The future of the YTC

Back in November of 2012, we announced that the Graduate Teaching Center was morphing into the Yale Teaching Center, and that a 15-year-old program built on supporting teaching by graduate students and post-docs was expanding to serve faculty as well.  In fact, we’ve been serving this population on a limited basis for years, but our new mandate to expand presents an opportunity to invent new services and rethink some old ones.

One question that we’ve been discussing is how the creation of the Yale Teaching Center will allow us to expand or improve our graduate teaching program.  One doesn’t have to look very far to find answers to this question.  All of our peer institutions have graduate teaching programs that are part of larger teaching centers, and they benefit greatly from their centers’ involvement in broader questions of teaching and learning on campus.  With our new arrangement, we’ll be able to match their efforts and do even more.  Here are some examples:

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about Teaching:  Talking about teaching with peers and “near peers” has well established learning and mentoring benefits.  The GTC has long made great use of these relationships to help graduate students navigate the process of becoming teachers.  The YTC plans to build on this structure, adding sessions with junior and senior faculty and creating new conversations that cut vertically, in addition to horizontally, across the teaching landscape.  A mixed group of faculty and graduate students can discuss the relationship between lecture and discussion, or the way a course advances a student’s quantitative reasoning skills, or how a curriculum can promote the development of a broad interdisciplinary perspective, in a way that either of those groups working separately cannot.

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about the path to Assistant Professor:  With the creation of the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation, we’ve aimed to encourage graduate students to take a long view of their teaching experience and preparation -- thinking about time in the classroom and each workshop or consultation as laying the foundation for the academic job market and an eventual teaching career.  The YTC will be much better able to infuse this process with insights from junior faculty who have recently made the transition.  Which activities in graduate school boosted his or her confidence on the market?  What experiences made the first year as an assistant professor easier or more productive?

The Associates in Teaching Program:  This program, now in its fourth year, is a prime example of an innovation that bridges the faculty/graduate student experience to the enormous benefit of both.  We plan to pilot more programs like this–programs that reconfigure how we teach and, in doing so, open the door to new ways of thinking about our teaching, our scholarship, and our disciplines.  

In the weeks ahead, the Provost will convene a steering committee to help guide the Yale Teaching Center to focus its energy on issues that matter most to our classroom teachers.  We’ve been talking to the fellows in our office about the Yale Teaching Center, and we’ve also scheduled a meeting with the Graduate Student Association’s teaching subcommittee.  

How have you experienced teaching at Yale, and how might the Yale Teaching Center further enrich the experience of teachers and students alike?

Bill Rando
Kristi Rudenga
Risa Sodi

The Teaching Statement out and about on the Job Market

This is Miti – one of the GTC fellows this semester. I am a 7^th year in the History Department. As the year of my studies at Yale may indicate to you, I am on the job market. This is my second time around on that particular carousel. Teaching figures heavily in my applications this year, as well as last year. All the positions on my color-coded job-spreadsheet involve teaching. As last year, the vast majority ask for a teaching statement. It seems like more applications call for a teaching statement than a sample of my research.

What, then, is a teaching statement, this vital document? Let us do what most students do: turn to the Web! 

Princeton’s Center for Teaching & Learning explains: A teaching statement is a 1-2 page single-spaced essay that explains your teaching strategies and goals and in the terms of your discipline and in the context of the teaching positions you have held and seek to hold. 

Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching makes is a bit more personal: is a purposeful and reflective essay about the author’s teaching beliefs and practices. It is an individual narrative that includes not only one’s beliefs about the teaching and learning process, but also concrete examples of the ways in which he or she enacts these beliefs in the classroom. At its best, a Teaching Statement gives a clear and unique portrait of the author as a teacher, avoiding generic or empty philosophical statements about teaching.

Great! However, what is it in practice for me, as I prepare for the job market – or the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation here at Yale? Looking back over my double-digit number of drafts (counting only the ones that I thought were final at some point), the one hard and fast thing I can say is, that the teaching statement is the single most difficult text I have ever written. After all, this is the document that will give a hiring committee an idea of me as a teacher – something the positions I have applied for, am applying for, and will apply for put a lot of emphasis on. That is a lot to put into two legible pages: explain my teaching strategies and goals, an individual narrative that avoids generic and empty platitudes, how I am in the classroom.

Yet, the teaching statement is exactly the document that gives the hiring committee the best glimpse of me as a person – as a potential colleague. It is two pages of me in a pile of hundreds of pages of hopeful and competitive applications.

Imagine it, December 2012… 

A professor is sitting in a lit office – it is dark outside. Maybe it is snowing. Final papers will be due and students are e-mailing panic-struck messages and contesting midterm grades. The editors for the professor’s newest book are asking for changes (about image reproductions rights no less!) and a committee the professor is on had a meeting that ran late. Again. The coffee ran out. Again. In addition, she or he has a pile as high as the Eiffel Tower is tall of job applications. The massive pile has been culled once based on completeness of application (not all three letters of application have come in? Discarded.); formal requirements (only one chapter of the dissertation is completed? Discarded.); cover letter (applicant’s research and teaching interests do not jive with the department’s needs? Discarded.) 

The professor reaches for the application on top, and flips to the teaching statement. She or he begins to read.

Is that my teaching statement the poor coffee-deprived faculty member is reading? Is my first sentence captivating enough to keep the professor reading to the end? Will he or she be able to imagine me in a classroom? Will I be likeable in those two pages? In addition, above all, will my teaching statement help me get the job? That is how important this document can be. It may not be, but that is how I have written mine, and considering the emphasis on teaching in so many of the History jobs announced I do not think it is unfounded. In addition, in my one, single job interview last cycle, this was the focal point of the interview. 

We are trained in academic writing. For the last six years, I have worked hard to eliminate my personality, my voice, from my writing. Yet now I am asked to expose my teaching personality, me in the classroom, to a random stranger who really just wants the Eiffel Tower pile of applications to magically disappear. 

How do I write that statement, being read in a far-away office? This is an essay: introduction, body, and conclusion. This is thesis-driven paper: the thesis is that I am a great, dedicated teacher. The teaching statement is there to provide evidence. The best way to expose Miti the teacher (I distill from workshops, reading obsessively online, and from feedback from colleagues and GTC staff) is to use concrete examples: Teaching goal – challenge in the classroom – action teacher/you took – student response. The statement is more than an expose of a teacher; it is also a writing sample. Clarity, structure, and style are important to the document. 

There is no one, tested and true, way to write a teaching statement. However, there are many great resources out there. The Internet is filled with useful resources – you can easily waste a week surfing around looking at different universities’ tips and sample collections

•  The GTC has links to a sampling of Teaching Statements.
• Columbia University: Writing a Winning TeachingStatement.
• UConn, dept. of Mathematics: teaching statement guidelines and role in the job search
• Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
•  PrincetonUniversity’s Center for Teaching & Learning.

 Apart from the links above, I have found The Professor Is In an invaluable resource, especially her acidic post on the eightpitfalls of the teaching statement.

  

Chronicle of Higher Education of course has articles on the Teaching Statement:

• Writing Samples and Teaching Statements 
• Everything But the Teaching Statement 
• How to Write a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• Teaching Statements are Bunk

Writing a teaching statement is very difficult. Do not expect it to be easy. But there is help out there! Do not hesitate to ask professors, friends, colleagues, and random strangers to read your Statement. The GTC is an excellent resource. My statement has seen three dramatically different “master versions”, two of which were made infinitely stronger than the previous ones, thanks to conversations with GTC staff. Am I tooting our own horn, why yes I am! Thank you for noticing.

For all of us writing our teaching statements – keep your eye on the prize: the job that will let you continue to develop as an academic researcher and teacher.

Here’s to hoping that when the caffeine deprived, tired, and over-worked search committee comes to your teaching statement, he will look up, stare off into the distance, and think “Wow! I could learn so much from this applicant as a colleague and a teacher…” and then he or she moves your application into the “Interview” pile.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This week’s post is about “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” (henceforth APTOVM), a resource that details and categorizes the many ways of presenting information visually.  I’m Damian, a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory.

Here at the Graduate Teaching Center we believe that one of the foundational skills of successful teaching is understanding how people learn and teaching accordingly.  There are several inventories that conceptualize the ways in which people learn (see Coffield, F., D. Moseley, et al. (2004) for an overview of learning-style inventories); one particular inventory that APTOVM directly speaks to is VARK.  The VARK inventory posits that information can be presented in Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic modalities, and that different people have different ways (or combinations of ways) in which they prefer to take in (or give out) information.  As teachers, then, we can strive to find modes of presentation that that best suit both the material and our students’ learning preferences

The Visual preference “includes the depiction of information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, which instructors use to represent what could have been presented in words.  It could have been called Graphic as that better explains what it covers” (from www.vark-learn.com; visit to learn more about VARK!).  APTOVM can help us both devise ways to present information visually and concoct activities/assignments that give students the opportunity to interface with information visually.  The table groups methods into data-, information-, concept-, strategy-, metaphor-, and compound-visualization categories; it also labels whether each method depicts structure or processes, details or an overview, and divergent or convergent thinking.

While we might initially associate the visual presentation of information with quantitative fields (graphs, charts, and the like), APTOVM demonstrates how visualization methods can be applied in any class.  Some ways that I’ve used visualization methods in my own teaching have been:

• having students produce their own decision-tree algorithm of how to harmonize a simple melody
• diagramming sonata forms’ thematic-material and harmonic relationships with boxes at the blackboard

I hope you have fun exploring the table, and would love to read in the comments about the ways you use visualization methods in your own teaching!

Transformational Teaching and transforming teachers

This week’s post is about transformational teaching, a broader approach to classroom instruction that was outlined in a recent review article in Educational Psychology Review. I’m Sara, a PhD Candidate in Ancient Judaism.

"Transformational Teaching" is a term created by George M. Slavich, an assistant professor in Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, and Phil Zimbardo, a professor emeritus in Psychology at Stanford. Yes, that Phil Zimbardo.

In higher education, lecturing is still the most common form of instruction, and makes up the bulk of what goes on in the classroom. But lots of good research has shown that many students don't learn best by listening to a professor declaim information from the front of the room. 

Instead, Slavich and Zimbardo synthesize fifty years of research suggesting that many new trends in teaching - active learning, making students collaborators in the classroom, and giving learning an experiential "outside the classroom" component - are all part of a larger transformational approach to teaching. 

According to the authors, "transformational teaching involves creating dynamic relationships between teachers, students, and a shared body of knowledge to promote student learning and personal growth. From this perspective, instructors are intellectual coaches who create teams of students who collaborate with each other and with their teacher to master bodies of information. Teachers assume the traditional role of facilitating students’ acquisition of key course concepts, but do so while enhancing students’ personal development and attitudes toward learning".

Like regular teaching, transformational teaching focuses on facilitating students’ acquisition and mastery of key course concepts, and like some great teachers, it also works on enhancing students’ strategies and skills for learning and discovery. But transformational teaching might be different from what you're used to because it also promotes positive learning-related attitudes, values, and beliefs in students, such as the belief that students can learn anything and solve problems, or that obstacles are really opportunities to problem solve. It's the combination of these three educational principles that makes some teaching "transformational."

Well, that's all very nice in theory, but how does one teach transformationally? Slavich and Zimbardo identify six core methods: 

(1) establishing a shared vision for a course
This can be as simple as stating the goals for the class on the first day, focusing on backwards designed student-centric goals, or more complicated, by having the students craft a mission statement for the class together. Instructors should remind students that while, they, the teacher, are an integral part of this process, students will be called upon to set a collaborative tone, and to make sure that the goals are realized. 

(2) providing modeling and mastery experiences
Instructors both model the skills that they want students to learn (e.g. how to read an academic article critically, how to use a particular statistical model) and then give the students different opportunities to master the same skills (in small groups, out of class assignments), while inspiring students to see these problems as opportunities. 

(3) intellectually challenging and encouraging students
Instructors begin the class at a universally comprehensible level of difficulty, given the dynamics of your particular school or field,and then pose questions and assign problems that are incrementally harder, to challenge students. This challenging is done while also providing emotional and instrumental support, sensitive to students's differences and learning needs. 

(4) personalizing attention and feedback;
Using discussion section, progress reports, office hours, and Q&A periods to assess individual students' learning, and to encourage students to assess their own learning. This helps students take responsibility for their own learning, and points the teacher toward the pieces that need reinforcement, or toward new areas to explore.

(5) creating experiential lessons that transcend the boundaries of the classroom
Instructors give students assignments to be completed outside of class that draw critical connections between their lives and the subject matter. This can be as simple as asking students to interview several people of different ages about a topic to get a sense of how understandings have changed, to field trips and experiments.

And finally (6) promoting ample opportunities for preflection and reflection.
"Preflecting" on an activity or reading before actually engaging in it allows students to think about their own attitudes and knowledge of a topic, and to consider ways to approach the issue. Reflecting, which is done after the assignment or activity is over, thinks through the assumptions one had about the content or activity, and reflects on the best ways to solve a particular problem or approach an issue. These reflections can be done individually or in groups, but are not meant to get everyone to agree to a particular conclusion or worldview. 

 

So transformational teaching has input into how a course is structured, how classroom time is used, and how students' learning is assessed and pushed further. It also reimagines the teacher as the coach of a collaborative team, instead of as a performer in front of an audience.

Transformational teaching is meant for ages 2-120. But how do you think it would play out specifically in university settings? Do you have experiences succeeding or failing using some of these approaches? Have concerns about how to use it? Inspiration to share?
Talkback in the comments!

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to our blog!

We are the fellows and staff of the Graduate Teaching Center (GTC) at Yale University. The GTC runs workshops and events aimed at graduate students (but open to everyone in the Yale community). This year we have decided to start up a blog and some other online content (see links to the right) so you can stay up to date on teaching news and workshop information! The blog is meant to be an informal place for us to post some teaching strategies, anecdotes, questions and answers, and whatever else we feel is important or interesting. Each week will be written by a different person to get different perspectives throughout the year

We hope it is useful, informative, and entertaining. Of course, we welcome comments and conversation from everyone!