Spicing up your teaching

Hello teaching world! My name is Jen and I’m a 5^th year PhD candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and also a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center. I recently co-led The Adventurous TF: Teaching with Food and would like to share the idea more widely! With this post, I'll provide some reasons why teaching with food might be a good idea and share some examples from a range of disciplines.

 

Why teach with food?

There are many reasons why college-level educators might use food in the classroom. The reference list at the end of this post provides more information about the pedagogy of teaching with food. For our purposes, I'll share three key motivations:

Learning styles

Students retain course material better when content speaks to multiple learning modalities.  Here at the YTC, we often talk about different learning styles using the acronym VARK, which signifies learning preferences (i.e. visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic). Teaching with food brings the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses to the classroom. In short, creating a multi-sensorial approach to learning is more than just a fun classroom exercise – it deepens students’ engagement with the course material. 

Personal connection

Connecting students’ personal experiences with course content is another way to peak their interest. Everyone eats, so all of your students have some level of personal connection to food. These experiences are a great starting point for exploring a variety of complex topics: labor, globalization, nostalgia, ethnic identity, gender, family, etc. In my sections of WGSS 120: Women, Food, and Culture, I ask each student to sign up for “food sharing,” where they are asked to give a 1-2 minute presentation. Students might present on a food that is important in their hometowns (e.g. lobster in a coastal Maine town), bring in a recipe that is important to them (on paper or as a dish to share with the class), or conduct a guided tasting (e.g. a particular ethnic food or childhood favorite).

Building community

Sharing food in the classroom can be a great way to build community and lower social barriers. Some teachers, including Risa Sodi (see below), notice that when their students are engaged in the act of food preparation, their defenses are lowered and conversation flourishes. 

How to use food in the classroom?

There are three primary ways to engage with food in the classroom: as a lens to explore diverse social and cultural issues, as a topic worthy of study in its own right, and as the physical material for academic inquiry and learning (Deutsch and Miller 2012).  I'll provide an example for each.

Food as lens 

  

Risa Sodi, a senior lecturer in the Italian Language and Literature department (and the Interim Associate Director here at the Yale Teaching Center) uses food as a lens for exploring Italian culture. She projects a list of flavors: 

Chocolate
Chocolate chip
Cookies and cream
Hazelnut
Lemon
Mint chocolate chip
Neopolitan
Pistachio
Rocky Road
Strawberry
Vanilla
Vanilla cream 
 

Risa then asks her students to identify the nine most popular American ice cream flavors and the seven most popular Italian gelato flavors. At the end of the exercise, Risa asks students to share which flavors they chose and to reflect on what sort of cultural assumptions their answers reflect. (You’ll have to stop by the YTC office to get the answers…) As part of their inquiry into Italian culture, Risa’s students actually get to prepare and eat authentic Italian dishes. To delve further, she asks her students to consider key food symbols of the Italian 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (e.g. menu ingredient, cocktail, kitchen object). 

Food as subject

During a section of WGSS 120 Women, Food, and Culture on food safety, we discussed the politics of pasteurization.  Retail sale of raw milk is legal in Connecticut, so I brought in milks ranging from the ultra-high pasteurized industrially aggregated milk to the hyper-local raw milk. I had three learning goals for my students: (1) to dissect packages for information related to food production, (2) to analyze imagery related to human-nature relationships, (2) to taste differences in a food product that is often thought to be a uniform commodity.

Food as material 

At the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, food becomes the material for scientific inquiry – one of the most talked about Harvard College courses Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter a public lecture series that you can access via iTunes or YouTube. Similarly, a whole world of chemistry lessons come to life through chocolate.  

For example, if you're teaching chemistry or materials science, you might have your students read an article about the materials science of chocolate -- the tempering process is a great way to talk about the relationship between time, temperature, and the resulting crystal structure. If the course had a lab component, you might have students try 3-4 different tempering rates. They could analyze the resulting crystal structure through materials characterization techniques, but just as importantly, you could instruct them to taste the results!

I hope these examples have provoked your own thoughts about how you might teach with food. Please share your ideas by commenting on this blog post!

Additional resources

Bender, D., R. Ankeny, et al. (2011). "Eating in Class: Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History." Radical History Review 2011(110): 197-216.

Bonnekessen, B. (2010). "Food is Good to Teach: An Exploration of the Cultural Meanings of Food." Food, Culture & Society 13(2): 279-295.

Desjardins, M. (2004). "Teaching about Religion with Food." Teaching Theology & Religion 7(3): 153-158.

Deutsch, J. and J. Miller (2012). Teaching with Food. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. J. M. Pilcher, Oxford University Press: 191-205.

Guthman, J. (2007). "Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al." Agriculture and Human Values 24(2): 254-261.

Johnson, D. M. (2007). "Teaching Anthropology Through Food." Southern Foodways and Culture: Local Considerations and Beyond.

Long, L. M. (2001). "Nourishing the Academic Imagination: The Use of Food in Teaching the Concept of Culture." Food and Foodways 9(3-4): 235-262.

It’s never too early to start planning an effective review session!

As the end of the spring term is only a few weeks away, now is a great time to start preparing final exam review sessions!  After all, it is not only your students that have to revisit all of that content that has been covered in the past few months.  Though this task can seem daunting there are ways to streamline your prep for review sessions.  In this blog post, you will find some tips for preparing and running review sessions that will be rewarding for both you and your students. 

Gather information about the exam

Know where, when and how long the final exam will be.  Be sure that you have an idea of the content that will be covered and the format of the exam.  Being familiar with the themes covered in the exam will provide a scaffold around which to structure your review session.  The idea is not to give students hints about specific exam questions but to frame a review session around material that the students will need to know.

Gather information about your students

Your students’ past performances on midterms or problem sets will reveal what topics will need to be covered in more depth during the review session.  Make sure to have an idea of the students’ schedule when you are choosing a time for the review session.  Be aware of when classes end, what the reading days are and the exam date.  You want to time the review session in a way that students will have already begun studying, but will still have time to address any areas of weakness they might become aware of in the review session.  If you wish to make an effort to get as many students to attend the review session as possible, I would recommend trying a user-friendly free online tool found at www.doodle.com that makes scheduling easier!

Make sure you master the material

Given your role in the course, you are expected to have a good grasp of the content.  This can cause you to feel quite a bit of pressure.  To alleviate some of this, put the burden back on your students and require that they e-mail you questions before the review session.  Though you should still be familiar with the course material that students do not specifically ask about, this exercise will help to orient you to the topics that may be the most discussed during the review session. 

Have a plan for the review session-and stick to it!

Make an outline for what you plan to cover in the review session.  Prepare some sample questions and answers that you can use during the review session or give to your students for use when they are studying.  Using sample answers provides a great chance to demonstrate what constitutes a good answer.  This will serve as an example of what you will be looking for when you are grading their exams.  Let your students know what to expect before coming to the review session so that they are able to prepare.  There are many options for the format of the review session.  Rather than using only a lecture format to cover the material, it can be fun to try some alternative styles.  A few examples are: a question and answer session, making a group outline on the board, playing a game of Jeopardy that covers all the themes on the exam, working through practice problems and giving an overview presentation on how the topics of the course relate to each other.  Feel free to try different things in the review session and find what works for you!

 

It is important to remember that exam time, though stressful for teachers, is also a major source of angst for your students.  Being nervous around exam time can be helpful for students and provide an extra source of adrenaline, but if students become too stressed this heightened state can become an impediment to their performance. To help with stress management encourage students to adequately prepare for the exam, recognize what they DO know about the content and take care of themselves by eating well and sleeping enough.  Be aware of resources offered through the counseling center for extreme cases of stress. 

Hopefully these tips on running review sessions have alleviated some of the anxiety you might feel about preparing a review session

Teaching outside your expertise? Don't worry...

Teaching outside your area of expertise can be daunting but is a reality in academia today. Even when teaching courses about subjects you know well, there will always be some topics you are more comfortable with relative to others. Non-experts do bring strengths to the classroom: when teaching a less familiar subject, you're more likely to have realistic expectations of your students, and you'll tend to focus on concrete explanations of problems and phenomena. As with any teaching assignment, though, you will want to manage your time, plan course content, and be respected by the students - all things we have a few suggestions for here.

What's important? Planning the course

• Look for a few syllabi (online or elsewhere) for a similar course
• Talk to at least one expert in the field to learn about important themes as well as common misconceptions
• Start with a topic that you are more familiar with
• Employ active learning techniques to engage students and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning
• Build flexibility into the syllabus

Establishing credibility

• Introduce yourself, including your background, work experience, and degrees
• Arrive on time or a little early
• Dress professionally
• Be clear about expectations and due dates
• Remind students about upcoming due dates, exams, and other events
• If something needs to be changed or rescheduled, ask for student preferences and feedback
• Prepare to explain confusing or difficult topics clearly and in more than one way
• Do all of the course reading in advance, and be familiar with it
• Learn how to field questions appropriately, and have ways of saying "I don't know the answer"

Managing your time

• Reframe your role in the classroom so you don't feel that you hold the "key" to all the knowledge
• Reuse quality material developed for the same course in the past
• Transfer relevant material from previous courses you've taught
• Familiarize yourself with course readings before the course and then before each class
• Stagger due dates and do not plan too many assessments
• Aim for quality instead of quantity

Try to avoid

• Underestimating the amount of time it takes to prepare
• Assigning too much work and too many assignments
• Over-preparing

These are just a few suggestions and techniques that may be helpful when you are teaching material that you're less familiar with. Keep in mind that, as a non-expert, you have strengths that you can use to your advantage. Furthermore, teaching outside your expertise can broaden your knowledge base, lead to new and interesting areas of research, connect you with faculty and colleagues in other departments and institutions, and enhance your C.V.  Let us know how it goes!

Source: Huston, Therese. Teaching What You Don't Know. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.

Course Design Resources

By Erica De Bruin and Mercedes Bravo

Preparing to teach your own course for the first time? Here's a round-up of some of our favorite course design resources on the web: 

The teaching centers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Vanderbilt have put together particularly comprehensive online guides, which take you from identifying situational constraints and developing course goals to writing the syllabus. If you are thinking of revising an existing course, reading about the experiences of other faculty (PDF) members might be a great place to start. 

"Integrated Course Design" (PDF), a paper by L. Dee Fink of the University of Oklahoma, discusses how to integrate course design so that your learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessments are well-aligned. For an illustration of how you might vary your instructional strategies, see: "Scientific Teaching in Practice." (For those of you that attended the Yale Teaching Center's recent workshop on course design, these papers were the source of the graphics we showed illustrating how to vary your instructional strategies.)

The University of Minnesota has a helpful tutorial that walks you through the process of designing a syllabus. Other great syllabus design guides have been put together by the teaching centers at Brown (PDF), Cornell, and Michigan. For sample syllabi, one website to check out is OpenCourseWareSearch, which compiles course materials from several universities with open courses including MIT, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Yale.

If you've found any additional resources, please leave them in the comments!

"Hot Moments" in the Classroom

Following up on an issue raised in a recent workshop that she co-facilitated, Claudia Calhoun (American Studies and Film Studies) addresses one of the challenges of teaching in a diverse classroom.

A recent Advanced Teaching Series workshop tackled issues of diversity in classrooms and course design. One issue that several participants brought up was the challenge of defusing “hot moments” in the classroom – those moments in a discussion where a student says something offensive, thoughtless, or unexpectedly controversial. These are difficult moments for teachers. When feelings are involved, it can become the responsibility of the teacher to protect all members of  the class – the ones who have hurt as well as the ones who have been hurt.

In our workshop, participants suggested ways in which “hot moments” can become “teachable moments.” Among the suggestions are two particularly worth highlighting, as they can be applied broadly:

1. Take a moment to deconstruct the statement. Ask the student, or the class, to talk about what assumptions that led to that conclusion. 
For example, in the context of a class on religion and society, a student says, "Well, we all know that Mormons are racists and homophobes." To address this issue without placing the student in a difficult situation, the teacher might say, “That’s a provocative statement -- let's turn it into a question.” She might then re-direct the conversation with questions like:

• Looking at contemporary society, what evidence would we gather to defend this position? What evidence would challenge it?
• Where would we look to better understand the forces that shape official church doctrines?
•  Are there any places where members of the church challenge these positions? Where would we look to find these?

 2. Use the literature of the field to stage a debate on the topic. 
For example, in the context of a course on women’s history, a student might say, “But there are some things that women are just better at then men; that’s just biological fact.” A teacher might respond by saying, “This is actually a longstanding debate within women’s history and gender studies.” And he could use the next class to extend the “teachable moment” by:

• Sending out or bringing in two short articles (or excerpts) representing both sides, and staging a debate in class.
•  Telling students that the first 20 minutes of the next class will be a conversation on this subject. Asking students to find an article or blog post that supports their position and be prepared to introduce its main points into the conversation.

During the our workshop, I was happy to see how participants’ suggestions for strategies dealing with hot moments also showed how, in facing these situations head-on, we can model the methods of investigation and inquiry that we seek to teach our students. 

Some of these strategies are also suggested in a document by the Bok Center for at Harvard, “Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom,” which is recommended for those who would like to read more.

Has anyone successfully defused a hot moment in a classroom? What did you learn? What do you think your students learned?

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

How to spend less time preparing better lectures

Erica De Bruin

Advice for new faculty suggests that, when lecturing on material that is familiar to you, you should spend two to three hours to prepare a one hour lecture. If you’ve given the lecture before, it should take you a half hour or less.

That time frame might seem undoable/possibly insane. The goal of this post is convince you otherwise.

In fact, I’m going to suggest that spending less time preparing can lead to better lectures. This is because excessive preparation can mire you in details that are not essential for students to learn. Research consistently shows that student retention is higher when less material is presented. Excessive preparation also encourages you to fill the entire lecture period with lecturing, which is not optimal for student learning.

So how can you prevent yourself from over preparing for a lecture? Here are some suggestions:

(1) Specify learning goals first

Identifying at the outset how you want your students to be different at the end of the lecture will help you focus your preparation. It will also prevent you from wasting time gathering supporting materials that you won’t end up using. A good guideline is to limit yourself to 2-3 learning goals for an hour-long lecture.

(2) Cover less content

The less content you intend to cover, the less time you will need to spend preparing it. It might be tempting to try to impress the audience with the breadth and depth of your knowledge about the topic, but there is only so much new information that students can process in a given lecture.^[1] So focus on conveying a few ideas well, rather than a lot of ideas poorly. Doing so will allow you to reiterate main points, provide examples, and connect the content to your students’ own experiences—all of which will aid student retention.

If you’re finding it hard to limit the scope of your lecture, consider assigning readings that will provide students will basic facts and background information about the topic, leaving you to focus on the problems, puzzles, and debates that make the subject interesting to you.

(3) Let students do some of the work

Don’t plan to lecture for the full period. Instead, plan mini discussion sections, group work, short debates, or other activities that allow students to engage with the material actively (more ideas here). Since students retain much more information in interactively taught lectures than in traditional ones, it will also improve student retention. (For example, one study found that after two weeks, we remember only 20% of what we hear out loud, but 70% of what we say ourselves.)

(4) Don’t reinvent the wheel

Even if you are preparing a lecture that you have never prepared before, chances are someone has prepared one on the same topic. If you are giving a guest lecture in an existing course, ask the primary instructor for his or her lecture notes and materials from previous years. If you are preparing lectures for a course that has been taught in your department before, ask your colleagues for their materials.

(5) Prepare an outline, rather than a script

Prepare an outline that includes your main points, evidence to support them, questions you want to ask, and activities that you will include, but don’t write out a full script—it’s simply too time consuming. Reading from a script also prevents you from maintaining eye contact with students and can make your delivery sound rehearsed. If you are nervous, consider writing a script for the introduction to your lecture to ensure you start off fluidly, then working from an outline for the rest of the talk.

(6) Embrace imperfection

This suggestion is for those of you who (like me) have perfectionist tendencies. You know who you are! In giving a lecture, it’s okay if you are less succinct than you would be if you wrote the whole thing out. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer to every question that a student asks. (In fact, admitting what you don’t know can improve your credibility as an instructor). In short, it’s okay if your lecture isn’t “perfect.” If you approach each lecture as learning experience and welcome feedback, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself and be able to continuously develop your skills as a lecturer.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas about how to prepare lectures efficiently, and convinced you that when it comes to lecture preparation, more time will not necessarily lead to better learning outcomes for your students.

Are there any other time saving tips that you have used when preparing a lecture? Please leave them in the comments below!

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^[1] Russell et al. (1984) compared student retention following lectures in which 90% of the sentences conveyed new information to lectures in which 70% and 50% did. The authors found that students learned and retained the most information when the least amount was presented.