NATURE | NATUREJOBS | FEATURE
Education: Time to teach
Nature
477,
499–501
(2011)
doi:10.1038/nj7365-499a
Published
online
21 September 2011
Young scientists want to concentrate on their
research, but teaching can bring rewards.
Subject terms:
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Kostas Pagiamtzis's experiences as a student
motivated him to be an effective teaching assistant. “I was actually a big
critic of teaching assistants when I was an undergraduate,” says Pagiamtzis. “I
had both really good ones and really bad ones.” The bad ones didn't even seem
to be trying. Then he had to take on the role himself, while studying for a PhD
in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto in Canada.
“I thought I'd better not be one of the bad ones”, he says. At the time, the
University of Toronto had no formal training for teaching assistants. So
Pagiamtzis looked to his adviser, his colleagues and the Internet for advice.
His diligence paid off: Pagiamtzis won three
departmental teaching awards and gained interpersonal 'soft skills', such as
communication and time management, that prepared him for a career as a
microchip designer with Gennum in Burlington, Canada.
IMAGES.COM/CORBIS
Making the time and effort to teach can be
difficult for young scientists — especially when mentors, advisers and other
faculty members tell them to concentrate on their research. Training varies
wildly in content and quality. Some institutions mandate training only in
topics such as sexual harassment and ethnic discrimination. Others offer
voluntary courses on how to teach. Some provide course- or topic-specific
instruction. And a few, such as Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and, now,
the University of Toronto, mandate detailed training, in which teaching
assistants or young instructors learn to teach first during discussion sessions
with small groups of students, then in lab courses and, finally, in large
lectures. Whether they are autodidacts like Pagiamtzis or have had formal
training like graduate students at Emory, good teachers learn the iterative
process of preparing relevant lessons and presenting information effectively,
then assessing the effectiveness of their efforts (see 'Pedagogical pointers').
Box 1: Expert tips: Pedagogical pointers
Early-career researchers are often unpractised at
teaching, and can get distracted by their lab responsibilities. Here,
experienced teachers offer some tips to help novices and their students get the
most out of the classroom experience.
Prepare
Send your syllabus to your peers for feedback. Ask
others who have taught a similar class to share their materials.
Set aside time to develop course materials — it
often takes longer than you think.
Find a mentor whose philosophy and teaching style
you would like to emulate. If possible, visit their classes before you begin
teaching, to understand how they structure time, interact with students and
promote learning. Talk to your mentor about what works and what doesn't.
Think about the skills and knowledge that you want
your students to gain — and make sure that you are allowing time for your
students to practise using them.
Interact
Focus less on content mastery than on skill
mastery. You can't expect your students to think critically in an exam if you
haven't asked the same in class.
Don't do for students what they can and should be
doing for themselves. Teach them how to find the answers to their own
questions, either alone or in groups.
Don't feel that you have to cover every topic that
falls under the heading of your course. What does it matter that students know
every definition in the textbook if they can't do anything with that
information?
Assess
Make sure to provide students with ample feedback,
so that they and you recognize when they need improvement.
Make sure you and your students have clear,
measurable goals. Write them down and provide copies to your students. Revisit
these goals throughout the teaching period and assess whether you've attained
them.
Be transparent with your students. Let them know
what you expect, what you are doing and why you are doing it. Honesty will go a
long way towards building a successful learning community. P.S.
Teaching can benefit an academic's career whether
or not it is their main focus. Bouncing between teaching and research can help
to identify research questions, improve academic writing and hone presentation
skills — particularly those required for audiences with varying knowledge and
skill levels. Teaching can also be a laboratory in which to learn the soft
skills that will be vital to a professional career.
Preparation
One of the most important aspects of teaching is
also one of the most misunderstood: preparation. Many new teachers think that
preparation means having a basic understanding of the course material, but mere
familiarity is only the beginning. “I aimed to understand the material one
level deeper than what I was teaching,” says Pagiamtzis. “But go as deep as you
can in the time you have allotted for preparation.”
To prepare course materials, Diane Ebert-May, a
plant biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, suggests thinking
about the core skills or knowledge that teachers want their students to gain,
then reverse engineering the syllabus to ensure that pupils get the desired
benefits. “Then you have to practise those competencies with them,” says
Ebert-May, who also trains biology postdocs in scientific teaching through an
inter-university programme called FIRST IV.
Students are often told to put in two hours of work
outside the classroom for every one they spend in it; teachers should devote at
least as much time to their own preparation, says Ebert-May. And that doesn't
include marking work, advising students or other administrative tasks.
I. GOLDTHORPE
Kostas Pagiamtzis: I was a big critic of teaching
assistants when I was an undergraduate. I thought I'd better not be one of the
bad ones.
Committing to that level of preparation means
mastering time management, especially for graduate students or postdocs doing
their own research. “Academic expectations keep going up. There just isn't
enough time,” says Alison Roark, a biologist at Hood College in Frederick,
Maryland, who is a former teaching assistant and a participant in FIRST IV. To
deal with the crunch, she reverse engineers her schedule in the same way as she
does her syllabuses — by setting goals, then carving out time to meet them.
What works best, she says, is to set aside blocks of time for specific
activities: academic writing, teaching preparation and correcting her students'
work.
“It gets better,” Roark tells new teaching
appointees. The first two years in an academic job are the toughest; teachers
are simultaneously developing curricula, writing grants and setting up a lab.
“My first year is something I don't want to repeat. You're developing
everything de novo,” says Roark. Having become established, she is
now able to spend a bit less time on preparation and a bit more on research.
Some programmes ease teachers in. For example, at
Emory, graduate students work their way up from supervising lab courses to
teaching independently, and so have time to get used to juggling different
aspects of their career. They also have the option to focus on research rather
than on teaching for a semester.
Although Pagiamtzis didn't have formal training in
teaching, he did have an advice network. His PhD supervisor, Ali
Sheikholeslami, an electrical engineer at Toronto, recommended that he ask
random students questions throughout labs or discussions — not to put them on
the spot, but to check whether they were getting the material. Pagiamtzis also
looked to other teaching assistants for support — for example, someone teaching
an earlier section of the same course might be able to tell him that they had
had a particular problem, alerting him that he might require extra time and
attention for his own section.
Good teaching, like good science, requires
observation. Novice teachers should watch others, then get colleagues and peers
to observe them and offer feedback, recommends Emily Rauscher, a postdoc in
plant ecology at Pennsylvania State University in State College, who had some
pedagogy training and took part in FIRST IV. Many formal teacher-training
programmes video-record practice teaching sessions; people who aren't in such a
programme can get a friend or colleague to record a lecture, then review it
with them, suggests Sidney Omelon, an engineer at the University of Ottawa.
P. BAKER
Biologist Diane Ebert-May suggests teachers spend
twice as long preparing classes as teaching them.
Presentation
Part of being an effective teacher involves being
able to grab students' attention — even being a showman of sorts. Young
teachers should look at the day's lesson as a story, with a beginning, middle
and end, says Pagiamtzis. For example, he traces the history of computing from
the invention of the transistor to the formation of technology giants such as
Intel and Google by talking about how William Shockley, co-inventor of the
transistor, “was a jerk”. Pagiamtzis interweaves the story of how transistor technology
morphed into microchips with tales of how Shockley's abrasive personality drove
away eight top scientists, some of whom went on to form a venture-capital firm
that funded Google, Amazon and others. Intermingling science with the
personalities behind it helps to hold students' attention, says Pagiamtzis.
Nanda Dimitrov, associate director of the Teaching Support Centre at the
University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, agrees. “A lot of great
researchers know the material very well, but do not know how to engage the
students,” she says. “You need to understand the learner, understand the
learner's prior knowledge and understand how to motivate the learner.” The best
teachers, says Dimitrov, use various approaches, including active learning and frequent
assessments. That philosophy sums up a technique called 'scientific teaching',
which builds on the standard lecture format.
“The notion that 'If I cover it, they learn it' is
fatally flawed,” says Ebert-May. Her research shows that students retain more
when lectures are enhanced by interactive lessons and lots of feedback (D. Ebert-May et al. Bioscience 47, 601–608; 1997). The best way for researchers to teach science,
says Ebert-May, is to treat the classroom as if it were a lab, getting students
to ask research questions, do literature reviews, conduct research, analyse
data and present results. “You want to have people working together to solve
complex problems,” she says.
Exercising
the brain
Roark uses this approach when teaching about how
nerves drive muscle-cell function in her introductory biology course. She gives
each student a 'neuron token' with a voltage value, then arranges the students
into 'neural networks'. They must work out whether a particular muscle cell in
that network will contract. “The students have to turn on their brains in my
classroom,” says Roark. “They can't just sit there and take notes.”
Pagiamtzis likes to challenge his students with
problems that have unexpected solutions. For example, as part of the standard
electronics curriculum, he asks them to calculate the level of amplification of
a two-pole amplifier. They usually use a simplified formula called the Miller
approximation, and most come up with the wrong answer. But with enough
prodding, students come to understand that the usual formula is not valid at
high frequencies. They will remember the lesson better for having discovered it
for themselves than they would for having been taught it directly, says
Pagiamtzis.
Although coming up with challenges requires a lot
of effort, the work pays off — and not just for the students. Pagiamtzis has
found that searching for special cases and exceptions to use in exercises
deepens his own knowledge and understanding of the subject. His experience
agrees with the conclusions of a study published last month, which
quantitatively shows that teaching helps to enhance graduate students'
scientific skill sets (D. F. Feldon et al. Science 333, 1037–1039; 2011). The authors suggest that coming up with multiple
study designs and research premises for use in the classroom honed the graduate
students' own thought processes.
Tobias Langenhan, a physiologist at the University
of Würzburg in Germany, finds that teaching and testing his students helps him
to think about where to put his future research efforts, as well as how to
refine his teaching. “You realize that some of the principles you teach are
very well substantiated in terms of experimental results and that others are
not,” says Langenhan. “Flipping back and forth between teaching and research
tells me where I should invest more time in explaining, and also where the pieces
in the dogma we are trying to explain to the students are missing.”
Not only did Pagiamtzis's classroom experiences
force him to gain technical mastery of his subject matter, but the
interpersonal skills that he learned have been invaluable to his industry job.
He uses those skills when he explains the intricacies of computer chips to
marketing people, or technical problems to managers. An important part of that
exchange, he says, is being a good student by actively listening. “In essence,”
says Pagiamtzis, “we are always learning from and teaching each other.”
·
Author information
Affiliations
1.
Paul Smaglik is a freelance writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
