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Scholarly Teaching at Georgetown: Breaking the Traditional Mold

By Mark Overmann

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: Those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.

Dr. Heidi Elmendorf, a professor in the Department of Biology and the director of science planning for Georgetown College, flashes a bright smile and chuckles upon hearing this sophomoric attempt to poke fun at her profession. She is quick to dissect the joke, however, and point out that she disagrees with two of its central tenets. First, she explains with another laugh, gym teachers are just as important as everyone else. And second—and most importantly, she contends—“doing” and “teaching” are not mutually exclusive. That is, a professor’s scholarly research is not separate from his or her teaching, but rather the two can be—and should be—intimately intertwined. Dr. Elmendorf describes this growing field, known as scholarly teaching, which is developing in the sciences as well as in other disciplines.

“Scholarly teaching is, quite simply, seeing teaching as a part of scholarly work,” she clarifies. “It’s saying, ‘Part of my expertise as a scholar is that I am a teacher and I stimulate student learning.’”

Administrators and professors alike are propagating and practicing scholarly teaching across Georgetown College and University. From grants and research support offered by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) and the College Dean’s Office, to scholarly teaching research being conducted by such professors as Dr. Peter Armbruster, Dr. Jim Sandefur, Dr. Jen Swift, Dr. YuYe Tong, and Dr. Elmendorf herself, Georgetown is awash with scholars who are breaking the traditional mold and approaching their teaching in new and innovative ways.

Dr. Elmendorf describes this traditional mold regarding a university professor’s responsibilities as “40-40-20”: professors spend 40 percent of their time teaching, 40 percent researching, and 20 percent engaged in service. While this portrayal may be accurate in many respects, it fails to acknowledge the core element of scholarly teaching—that what a professor contributes as a scholar is not only papers and books, but also curriculum and pedagogy.

“Really, for many professors, the line between teaching and research is very fluid,” says Dr. Elmendorf.

The goal of scholarly teaching is greater than simply becoming a “better teacher” or discovering news ways to keep students awake in class. Rather, scholarly teaching calls for a broadening of one’s way of thinking about teaching and its relationship with what is traditionally viewed as scholarly work, according to Dr. Randy Bass, executive director of CNDLS and a professor in the Department of English.

“One telling measure of how differently teaching is regarded from traditional scholarship is what a difference it makes to have a ‘problem’ in one versus the other,” Dr. Bass says in an essay on the scholarship of teaching. “In scholarship and research, having a ‘problem’ is at the heart of the investigative process, around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a ‘problem’ is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it.”

Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research would most likely be viewed as an invitation to chat about recent work. Yet ask about a “teaching problem,” Dr. Bass cautions, and your comment will probably come across as an accusation. For Dr. Bass, then, a primary challenge has been remedying a mindset that he himself held for many years.

“For a decade, I had good success as a teacher. Positive feedback, strong evaluations, evidence that students learned something in my courses,” he says by way of explaining how scholarly teaching became a focus of his work. “Yet, I realized I knew very little about why certain students did better than others. Or, more generally, I knew very little about how students came to know the material I was teaching.”

Dr. Bass thus came to view his teaching in a new light: not as an activity he performed in addition to his scholarly research, but as a research problem in and of itself worthy of his scholarly attention. He is now leading an effort on Georgetown’s campus to encourage others to do the same and is already making significant strides.

For example, in November 2006, Georgetown played host for the conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, with 800 participants from 14 countries, the largest meeting ever of the society. In October 2007, Dr. Bass brought Dr. Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, to Georgetown as the featured speaker of the Provost’s Seminar on Teaching and Learning. Dr. Shulman, a recognized educational psychologist and expert in the study of teacher education and teaching assessment, spoke to faculty from across the university about his views on scholarly teaching, encouraging them to “study the consequences” of what they do. In addition, Dr. Bass and CNDLS have greatly supported College faculty, including several science professors, as they delve into research about the effectiveness of their own teaching.

Georgetown College, under the leadership of Dean Jane McAuliffe, has also been involved in this effort. Since the beginning of the 2000-2001 academic year, the College has sponsored two separate phases of the College Curriculum Renewal Project (CCRP). This project was designed to spur “curricular examination, experimentation, and renewal” and has supported, by way of individual and department-wide grants, a process of curricular reflection. CCRP has catalyzed many professors and departments into deeply examining why their curricula and courses are designed the way they are, and how their students learn. Many important and innovative changes have come about in both department course structure and individual teaching methods as a result of this research.

A prime example of the way in which CNDLS and CCRP have intersected to provoke innovation in scholarly teaching comes from Dr. Peter Armbruster’s use of the I-Clicker. Dr. Armbruster, a professor in the Department of Biology who teaches Introductory Biology II to sometimes more than 170 first-year students, found that the traditional “stand-and-deliver” style of teaching was simply not effective. Thanks to grant monies from both CNDLS and CCRP, he and fellow Biology professor Martha Weiss attended a workshop on creating “student-centered learning environments” at the National Academies Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology. They returned to Georgetown invigorated and ready to look deeply not just into what students are learning, but also how they are learning.

“The National Academic seminar really convinced us that [scholarly teaching] was the way to go,” Dr. Armbruster says. “We really got fired up to make some dramatic changes.”

One of those changes came in the spring of 2007 when Dr. Armbruster introduced the I-Clicker to his Intro Bio II classes (described in a Research News profile). This innovative device allows students to click in their responses to the multiple choice questions that Dr. Armbruster poses periodically throughout the lecture. Results from the clicked-in answers appear immediately on the lecture hall screen. For Dr. Armbruster, the benefits of the I-Clicker are immediate and apparent: it generates dialogue, students comprehend the tested material, and students are engaged in learning on a real-time basis. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, when students give diverging answers to a question, they are able to hash it out amongst themselves.

“Students become empowered to teach each other,” says Dr. Armbruster. “They can be much more effective at addressing their own misconceptions than me.”

But scholarly teaching for Dr. Armbruster is more than simply shaking things up in his classroom; it is also about in-depth research. He delves into the literature of science teaching and analyzes data collected from his own classes in the hopes of drawing conclusions and further understanding how his students absorb and retain the information he teaches.

“Having taught both ways, it would never occur to me to go back,” Dr. Armbruster says with a tone of finality. “A more scholarly teaching approach has provided such a better outcome. It’s mind-boggling that we haven’t always used it.”

In addition to Dr. Armbruster, many other Georgetown College science professors are involved in various facets of scholarly teaching:

Dr. Jim Sandefur, the chair of the Department of Mathematics, is researching student learning and problem solving methods by videotaping groups of volunteers in “think-aloud” sessions—that is, working together to solve math problems—and then analyzing the results. (Read more about Dr. Sandefur’s project, “You Do the Math.”)

Dr. Jen Swift, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, researched her own teaching practices, which in turn helped her to reorganize her Organic Chemistry II course to better meet her students’ needs. (Read more about Dr. Swift’s project, “The World is Your Lab.”)

Dr. YuYe Tong, an assistant professor also in the Department of Chemistry, was convinced that the traditional lecture style format of teaching was limiting his students’ creativity and ability to actively pursue new knowledge. Thus, he worked with a research initiative called the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning method (POGIL) to make his courses more “student-centered.” (Read more about Dr. Tong’s project, “Student Centered Teaching Through Guided Learning Inquiry.”)

So how does a professor determine the angle from which he or she will approach this idea of scholarly teaching? As Dr. Elmendorf explains it, she tackles it in the same way that she approaches any other research problem.

“The work that we do when envisioning curriculum, when we design a course and consider pedagogy and determine what we value in student learning,” she says, “that all derives from our own identities as scholars.”

But if there is one angle to scholarly teaching that is common among all science professors at Georgetown College, it is that their research focus in this burgeoning discipline is all student centered. They perform research on teaching and learning techniques not to gain another notch on their scholarly belt, so to speak. Rather, they do it for the ultimate benefit of the students, so that they might become better learners, scholars, and problem solvers.

“At Georgetown, we really do a phenomenal job of fusing teaching and research,” concludes Dr. Elmendorf, “because we spend so much time with students as co-researchers.”

So much for teachers not being able to do.

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