Called to Teach. Группа авторов
of groups and working on what we learned in class. Always kept you interested in the next lesson to come.
It was taught in a very interesting way and it was so different than the rest of my classes.
Students are also given the opportunity to follow up the course with undergraduate research experiences in my Space Weather Research Lab. In this setting, they get to work with space weather data and participate in data analysis to support research outcomes. So far, ten students have worked as student researchers, with one student presenting a research poster at the 2017 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest earth and space science conference in the world.
As the student comments above attest, when we strive to push ourselves beyond the norm and work from a mindset of constant learning and growth, we can connect to students and achieve true learning. Since starting this class, there have certainly been times where I have tried to do some things that haven’t worked so well. I would urge educators, however, not to fear failure; if you are inspired to try something new, try it. If it doesn’t work, don’t do it again, or figure out how to make it better. Ultimately, that is one of the ways we grow and develop as teachers, and in the end that will benefit our students more than we realize. When we acknowledge that our own learning never ends, we are much more likely to ignite the spark of learning in our students. And we can make science not so boring.
References
Freeman, Scott, Sarah L. Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle K. Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Mary Pat Wenderoth. “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.23 (2014) 8410–15.
Hanson, David M. “Designing Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Activities.” In Faculty Guidebook: A Comprehensive Tool for Improving Faculty Performance, edited by Steven W. Beyerlein and Daniel K. Apple, 281–84. Hampton, NH: Pacific Crest, 2007.
———. Instructor’s Guide to Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning. Lisle, IL: Pacific Crest, 2006.
Kober, Nancy. Reaching Students: What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2015.
POGIL. pogil.org.
7. Kober, Reaching Students; Freeman et al., “Active Learning,” 8410–15.
8. https://www.pogil.org; Hanson, “Designing Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Activities,” 281–84; Hanson, Instructor’s Guide.
3
Observing a Master Teacher
A. Alexander Beaujean
Psychologists and educators have studied teaching excellence in higher education for almost a century.9 Like many things in psychology, this research has largely consisted of common-or-garden variety concepts and has generally lacked much that is technical.10 This does not mean that our knowledge of college teaching has been stagnant, only that assuming attributes in this domain are quantitative is not currently warranted by the state of evidence.
The current state of knowledge indicates that the phenomena constitutive of teaching excellence in higher education are qualitative.11 This does not make them any less real than quantitative phenomena or their investigation unscientific.12 It just means that the approach to their investigation should match the known structure of the phenomena. To that end, in this chapter I describe a qualitative investigation into how one particular master teacher approaches the process of teaching.
Teaching Excellence in Higher Education
As with any other profession, there are certain attributes that professors need to have. At a minimum, they need to understand the core concepts in their field. Expertise in a given academic field does not translate automatically into having expertise in the classroom. In fact, the two skill sets are likely independent of each other.13
In addition to having a strong grasp of their discipline, professors who engage in teaching need to have a certain set of minimum competencies.14 For example, they need to be able to communicate concepts in their field in an organized manner and be able to assess others’ understanding of these concepts. Although they are both normative concepts (i.e., relate to some standard), competence is not the same as excellence, however. Competence refers to having a sufficient amount. In principle, any professor can be a competent teacher as long as they meet the minimum criteria. Such is not the case with excellence. Excellence requires being outstanding--of the highest quality. All professors can strive for teaching excellence, but by its nature they cannot all be excellent teachers.
If teaching excellence is not equivalent with teaching competence, then what is it? Excellence in college teaching is not a technical concept. Ask any group of college students or faculty to define or describe excellent teaching and you will get a variety of answers.15 Not only is excellence not a technical concept, but also there is a growing consensus that there is no single set of behaviors constitutive of excellent college teaching.16 Buskist et al. argued that master teachers (i.e., professors who have demonstrated a level of rare excellence in the college classroom) possess certain qualities (i.e., non-quantitative attributes), but demonstrating behaviors constitutive of any specific subset of these qualities is not sufficient to be a master teacher:
Rather, master teachers are likely to come in all shapes and sizes, so to speak, and represent different combinations or blends of these qualities. What makes [Professor X] a master teacher is not exactly the same as what makes [Professor Y] a master teacher, although there may be some overlap in the personal qualities and penchants relevant to teaching that each possesses . . . Master teachers are as unique as teachers as they are as human beings.17
When considered in the broader literature of expertise, the uniqueness of master teachers is not surprising. Experts do not only just have more of something than others in the same field but also represent a different class of individuals.18 There is disagreement about how someone becomes an expert,19 but there is little contention that experts both process information in their area expertise differently as well as attend to different information than other individuals.20 This allows them to plan better and respond to situations more adroitly than non-experts.
Studying Teaching Excellence
Historically, most studies of excellent teaching have focused on perceived qualities of professors who exemplify excellence.21 For example, asking stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, alumni) what they perceive as teaching excellence22 or investigating criteria for teaching awards.23 Such studies can provide useful information, such as some general qualities that people believe are constitutive of being a master teacher (see Table 3.1). At the same time, these studies are limited because investigators do not examine behaviors directly. Instead, they rely solely on secondary information about excellent teaching.
An alternative to using secondary information is to observe master teachers engaged in the process of teaching.24 Although investigators infrequently collect this type of data, this type of data is critically important for understanding teaching excellence.25 Direct observations allow for collecting data about the specific behaviors in which professors engage that make them experts in teaching.
Direct observation of behavior is crucial to understand any type of expertise.26 Experts often behave and extract information from their environment with automaticity. That is, they are not always conscious of what they are doing, or how what they do is any different from others. Thus, it is not surprising that master teachers approach teaching qualitatively different than their colleagues and that they are not necessarily cognizant of how or why what they do is different.27 Consequently, direct observation of master teachers can provide a wealth of information about what it is they do that makes them experts.
In this current study, I conducted a case study of a master teacher for an entire course.