Comments from Former Fellows (1999-2000)

Fellows, together with their Mentors:

Susan E. Burns, Civil Engineering
James A. Smith, Civil Engineering
Jeffrey A. Grossman, German
Jahan Ramazani, English
Andrew C. Hillier, Chemical Engineering
William C. Johnson, Materials Science
Angeline Lillard, Psychology
Dennis Proffitt, Psychology
John O'Brien, English
Alison Booth, English

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

Reflections on teaching
Interdisciplinary discussions
Interactions of teaching and research
Workshops and the retreat
Value of Senior Mentors
Teaching tips and techniques learned
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

Reflections on teaching:

What’s been most gratifying of all is a sense of the institutional support and community that the Fellowship program and the TRC as a whole have constructed around the life of teaching. It’s a task that we all do in a kind of bubble of isolation, which is not all terrible, or completely avoidable. . . . But teaching is also the most sustained public and collective activity we do as well; the classroom is both a public space in itself and a link—or, better, scores of links, one per student—to the broader world.

The program really helped me establish a strong appreciation for what is important in teaching: are the students learning? When I began teaching, I was only concerned about content, and making my course a tough engineering course. Now, I have an appreciation for the fact that engineering education often confuses poor teaching with difficulty of subject matter [but] there should be very few, if any, barriers to effective learning.

The most important improvement that I have made in my teaching through involvement in the fellowship program is an increased awareness of my own teaching and an exposure to the methods of other skilled teachers. I have learned that dedication combined with self-awareness and self-criticism are critical components to improved teaching.

Interdisciplinary discussions:

The program did an excellent job facilitating contact with faculty from other department and school, contact I had sorely missed in my first couple of years at U.Va. Such contact is very helpful for a range of reasons—intellectual, institutional, pedagogical, personal—some of which I have tried to suggest in this report, and I consider myself very fortunate to have benefited as well from this aspect of the UTF program.
I very much liked the underlying themes and common issues that we found through the different disciplines.

One added benefit for me from this program was an exposure to the teaching methods and philosophy of “non-scientists.” Interacting with fellows from throughout the University gave me an insight into how teaching is perceived and implemented in non-technical fields. In addition, learning about the differences in obligations and expectations of faculty in the various disciplines was quite eye-opening. We clearly have very different jobs, but many of the teaching issues that we deal with are similar.

Interactions of teaching and research:

My time at the TRC was a refuge of calm in the tumultuous sea of assistant professorship. I found the interactions interesting and thought provoking, and always left feeling energized about both teaching and research. I have always believed that good research and teaching are integrally linked, not competitive, and the program helped cement that idea, while also providing practical ideas on how they can build on each other.

Workshops and the retreat:

I found all the teaching workshops to be well organized and very stimulating, but the workshop on creativity with Claude Cookman stands out foremost in my mind. I especially appreciated the excellent series of exercises and the discussion that Mr. Cookman provided for exploring how creativity develops, how to gain access to more creative thinking, and how to stimulate such thinking in others.

From the retreat in Staunton, through the series of workshop, to the final convening to discuss courses, the workshops provided ongoing fodder for ways to improve teaching.

In my upper-level course, I asked the students to do performances of scenes, and pointedly left it to them to organize into groups, to decide what scenes to do and what approaches to take, making clear that I would be a resource, but not a determining authority. I doubt I would have had the courage to turn so much over to them had I not been bolstered, not only by Jahan Ramazani’s workshop on critical thinking, but also by Claude Cookman’s workshop on creativity and the workshop on performance in the classroom run by Michael Levenson and Karen Chase. The result, however, was spectacular: the students came up with marvelous and inventive performances, group efforts that uniformly displayed enormous care and forethought. They also clearly love the opportunity, and several of them described these performances as a highlight of the course on their evaluations. In the long run, probably the most important and ongoing payoff from the fellowship experience is both a conviction that it is possible and necessary to turn authority over to students, and concrete strategies for doing so.

Value of Senior Mentors:

Observing my mentor’s teaching, I found myself witnessing—and taking copious notes on—the excellent model he provided for generating student participation. . . . I look forward to exploring and working with these models as I seek to further develop my own methods for teaching and generating student participation.
Having ongoing guidance from someone as clear-sighted as my mentor, who has been through the process before, has made my life enormously easier.

As a general reflection, the participation of senior faculty who have demonstrated an excellence in teaching or who have an interest in their protégé’s activities is an effective way to increase the talent pool in the program and to create for a more engaging environment for discussion of teaching.

Having the opportunity to discuss all aspects of teaching with a renowned teacher stands out as a very valuable experience. . . . Our lunch discussions concerned many matters, from grading and exams, to managing TAs ,to graduate student teaching, to how he runs his laboratory, to grant applications, to juggling teaching and research to optimize both, to syllabus design. The opportunity and excuse to talk about these sorts of matters was fabulous.

Teaching tips and techniques learned:

I now have a strong appreciation that the idea of relevance is of critical importance to students. Because I can clearly see the implications of something, it is easy to forget that undergraduates are doing all this for the first time. Keeping a folder of newspaper clippings with recent, relevant articles was a great suggestion.

Boice’s Advice to New Faculty Members recommendation on working at teaching all the time, when you aren’t really working—at stoplights, or while pulling weeds in the garden—has been most helpful. By jotting down notes at all kinds of odd times, the work involved in finally preparing presentations is markedly reduced.

Ultimately, if the students are well-trained in the fundamentals of problem solving, they can deal with most problems that they will face on the job. Often, it is the excessive and difficult content that drives students away from their technical courses. Therefore, I will focus on problem solving more directly in my courses. This tactic will be easily incorporated into my course redesign project through the project-oriented nature of the laboratory and simulation modules.

Value of feedback:

My new course, as I had conceived it, was too theoretical and technical to be effective at the undergraduate level. My mentor suggested that I might develop a course focusing on specific themes, but incorporating the theoretical concerns underlying the initial course. Since then, the course has gone through several version and benefited, most recently, from the excellent feedback I received from the fellow, mentors, and permanent faculty at the TRC.

I am, needless to say, much indebted to the feedback I have received as a teaching fellow this year. As a result, I will not hesitate in the future to seek out colleagues with whom I can discuss syllabi and other aspects of my work—something that I was indeed much more reluctant to do a year ago.

Overview of the program:

The Teaching Fellows Program has surely been the most gratifying experience in my (admittedly brief) career at the University of Virginia; our meetings have been the events that I have look forward to most avidly and felt most energized by in retrospect. The fellowship year has gone by astonishingly quickly, but I am sure that I will be drawing upon it for years to come. What’s been most sustaining is the realization of the kinds and extent of available human and materials resources for thinking about and working on teaching at the University.