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

“Choice Architecture” and Teaching

Do you think that the choices your students make shape what they get out of your class?  Most teachers, if not all, would respond to that question with a rousing “Of course!”  Now, don’t you wish there was an easy way to get them to make better choices?  I’m Celia, a PhD candidate in Political Science and a Fellow with the Yale Teaching Center, and today I’m going to describe why thinking of yourself as a “choice architect” might help.

“Choice architecture” is not simply about physical buildings and structures (although they do play a role).  Rather, choice architecture is about the norms, habits, practices, and patterns that structure our social, political, and institutional lives.

Of course, these aren’t just my ideas – I’m working with a framework developed by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their recent book Nudge:Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.  While Sunstein is a legal scholar and Thaler is a behavioral economist, political scientists frequently draw on Sunstein and Thaler’s work as well.  What do all these disciplines have in common?  They all share a concern with how people make choices and the factors that determine whether those choices are optimal or less than optimal. 

Sunstein and Thaler make a few key claims about choices:

• Small changes in context make a big difference in the choices people make.
• Individuals’ “true” preferences are hard to define and often not set in stone.
•  When you are organizing a context in which people make decisions, “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design.” (Sunstein and Thaler, p. 3)

Now, just think about all the choices your students make when it comes to your class.  Every week, they decide whether or not to do the reading.  They decide whether or not to speak in class.  They decide whether or not to take notes, and they decide whether to be there in class in the first place.  Moreover, they decide what kind of attitude to take – skeptical, engaged, bored, distracted, excited, or domineering.

You don’t have full control over ANY of these decisions.  Sure, you can lay down class rules and determine grades, and these are important instruments for shaping some of your students’ behaviors – but rules and grades are just too blunt to shape every single decision your students will be faced with.  

That’s where choice architecture comes in.  You want to organize your classroom to nudge students towards the best choices.  What are some ways to do that?  Here are a few:

1) Leverage the power of habit.  For example, you want to get your students talking during discussions?  Have them fill out weekly online response forms.  Just the act of writing something, anything about what they’ve read will help get them in the habit of A) doing the reading and B) having something to say about it.  Even if the response forms only account for some small percentage of their participation grade, they can have an outsize effect on student readiness to engage in class discussion.

2) Use social pressure to your advantage.  Split students up randomly into pairs to discuss a question, and walk around the room listening in.  The goal is not to create a high pressure situation, but rather to create a situation where the default is to participate.  Your students will feel more awkward if they sit silently with their partner than if they talk about the readings, especially if they see you walking around and listening in.

3)  Change the physical space.  Consider how you can modify the physical space of the classroom to address any challenges you might be facing.  If you’ve got only a few students in a big classroom, conversation often lags – you could try to get assigned a new room or get to the classroom early and use the chairs to create a smaller area in which to hold class.

Some of my favorite activities are those that combine several of these elements at once.  For example, last semester, when we were reviewing major Supreme Court cases relating to the Interstate Commerce Clause, I came up with a jigsaw activity for my students.[1]   I split students up into four groups and assigned one Supreme Court case to each group.  Each group had just ten minutes to prepare a brief presentation on the case and write an outline of their presentation on the board.  After the first set of presentations, each case would be passed to another group, and that group would have just a few minutes to prepare a presentation on the interpretation of the Commerce Clause in that particular case.  Then there would be a second round of presentations, after which each case would be passed to a third group, who would apply legal principles from that case to a new case currently before the Court.  Before each case was passed, the group about to receive the case would have the chance to ask questions of the group currently in possession of the case.

This activity ended up being a lot of fun – the students were engaged and enthusiastic – so that’s part of why I remember it fondly.  But it’s also a nice illustration of choice architecture in action.  Since students were in small groups, there was some social pressure to participate.  Because the activity involved writing on the board and time pressure, it got students moving and raised the energy level in the room.  Finally, because students had to ask each other questions before the cases were handed from group to group, they started to develop the habit of talking to each other about the material, and not just directing all their comments towards me.

I'd love to hear reactions to these ideas in the comments below.  What are other ways you could apply the principles of choice architecture to your classroom?  How might the features of choice architecture vary across classrooms in different disciplines?  What other insights about teaching can we draw from Nudge, or from other work in behavioral economics and behavioral psychology? 

References:

---

[1] The jigsaw classroom is a form of cooperative classroom learning, so-called because “just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece--each student's part--is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.”  For more information, see http://www.jigsaw.org/overview.htm. 

Museum as Classroom

Hello Teaching World! I am Alex, a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department and a YTC Fellow. Today I'd like to tell you a little about teaching with art and, for those of you teaching in or around Yale, the wonderful Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens on Wednesday, December 12th.

Contrary to popular belief, museums are not scary places. Nor are they the private domain of experts, aficionados, and elites. No way! They are for the people, especially the free-of-charge YUAG, which has been from its inception a teaching institution. Better still, the museum has just undergone a substantial renovation and re-installation, nearly tripling its previous size. 

Even if you aren't teaching art history, a museum has much to offer many disciplines from Medicine to Japanese, especially the temporally- and geographically-extensive YUAG. The education department would be happy to help you select material and arrange a visit (contact David.Odo@yale.edu for more info). The objects you select could be similar to your discipline's subject (e.g. medical students looking at medical images) or similar to its methodology (e.g. anthropology students analyzing museum visitors' interaction with art objects.)

In this post, I will focus on the pedagogical benefits of close-looking at art objects.  The cornerstone of art historical methodology is visual analysis -- a close-looking of an object to build an interpretation. Formal analysis is analogous to "close-reading" in literature, but through parsing visual details rather than textual. The benefit of having a real, live art object is that you can look really, REALLY, REALLY closely -- sometimes even with a magnifying glass! This ability allows you (and your students) to more thoroughly understand the artist's choices, the life of the artwork, the chemical basis of the materials, and much more.

The first and foremost pedagogical benefit of a museum visit is how it can add variety to your teaching style. For most, getting out of the classroom is an invigorating experience that can inject any class with new breath. Additionally, a visit will activate  learning styles (VARK) sometimes lost in the classroom -- kinesthetic and visual -- through the sheer physicality of being in a museum and, of course, the visual material. Furthermore, you can use the museum  outside of classroom time, assigning short papers or presentations based on student research and/or observation.

Second, developing critical thinking through close-looking can aid in a student's overall intellectual development. It can make students more cognizant of their visual surroundings -- prompting them to question the images that bombard us daily, ranging from iPhone apps to CNN to fast-food ads. In the classroom, visual analysis provides an analogous method of critical thinking, which students may apply to other disciplines and contexts. The process of building an interpertation based on careful observation can also aid in the development of expository writing or even diagnosis.
 

Alongside this post I have a attached some Instagram photos I snapped at the YUAG last week. With these photos as an example, I would like to suggest a museum activity that you can use with your students, in a class or as an assignment:
1) Tell the students to bring a smartphone to photograph object(s) of their choosing.  
2) Have them also select frames and filters for their images. (Most young folk are very familiar with these photo-editing apps like Instgram, Picfx, or even Facebook).  
3) Depending on your class's subject matter, add a theoretical framework through which they should make these choices. This could be gender, spirituality, historical events, chemistry, physics, post-structuralism -- you name it! 
4) Then have the students present their photos and why they chose the object, composition, frame, and lens with regard to the theoretical framework. 
5) Commence fruitful discussion!

Thanks for listening! I hope you all get a chance to see the new YUAG soon! 

Images:
1. Central Stairway, Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn Building, 1953
2. Benedetto Bonfigli, Christ the Redeemer, ca. 1455–1460  
3. Fukami Sueharu, View of Distant Sea II, ca. 1985 
4. Portrait of a Man, c. 300 A.D., and Portrait of a Young Man, 140-160 A.D., Ancient Rome (in far background: Joseph Wright, Portrait of Mr. William Chase, Sr., ca. 1760-6)
5. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #786A, 1995
 

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!