“Once a Scientist…”: Disciplinary Approaches and Intellectual Dexterity in Educational Development

Mara Bollard, Graduate Student Instructional Consultant (Philosophy)

Philosophers often confront difficult questions that do not have clear, definitive answers. Doing philosophy well requires a disposition that helps one move inquiry forward in the face of uncertainty, with a sense of humility. Doing philosophy in this way requires the ability to recognize when one lacks relevant knowledge, ask questions to get the information one needs, and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the views one adopts. Importantly, one should be willing to revise one’s view in light of new information and/or compelling reasons that speak against that view.

Just as some philosophical positions are better than others, some teaching practices are more effective for students’ learning than others. We should prefer (and be motivated to pursue) better in both cases, even when it is not clear to us what would be uniquely best. A simple way to help instructors reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching is to ask them to articulate and evaluate the reasons that underlie their current teaching methods. If instructors do not know which pedagogical strategies are more effective, I encourage them to ask others, including their students, for help and feedback, seek out relevant empirical evidence, and—most of all—be willing to change their existing teaching practices on the basis of what they discover.

Michele DiPietro, Executive Director of a CTL (Statistics)

The statistical lens I use to process the world is that of variability and uncertainty. I automatically look at variability and try to quantify it, predict it, and reduce it when appropriate. For instance, there is a spectrum of student performance. What is the shape of that distribution? What characterizes students in the upper tail? How can we push students in the lower tail toward the middle of the distribution? To that end, the most useful tool in my toolbox is Hypothesis Testing, which I regularly apply when working with faculty on their courses. I encourage them to start with two competing hypotheses. The null hypothesis assumes no effect or relationship, such as “Flipping my course will not increase grades/learning/retention.” The alternative hypothesis theorizes an effect, an increase in one of those dimensions. I encourage faculty to treat their classroom as a laboratory, where they conceptualize teaching experiments to solve pedagogical issues, decide what data encode the evidence in either direction, determine the threshold of evidence (e.g., at least a 5% increase in retention to disprove the null), run the experiment, and iterate it.

This allows me to consult from a research perspective (Nyquist & Wulff, 2001), set myself up as an inquiry partner, frame suggestions for improvement as a hypothesis for the instructor to discover on their own (“Could your issue be due to X?”), and promote a growth mindset, thus realizing the ethos of educational development.

Devon Donohue Bergeler, Language Instructor (Foreign Language Education)

Empathy is an important skill and component of the intercultural learning that accompanies foreign language education. It requires openness, a tolerance for ambiguity, and patience. The ability to shift one’s perspective to another frame of reference makes it easier to understand other cultures and individual mindsets, to recognize and repair misunderstandings, and to explore the human experience. As an educational developer, I empathize with the motivations and demands placed on graduate student instructors and thus adapt my support to be immediately relevant, scaffolded into small steps, and to fit their most pressing needs.

Because graduate students are crunched for time and have variable bandwidth for teaching, I tailor workshops and share resources that they can directly implement in their classrooms. I also encourage instructors to modify and develop shared activities to fit their specific teaching philosophy, whether that means facilitating written dialogue on posters or creating a model UN role play. When supporting such work, I discuss teaching efficacy and expectations to enable instructors to make the most productive and efficient choices for their teaching context. Even small improvements, like incorporating short reflective discussion about how a learning strategy works, can have measurable outcomes like increased student (and instructor) engagement. By personalizing teaching development through empathy, I can make the highest possible impact for each individual instructor and classroom.

Leslie E. Drane, Instructional Consultant Assistant (Anthropology/Archeology)

With my background in archeology, I use my disciplinary skills and experiences to help with my work as an Instructional Consultant Assistant in a CTL. When working with fellow educators, I often consider the phrase the famous archeologist Ian Hodder (1999) wrote: “interpretation at the trowel’s edge.” When Hodder wrote these words, he was advising archeologists to continually alter their approach to excavations depending on what was being discovered while they were excavating. So, more simply, Hodder was reminding us that context should be considered when deciding our actions.

In my educational development work, I bring this knowledge with me when I help to facilitate learning communities, workshops, and consultations. While I have a plan for each meeting, it is important that I am open to changing my style, activities, or advice based on the needs of the people with whom I am working. Each person I help will have a unique context (based on their classroom, their experiences, and/or their knowledge), necessitating that I consider these circumstances as we continue to work with one another. Similarly, I often remind my clients that the context of their classrooms (size, time of day, stage of student, level of course) is important to their “interpretation” of how to proceed in the classroom. Although it is always helpful to have a plan, often, the “discoveries” we make during our classes or consultations may require slight adjustments to our approaches.

Elizabeth Luoma, STEM Education Program Director (Cell Biology)

Once a scientist, always a scientist. As part of my role at a CTL, I teach a course called “Theory and Practice of Scientific Teaching” for STEM graduate students and postdoctoral associates. We challenge participants in the course to, in the words of Handelsman Miller, and Pfund, “apply the rigor and spirit of research to their teaching” (2007). I typically ask the participants, “Would you ever conduct an experiment, never collect the data to find out if it worked, and then repeat the same experiment again?” The group typically laughs incredulously, “Of course not!” I follow with, “Have you ever given a lecture, never collected data to find out if it worked, and then repeated the same lecture again?” Following this second question, there are typically considerably fewer laughs and, often, a few participants shifting uncomfortably in their seats. This tends to be a powerful moment in the course, in which participants make true connections between how they approach their scientific research and how they approach their teaching.

Andrew Estrada Phuong, Chancellor’s Fellow, Consultant, and Program Developer (Learning Sciences and Organizational Learning)

One simple phrase has given me the intellectual dexterity to confront the daunting challenge of responding to over 2000 students and instructors’ needs. I learned this transformative phrase from Richard McCallum, one of my advisors in the learning sciences cluster at my university. When I was in his life changing course, Rick equipped me with a phrase that became core to my pedagogy and educational development strategies: “Don’t guess, assess.”

As a consultant and program developer, I ask faculty, administrators, graduate student instructors, and undergraduate instructors to inform me about their challenges. After listening deeply to their concerns, I propose strategies to address their challenges—one of which includes ungraded formative assessments that are aligned with the rigor of the final assessment. I find that the instructors and administrators who do not regularly implement these assessment strategies have been shocked by the data most of the time. Many of them realize that some of the students who were seen as part of the challenge actually grasped the material, while other students they did not mention had difficulties understanding course content.

These assessment strategies help us gain a greater awareness of the problem and often provide a framework to address deficit thinking exhibited toward many students, especially those who appear less engaged, confident, and vocal (Nguyen & Phuong, 2016; Phuong, Nguyen, & Marie, 2017). Through these experiences, we learn how assessment data allow us to see patterns in students’ engagement, strengths, and learning that were not apparent from mere observations. As instructors and administrators implement these strategies, they see outcomes (e.g., higher student learning gains, engagement, and course evaluation scores) that motivate them to continue refining their work (Phuong, Nguyen, & Marie, 2017). This process helps them identify their strengths and find ways to improve their practices based on classroom data (Freishtat, 2016).

Laura Thain, Teaching Mentor (Rhetoric and Writing)

The Roman orator Cicero relates the myth of Simonides, who, while dining in the hall of a wealthy Thessalonian, stepped outside to meet a visitor. In his absence, the hall collapsed, and Simonides was called upon to identify the bodies so that they could receive a proper burial. To his surprise, he was able to do so by simply recalling where each man had sat around the banquet table. Cicero cites this as the invention of the science of memory, one of the five canons of rhetoric.

Memory was an important faculty in ancient oratory, which taught speakers to map information onto space in order to recall it at will. The modern study of rhetoric is still interested in how and why we commit things to memory—in short, what makes new information “sticky.” Cicero’s “method of locating” holds relevance among highly literate 21st century students, not in spite of thousands of years of writing technologies but perhaps because of them. These technologies not only defer the burden of memory to moments beyond speech but also dramatically increase the amount of information students must process as they seek compositional mastery. Employing mental mapping in the classroom is one way for teachers to connect with students’ prior knowledge and understand information architecture as more than just figurative. Learning to access the spatial component of memory and its cognitive connections to spatial reasoning gives rhetorical pedagogy dimension. It is the glue that helps course content stick.

One rhetorical exercise useful to many disciplines is the practice of mapping discursive networks at different stages of the writing process. Using a cartographic approach, I ask students to produce a visual representation of connections and interactions they are discovering in their research as they investigate a social issue. This method, employed most famously by Latour (1987, 2005), helps shift the focus away from learning a body of “facts” and toward understanding how discourse produces facts. Mapping exercises are useful for teachers as they gauge prior and emerging student knowledge and help students find “space” for new ideas so they can invent new arguments. I share this exercise as a useful instructional approach with students in my teaching fundamentals course for new graduate teaching assistants, and have observed them as instructors creatively incorporating controversy mapping in literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies classrooms.

Mary C. Wright, Director of a CTL (Sociology)

Although I am a full time educational developer, I use a sociological “lens” every single day in my work as director of a CTL. The methodological training has been essential, as has been the discipline’s foundation in the analysis of race, class, gender, and their intersections. However, in the spirit of the “one thing,” I would name a brilliant sociological book, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation. Although published in 1977 about a disguised IBM, I find that this book’s three themes about organizations—opportunity, power, and proportions—offer a helpful lens for understanding universities and how educational development work fits within them. Take, for example, Kanter’s simple definition of power, “the ability to get things done” (p. 166). Although our field worries about visibility, and often with good reason, this more agentic view of power gives me hope about the field because educational developers are often the ones to carry forward university initiatives and make sure change projects get buy in and are implemented well. Her understanding of access to opportunity is also helpful for depersonalizing when we cannot get things done. For example, faculty and staff who experience a blocked opportunity may be more likely to resist innovation in order to carve out an “arena of control” (p. 155). Finally, her work is path breaking for thinking about tokenism—or how proportional representation of diversity shapes behavior and perception—a lens that can be applied to situations ranging from classroom observation to the university as a whole.

These eight narratives show how academic training is a deeply embedded and strategic asset to our work in educational development. Our disciplinary epistemologies give us an approach—a theory and a methodology—that can be applied to our work in many forms, such as gathering evidence about teaching and learning in the classroom, using a model of experimentation to determine the effectiveness of new approaches to teaching, discerning how instructors can help make new information “stick” in students’ minds, and employing an empathic approach that attends to the real needs of instructors and students. In this way, educational developers are able to make disciplinary thinking and pedagogical practice visible to their faculty clients, a practice that resonates with Decoding the Disciplines approaches to uncovering the signature pedagogies of any particular field (Gurung, Chick, & Haynie, 2009; Middendorf & Pace, 2004; Figure 1).

Figure 1. Three Overlapping Approaches to Classroom Instruction as an Object of Study

Perhaps paradoxically, the “one thing” that guides our view of educational development is more than simply one specific, disciplinary approach in isolation. Rather, our “one thing” is the multiplicity of these approaches as we support educators in their teaching trajectories. We believe that the epistemology of educational development is the ability to think inclusively about disciplinary approaches, to employ “intellectual dexterity” (Green & Little, 2017) in order to “read” any classroom, and to provide both near and far examples to clients in a range of disciplines. Here, we provide two examples of how we employ multiple lenses simultaneously to “read” and gather evidence about classroom interactions.

Molly Hatcher, Program Coordinator for Graduate Student Development (Law, Gender Studies, and English)

In my work supporting graduate student instructors, whether facilitating a workshop, teaching a pedagogy course, or conducting a one on one consultation, I draw on my formal training as a lawyer and scholar of cultural and gender studies to consider the power of language in the classroom. From a legal perspective, language has definitive, binding consequences on individuals’ lives, whether through contractual obligations or rules set forth in statutes and case law. Many feminist scholars have theorized the power of language to exclude groups of people (as explored in the works of French feminist literary theorists like Cixous, 1976; Kristeva, 1984; Irigaray, 1985) and also to wrestle back power by reclaiming terms that have been used historically to oppress underrepresented groups, such as the “queer” movement. Close reading is a critical tool used in cultural studies to make meaning of a text by carefully observing details and patterns.

As a product of training and practice in all of these areas, I have a keen awareness of how the language used in classroom instruction and university policies can influence student learning, and I coach graduate students in these areas. For example, I encourage instructors to use Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) to think about how shifting language in the construction of student questions can help students practice a variety of skills, from basic understanding (“Can you give some examples of metaphors?”) to analysis (“How do Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Metaphors’ employ metaphor to forge a connection with the reader?”). In a different yet related vein, I work with instructors to think about how policies such as legal accommodations for students with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) may seem to offer a benefit to students but ultimately force them to do more than is required of other students. We have conversations about how instructors can go beyond what is required by the ADA to design learning outcomes, activities, and assessments that remove barriers to learning, such as allowing students multiple options for demonstrating knowledge in student assessments. My disciplinary training helps me work with graduate student instructors from any discipline to consider how language affects student learning.

Katherine D. Kearns, Lead Instructional Consultant (Biology/Ecology)

As an ecologist by training, my early work in educational development incorporated experimental and ecosystems thinking perspectives. Now into my second decade of instructional consulting, my toolkit has expanded because of the disciplinary concepts I have learned in classroom observations and consultations across the university curriculum. In particular, classes in anthropology, communications and rhetoric, and gender studies have furthered my own work in educational development. For example, my visits to anthropology classes as an educational developer have taught me about how cultural relativity helps me see the inherent validity of specific disciplinary methods and to respect each field’s contribution to our knowledge of the human experience. Similarly, I use the anthropological tools of participant observation and ethnography to closely watch and take notes about the rituals and behaviors of a classroom. I explicitly model and teach these anthropological strategies in my multidisciplinary workshops; I teach participants how to listen to and watch for the teaching moves of other disciplines. From observations of communication and rhetoric courses, I have learned about Turner’s (1982) concepts of performance, presence, and social group, and I think about how they apply to classroom interactions in any course. How are teachers and students performing their roles? How are teachers and students making certain objects present—and by omission, other objects absent—by what they say and how they act? Again, in my workshops, I teach participants how to see these performance behaviors in themselves, in their peers, and in their students. To be clear, specific teaching strategies also become part of my educational developer toolkit, but I also carry these larger disciplinary concepts gleaned from classroom observations to every interaction I have in educational development.

These two examples illustrate our openness to perpetual renewal and learning while honoring our disciplinary homes. Additionally, these examples show our “capacity for connectedness” that allow us to continually weave complex webs of connection between people, subjects, and students, and this emerges from our integrated selves (Palmer, 1998, p. 11). To engage in an ongoing process of seeing and making complex connections between disparate ideas and subjects is essential to excellence in educational development. It fuels the process of reflection, self discovery, and lifelong learning that we hope to instill in the instructors with whom we consult and collaborate.