth (quizzes in the course management system, creating online videos to supplement in-class instruction). In my experience, CMS software (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT) is a massive time sink (i.e., inefficient) if you use it to do anything other than disseminate materials. They don’t help students learn as far as I can tell, and are just part of the Techo-Education complex (unless of course it’s an online course, which is a different beast altogether).

Because we all have different experiences and aptitudes, what is efficient for one person may not be for another. For example, some people report that classroom approaches that do not involve traditional lectures take a lot of time and are still worthwhile. I find it’s actually easier to not build a big fat dense lecture, but I did get some genuine training to learn how to do it. Experience with certain techniques can make them more efficient, but others (making and grading quizzes, for example) always takes plenty of time, even if you do them with clickers or some other higher-tech approach.

What are effective and efficient techniques? What inefficient techniques are we obligated to use because they are irreplaceable?

A rationale for existence

I’ve started this blog because I have so much free time on my hands.

Over the last couple years, a few blogs of scientists have become a part of my routine, even though I lurk on all of them. Reading blogs has been a way for me to learn from others.

Nevertheless, there is a huge disconnect between these scientists and my daily experience. Some of my biggest challenges and triumphs are endemic to my work at a teaching institution. We have a lot in common, but my experience is different in some fundamental ways. There are so many of us at teaching schools that do (or aspire to do) big-league research, even if it’s on a smaller scale. The strategies we use to build and maintain a research agenda are often different than our colleagues at research institution. I think we all prioritize our students and student training, but it’s really different when your students are all or mostly undergrads, and you teach a lot, and your school cares way more about your teaching than your research.

Many of my junior colleagues – whose work I greatly admire – are now taking jobs very similar to the one that I’m in. I am often asked about how I go about my job, get funded, manage my teaching load, maintain a research program. How I do what I do. This leads me to suspect that this blog will be useful.

I’ve read enough blogs to be able to identify, at least in my view, what makes a good one. That list includes:

a clear focus with a useful perspective that comes from experience
frequent entries, at least a couple times a week if not more often
a community of people who contribute their views
a greater number of lurkers who never contribute but regularly visit
high quality writing

If you’ve discovered this early on, input is particularly welcome. My plan is to do this for a little while before I attempt to let people know it exists. I’ve decided against anonymity. This is not common, but I’m tenured and don’t have dirty secrets to hide, and this will keep me from worrying about the attempt to hide details. (When I’m annoyed by something at my institution, which is more often then I could ever mention, I’d be glad if my administration read about it and know that it is from me). I will be able to showcase my research and field more openly, not to mention be openly proud of my students and institution. By being known, I just need to worry about being polite, which is a good habit to be in.

Small Pond Science

Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences

time management