Comments from Former Fellows (2001-2002)

Fellows, together with their Mentors:

Phoebe Crisman, Architecture
Elizabeth Meyer, Landscape Architecture
David Evans, Computer Science
Judith Shatin, Music
John Lach, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ronald D. Williams, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Debra E. Lyon, Nursing
Kate Burke, Drama
Emily E. Scida, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Ellen Contini-Morava, Anthropology
Brian L. Smith, Civil Engineering
Stephen G. Wilson, Electrical & Computer Engineering
David Waldner, Government & Foreign Affairs
Sharon Hays, Sociology

Each paragraph indicates a comments from an individual Fellow. Comments are organized into the following categories:

Interdisciplinary discussions
Intellectual community
Value of Senior Mentors
Teaching strategies and techniques learned
Workshops and the retreat
Value of feedback
Overview of the program

NB: Fellows were told that we expect to learn the following information from their reports:

• how you changed or confirmed your teaching approach, philosophy, methods, strategies
• what impact the mentor/protégé relationship had on you
• what workshops or aspects of the program you found most effective
• anything else you gained from participation in the program
• your suggestions for improving the program in the future
• your plans for continued engagement with your teaching

Interdisciplinary discussions:

This fellowship year provided an exceptional venue for me to meet faculty from many disciplines and begin to understand something about other departments within the university. . . . This interdisciplinary exposure produced fresh ideas, revealed new colleagues and even resulted in a planned lecture exchange with another fellow.

Intellectual community:

The UTF Program allowed me to make connections outside of my department and cultivate new professional and personal relationships that I may not have had the chance to develop otherwise.

Value of Senior Mentors:

My mentor acted as a very practical sounding board for my ideas, complaints, excitement, etc. As a young professor with only two years of experience, my exuberance and ideals can sometimes drift too far towards naiveté. My mentor seems to know how far to let me dream before providing the dose of realism that I certainly need at times. Since we are departmental colleagues, I am excited to know that our mentor/mentee relationship is sure to continue.

The relationship with my mentor was a critical component of this experience. She was a fountain of good ideas and sharp insights into what I was doing well and what needed work. But more than these individual lessons, . . . I respected her opinion, and so she played a vital role in shaping my overall pedagogical orientation. I don't want to underestimate the numerous tips she gave me about how to be more effective in the classroom, but most important was how she helped me to re-conceive what it means to be teacher.

Establishing a mentor/protégé relationship has been very helpful on a personal and professional level. It has been a rare opportunity to talk about teaching, rather than degree program curriculum, specific course content, and other such topics encountered at departmental faculty meetings.

The mentor/protégé relationship was a comfortable and caring method for me to ask questions about how my discipline teaches and get an opinion and guidance from an individual who was inculcated into another way of seeing the world.

The suggestion to choose a mentor from outside of my department and whom I didn't know was excellent. In this way, I had the opportunity to learn about teaching from an individual with a very different teaching style than my own. This provided lots of opportunities for me to critically examine choices that I have made in teaching by contrasting with my mentor.

Teaching strategies and techniques learned:

A teacher can give students room to express their creativity while providing a structured framework to guide them. In my hardware design course, I have intentionally provided very little structure to the semester-long design project as a way of enhancing the space for creativity . . . . However, the desired result has not been achieved. . . . Several people from UTF group introduced the concept of structured flexibility that has been successful in similar design-based courses. As part of my UTF-funded project to restructure this course, I am instituting a more structured design timeline that I believe will help reduce the students' angst about such a large design, enabling them to explore the design space in more limited but equally rich chunks throughout the semester. I hadn't ever considered that increased structure could help stimulate creativity.

I have come to respect more both the strengths and the limitations of my students. I have become convinced that students enter my classroom with widely diverging cognitive orientations and capacities separate from their core intelligence. I now teach to what I think they can handle rather than demanding that they move effortlessly up to the cognitive level I hope they will attain by the end of the course. Of particular importance is the notion, stressed again and again by TRC faculty and by my mentor of the "pause," the regular intervals in which I stop the lecture and seek a new way, addressed to different faculties, to hammer home a point while giving students an opportunity to catch their mental breath.

It was stimulating to receive positive feedback, and it has helped to increase my confidence about my core convictions. This fall I will incorporate a number of specific improvements to lecture delivery and student interaction. . . . Last fall I successfully experimented with Concept Mapping in my theory lecture class, and will use a modified version of this classroom assessment technique again this fall. In addition to gauging student learning and providing feedback on my teaching effectiveness, such in-class exercises will enliven students during the ninety-minute lecture period. No matter how engaging my lectures might be, it is difficult for students to stay focused throughout such a long class. . . . There are more examples, but it is fair to assert that specific aspects of my teaching have significantly improved due to discussions and subsequent changes during my UTF year.

I have learned to try new things. As a relatively new teacher, I have been hesitant to try new techniques in that they may make me appear to be less knowledgeable and/or authoritative to my students. Through being encouraged to try new approaches, particularly using the classroom assessment techniques, I have learned that students truly appreciate attempts to improve the classroom experience and that new techniques help keep me from getting complacent in my role as teacher.

Especially effective was attending my mentor's lecture. This was probably the only time I had ever been in a college-level course in which I wasn't a student or the instructor. I was amazed at how many little nuances I picked-up watching my mentor teach.
Smith, Civil Engr.

Workshops and the retreat:

The retreat is a terrific way to begin our year-long dialogue on teaching and to get to know the other fellows. It was effective to have both time together to "work" and socialize and also time along to explore Wintergreen. The readings provided a good basis for discussion of various teaching issues, and Boice's Advice for New Faculty Members is a resource that every junior faculty member should read (and discuss).

Value of feedback:

I gained tremendously from the commentary of my videotaped lecture. It was particularly satisfying to learn that I was doing a few things well and that I could incorporate these elements into a redeployed pedagogical apparatus rather than constructing everything from scratch.

The videotaping of one of my lectures early last fall and the subsequent discussion with Marva were valuable. . . . This process would be worthwhile for every faculty member in the university-from novice to full professor.

Overview of the program:

I see this UTF year as a strong beginning to an ongoing process of critical evaluation and revision to my teaching. I have found this program to be infectious, in that the frequency of teaching-focused discussions with my colleagues in my school has significantly increased. In this way, the fellowship has not only improved my teaching but perhaps indirectly the teaching of others.

I feel very fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to participate in the University Teaching Fellows Program. Working with such a diverse group of bright individuals, I have gained a much deeper understanding of my strengths and weaknesses as an educator, the fundamentals of teaching, and, more generally, what it means to be part of the university community. I am particularly grateful in that the program has helped me to break free from my somewhat isolated shell of domain-specific research to broaden my perspective on what it means to be on the faculty at the University of Virginia.

This great group was lively, engaging, pleasant, funny, insightful, intelligent, compassionate, and quite simply…fun. Now perhaps my idea of what is fun is a bit strange, but one of the key factors in fun is personal enrichment. I can't have fun if I don't feel like I am growing personally or professionally, and I feel I have grown considerably in both respects due to my experiences with this group. They challenged me without pushing me too far, helping me not only break down many of my ideas about and approaches towards teaching but also build up new ones, all without breaking my confidence - actually, they made me feel like I can do this whole teaching thing.

I honestly view this year in the program as the beginning step in a long journey. To continue growth as a teacher, I plan to do the following:

Continue to attend TRC workshops
Continue mentor relationship (perhaps seek other mentors and colleagues to share ideas with)
Use other TRC resources (books, etc.)
Continue experimentation with classroom assessment techniques