Max. Classroom Capacity
Marcus W. Dickson
Wayne State University
Like many of you, I’m a faculty member at a research-oriented university with an I-O doctoral training program. One thing I’ve wrestled with is how to encourage our graduate students to pay attention to the quality of their teaching when many of them will enter environments where teaching is not emphasized. I’m not intending to argue about whether teaching should or should not be more emphasized at research-oriented universities—that might be a future column!—but I don’t think there’s any question that teaching is generally less emphasized in our research universities. For example, in many departments, if you take on a new administrative task, you receive a teaching reduction (not a research expectation reduction). At my university and many others, the top merit raise for teaching excellence is always less than the top merit raise for research excellence. Sabbaticals are designed primarily to allow you to reenergize your research program—I strongly suspect that a sabbatical application that talked about redesigning a course would be met with much less positive reception. So given all of that, how can we encourage our graduate students who are going on to academic positions (part or full time, master’s or doctoral) to be good teachers as well as good researchers?
Some argue that teaching students to be good researchers will simultaneously make them good teachers because good research and good research thinking informs one’s teaching. This is a position I’ve heard advocated repeatedly over the years, mostly by folks who don’t want to allocate resources towards teaching or towards training in teaching. I’d like to believe that it is true, but the general conclusion of the research on the topic suggests there is really very little correlation between research productivity and teaching effectiveness (e.g., Feldman, 1987; Hattie & Marsh, 1996). Certainly there are questions about this work, not least of which is the fact that publishing is a rare event for most faculty members—a variety of sources across a variety of disciplines have found that fewer than 15% of faculty members in a discipline account for well over 50% of the publications in that discipline, so there may well be attenuated correlations simply due to the relative infrequency of one of the events being assessed. Nonetheless, there is a substantial amount of evidence suggesting that efforts to train our graduate students to be highly productive researchers does not make them into good teachers. (It doesn’t necessarily make them into bad teachers either, it just doesn’t seem to be related.)
Although some have concluded that the solution to this conundrum is to create separate faculty tracks for teaching and research, I don’t buy that model. Instead, I think Hattie and Marsh had it right when they said:
[I]nstitutions need to reward creativity, commitment, investigativeness, and critical analysis in teaching and research and particularly value these attributes when they occur in both teaching and research. Only when these attributes are recognized is it likely that the relationship between teaching and research will be increased. We advocate that a desirable aim of a university would be to devise strategies to enhance the relationship between teaching and research, and all should be pleased when they increase the relationship positively beyond zero. (p. 534, emphasis added)
What sort of strategy would enhance the relationship between teaching and research? Are there strategies we could implement that would increase the Max. Classroom Capacity of our students who are headed to academic careers, while at the same time preparing them for the research demands of those careers? I think there are, and they involve the development of students’ mindsets, particularly around creativity.
One of the things that was emphasized for me in my doctoral research methods training—and that I have emphasized when I have taught doctoral research methods—is the development of a “creative research mindset.” In other words, we try to develop in our students the ability to see something interesting in the world and then to think about how to design creative research to answer meaningful questions about that interesting thing. For example, we were doing a study on responses to feedback, and one of my graduate students thought she saw a trend in the data that, when asked whether they had received positive, neutral, or negative feedback, Asian respondents tended to see the feedback as more positive than we had intended it to be (e.g., saw negative feedback as neutral and neutral as positive). So she thought about how to cut the data to see if that was accurate and then how to design a creative follow-up study to see if we could better understand the issue. Another student was doing an internship at a consulting firm and thought he noticed that the results of their surveys of employees in low-income, high-turnover positions were substantially different than those of other employees, and different from what dominant theoretical models would suggest, so he designed an interesting and effective study to examine those questions. The results didn’t really matter to me. I was so pleased that these students were noticing interesting things in the world or in their data and had developed the capacity to think clearly about how to investigate those things. In our graduate training programs, we’re pretty good at helping our students develop a creative research mindset in which they learn to think about phenomena or materials in the world in terms of topics they are studying and see linkages to how those things could be used in their research projects.
We are often less focused on helping our students develop a “creative teaching mindset,” in which they learn to think about phenomena or materials in the world in terms of topics they teach and see linkages to how those things could be used in their classrooms. Is it really that different a process, or is it just that we don’t really mentor our students in how to think about teaching in the same ways that we mentor them in how to think about research? I find myself regularly explaining to the graduate students who work with me why I chose to design a study a certain way or use a particular measure, trying to role model a research thought process. I spend much less time talking about how and why I decided to use a particular exercise, video, simulation, or reading to teach a concept in class and why I think it makes sense to do it that way—in other words, much less time trying to role model a teaching thought process.
For example, Tedford (2003) talks about teaching a programming course in the fall 2001 semester. Following the September 11 attacks, her students were stunned at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s apparent “inability to track the expiration date of the visa for a person visiting the United States” (p. 50). The students thought they could develop such a program, and so the external situation led to the possibility of a vivid, memorable teaching experience. I really hope that Tedford was able to talk with students learning to be teachers about how she drew on events in the world to inspire the project, how she designed the project, and why she did it that way.
As another example, the textbook I use to teach Introductory Psychology (Ciccarelli & White, 2009) presents personality profile data on writers and airline pilots, demonstrating that different types of people choose different careers. Shortly before we reached that section of the semester last year, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger safely ditched his aircraft in the Hudson River, with all passengers aboard surviving. When the recordings of Captain Sullenberger’s communications with air traffic control became available online, they indicated a focused, calm individual in the midst of crisis—an excellent, vivid example of the lower levels of trait anxiety among pilots shown in the textbook. Exams in that and subsequent semesters have shown that students now really “get” that concept and can expand it beyond writers and airline pilots, which was not necessarily the case before. But I’ve never had a conversation with my graduate students (including my teaching assistants for that course) about why that concept was challenging before and why I incorporated those recordings in the way that I did. I—and we—should have more conversations like that.
Certainly, there are many other things that excellent instructors do than what I’ve talked about here. But almost all of the instructors I know who are perceived as being dynamic and effective in the classroom tend to use vivid, current, and creative examples of concepts. They post links to YouTube videos on their course management systems (e.g., Blackboard), with notes about how those videos relate to the class. They see a show on television or hear an interesting radio story and realize how it would be a great way to explain a concept in class. They use a poem in class—I’ve used Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—to raise questions about the importance of control groups, for example, or they read a fiction story and see its relevance—Rick Guzzo used to use Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (which just came out as a short film called 2081) to raise questions about fairness issues in selection. Instructors with a creative teaching mindset identify new ways to communicate concepts to their students, and I believe that this is a skill that can be cultivated in our graduate students, just as the research mindset is.
I’ll return to this topic in a future column. In the meantime, I hope that I’ll hear from you. Write me and tell me how you see instructors in graduate I-O programs developing both research and teaching mindsets in their students. Tell me about specific people who you think do this really well. Tell me that I am way off base. I’ll draw on your responses for a future column about enhancing the Max. Classroom Capacity of the graduate students we train. You can reach me at marcus.dickson@wayne.edu, and I look forward to hearing from you.
References
Ciccarelli, S., & White, N. (2009). Psychology (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Feldman, K. A. (1987). Research productivity and scholarly accomplishment of college teachings as related to their instructional effectiveness: A review and exploration. Research in Higher Education, 26, 227–298.
Hattie, J., & Marsh, H. W. (1996). The relationship between research and teaching: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66, 507–542.
Tedford, P. (2003). Using current events as a teaching tool for an undergraduate data structures course. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 18(4), 50–55.