CID Summer 2005 Convening: Developing Effective Teachers

Topic 1: Ready to Teach

University of Michigan-Department of Chemistry

This Snapshot describes how the doctoral program in the Department of Chemistry helps new teachers develop a vision of their teaching that enhances their readiness to teach.

In order to design and teach their courses, new teachers must imagine ideal classrooms that reflect their vision of how students learn. The development of this vision (sometimes called a "teaching philosophy") may be informal and idiosyncratic or highly structured and carefully mentored.

Summary Description

CSIE (Chemical Sciences at the Interface of Education) is a program for integrating "discipline-centered teaching and learning," encompassing a full range of faculty responsibilities and obligations, into the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral education of students considering academic careers. The structure deliberately emulates the existing infrastructure for scholarly development.

What is the infrastructure for scholarly development?
Through a systematic process that we do not understand that well, promising high school graduates are transformed in 10-12 years into functional scholars who truly greater than the sum of their (educational) parts. This powerful structure can be broadened to add the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to one's education in the Scholarship of Research.

What are the main goals?
Faculty-led groups changed the face of research, allowing faculty members to take on challenging and complex problems that individuals and small groups cannot possibly do. Teams raise the bar, and provide an amazing context for learning.

Why not use a "Chem Ed" PhD program?
"Chemical Education PhD" programs derive from a non-mainstream and separatist mentality ("them and us"), while we believe that systemic improvement will not occur unless and until the mainstream faculty members, from as early a time as they are brought into research practices, are introduced to and supported in their instructional practices. One interesting alternative is provided by the UM Graduate School: the Student Initiated Combined Degree. A student and two faculty mentors can design a combined PhD (eg, a PhD in Chemistry and Education) at the level of that sole individual (much like the custom-designed undergraduate major). We have our first Chemistry and Education SICD student in the department (Alan L Kiste, representing us at the 2005 CID convening). Alan's thesis will be 50% based on a laboratory research project in chemistry, and 50% on science education research that in informed and anchored by his disciplinary content mastery.

Tools and Resources

Tools and resources CSIE uses to develop teachers and the readiness to teach. Examples from the graduate experience:

Case Study: Studio Chemistry
Professor Mark M Banaszak Hall imagined an introductory chemistry classroom enviornment that followed a "studio" or "one room schoolhouse" model - integrating lab, lecture, and discussion. In order to carry out this proposal, and in doing so add "education" to his scholarly portfolio, he engaged the CSIE structure and works with an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of students and collaborators.

CSIE project
How do faculty members move their research ideas forward? They form teams called research groups. CSIE students and faculty members collaborate on instructional ideas - sometimes these are driven by faculty interest, sometimes by student interest.

CSIE seminar & brown-bag series
Typical departmental activities include seminar programs (external speakers) and brown-bag programs (internal speakers) as a way to broaden the exposure of graduate students to relevant people and ideas in the field.

CSIE Fellowships
First-year graduate students are eligible for a 1-year fellowship based on a training grant model of support, during which time they take education cognate courses & develop an instructional development proposal.

Communication & Documentation
Representative examples from the Studio Chemistry Project

Goals for Students

While the focus of this program is on future faculty development, and it attracts that subset of students (ca 15% of the graduate population), many of the skills translate directly to the responsibilities that a group leader in industry. That said, the vision statement for a future academicians is to be as prepared for their full range of responsibilities as they are for carrying out research.

The 4 pillars of scholarly practice are: informed design, skillful implementation, convincing assessment, and persuasive documentation. With these in mind, graduate students should (ideally):

Roush & Coppola Peer Review 2004 6(3), 19-21.
In "Broadening the Existing Intergenerational Structure of Scholarly Development in Chemistry," Roush and Coppola argue for the basic CSIE design, drawn from 6 years of experiences in their department.

Coppola & Jacobs In, Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Conversation (M. Huber and S. Morreale, Eds)
In "Is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning New to Chemistry," Coppola and Jacobs outline the history and present context for doing instructional work in undergraduate chemistry education.

Program Context

Our contention is that the core features of the scholarly development infrastructure, including the central role of graduate education, can be broadened to include the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. By studying and identifying the pieces of that infrastructure, we have created targets for building our program. In that sense, these ARE the elements of the doctoral program for these students, and should not in any way be construed as anything other than what we SHOULD be doing, as responsible educators, for the next generation of faculty members... precisely because they are the things we already know we MUST do in order to fulfill our obligations to prepare the next generation of research scientists.

Teaching is not research... and "teaching as research" misses the point of scholarship almost completely. Scholarly practice is what has transformed the way research is done over the last 150 years. And while education is not a natural phenomenon subject to any "scientific method," it is something that can benefit from the same refinement (i.e., scholarship and the tenets of scholarly practice) that keeps the good:bad ratio of research practices over on the "good" side.

Reflections

Reflection from Professor William R. Roush, Former Chair (05/2004)

Here is the question for the day:

If forming teams of faculty and students to do research absolutely influences what can be accomplished in certain disciplines, is teaching and learning also an area that benefits from the team approach as opposed to the isolated approach?

Until recently, no one knew the answer to that question. Now we know: and the news is as good as it is exciting.

This is a remarkably simple idea: we have learned how to use the team model as a way to move undergraduate education to a whole new level.

At the same time, our other students, the Michigan undergraduates in our courses, get more innovative and exciting instruction. And by finding ways to support faculty and student positions within a program focused on future faculty development, we have created three significant outcomes:

(1) we are educating chemistry students at all levels in a dramatically different way when they express an interest in higher education careers;

(2) UM undergraduate students are the primary and direct recipients of an education that would simply not be possible without this structure; and

(3) as a department, we have discovered a new source of energy for helping us do the job we want to do as faculty members at the University of Michigan

Reflection from Pascale Leroueil (05/2004)

I am completing my first year as a chemistry graduate student. I am also a part of the future faculty program because I am interested in exploring the option of an academic career.

As a new graduate student, I was expecting the learning curve to be pretty steep when it came to laboratory work. I have to say that I am equally impressed by the chance that I have had to think really hard about teaching and learning during my first year, too.

I have had all of the usual things that a first year graduate student might have if she was working in a new area. We have an education-related seminar program; we take a couple of courses that focus on educational design and other issues; and I received a fellowship that allowed me to be able to add this additional work to my first year of graduate school.

On top of getting my research started, I have also been able to get an incredible experience working with faculty and colleagues on helping to make some of these new teaching ideas a reality.

Reflection from Professor Joe Krajcik

UM School of Education

On the national scene, there have been many efforts to reform teaching and learning at the undergraduate level but few have been successful.

The chemistry program has approached undergraduate curriculum reform as a truly interdisciplinary activity. For example, my colleagues and I have adapted our graduate education courses, such as my course on Designing Science Education Learning Environments, to enable chemistry and science education graduate students to wrestle with important ideas.

This is the only program, as far as I know, that has taken seriously the principles of good teaching, as well as how students learn. This effort has allowed us to create course materials and provide professional development for future (and current) faculty to help undergraduates understand the discipline better. In short, we have discovered a way to take the best ideas we have about teaching and learning and translate them into actual curriculum for Michigan undergraduates.

A final perspective that is personally exciting to me is that these new undergraduate courses are exactly the kind of learning environments that I would like to see our future K-12 teachers experience so that they see models of good science teaching practices.

Reflection from Ian Stewart (04/2004)

UM BS 2002 (PhD candidate at UC Berkeley)

My combined experience in chemistry and chemistry education has given me lots of advantages in graduate school.

The time I spent at Michigan as an instructor prepared me in three ways: First, I had a better understanding of fundamental chemistry concepts after I spent 3 years helping my own students learn them.

Second, I arrived with lots of teaching experience - including designing my own teaching materials. Because of this, I was given freedom to adapt some of the work I did at UM to the Berkeley chemistry program.

Finally, developing leadership skills was also an important outcome from my Michigan experience, and I am currently the student chair of our Graduate Life Committee, which has responsibility for improving conditions for students in our department.

How Do We Know?

There are clearly three levels of evaluation in the CSIE.

The first is at the level of the individual students and their work in educational and instructional development. Again, we have turned to the standard criteria for scholarly work as our baseline measures:

(a) Is it publishable in respectable, peer reviewed venues?

(b) Is it accepted for presentation is appropriate professional venues?

(c) Is it prepresentable and defendable at the candidacy meeting, data meeting, and thesis defense?

(d) Does it produce results that others may built upon?

(e) Does the work impact the field?

For some of these, demographic analysis and simple yes/no can answer the question. Others are more elusive, particularly impact.

The second is the intellectual development and responsiveness of the students themselves. This is the same question that drives the CID in the research development area (appropriately enough). Are these students better able to design, carry out, evaluate, and report work in teaching and learning compared with students who do not participate in this type of work? The answer, at least derived from those who have been interviewed, is a resounding yes. But this is not adequate. The fact that the students originate and follow through with publishable and presentable work is at least a surrogate for this. While a deep and detailed performance-based evaluation method that collected response data longitudinally would be ideal, it is itself an enormous undertaking that has - frankly - taken a back seat to keeping the program moving forward. We have engaged a third party evaluator (see below) who did give survey and interview-based reports that give postiive leading indicators for student development.

The third is an evaluation of the program itself - as a program. Accordingly, we engaged our colleagues at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Higher and PostSecondary Education to carry out a survey and interview study with the graduate students and faculty in the department of chemistry. Using the two basic questions that drove the sunset review of the national preparing future faculty program: (1) has the education of graduate students been impacted positively about academic work, and (2) has there been an impact within the PhD program of the department itself. A summary of the commparative results is given below, and a final report is still being prepared for publication (as of July 2005), and will be released in due course.

In addition, the Dean and the science departments in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan are currently (July 2005) and actively pursuing a capital campaign plan to endow and expand the CSIE concept as an Institute within the College... which might argue positively for institutional programmatic impact.

Program Assessment Summary
Using an outside research team, the first 5 years of CSIE were evaluated. The summary slide is shown here. While we compared favorably with most of the measured used to assess the national Preparing Future Faculty Program, there were two main differences. First: CSIE was more expensive, per student, than PFF, thanks to the graduate fellowships. Second, while one of the discouraging results from the national PFF study was the lack of impact on the home (PhD granting) departments, CSIE showed substantial impact on the chemistry department - and might be taken as a positive leading indicator for systemic change.

Unanswered Questions

Like the infrastructure that supports the development of researchers, the CSIE concept is expensive and requires an investment of time and energy. The outcomes have been worthwhile, but the questions that remain are significant:

(a) By what criteria can we tell if this effort is actually worth the investment?

(b) So far, having a faculty line (1/39) devoted to "discipline-centered teaching and learning" has been critically important to developing the program; how many people with this specialization should there be in a department?

(c) Can this work be expanded into other departments with institutional infrastructure that supports the work of those faculty members inclined toward it - or does there need to be local, departmental expertise throughout the College's departments?

(d) Can we design a compelling performance-based assessment scheme for getting at "intellectual development," not only for the CSIE work, but for gauging the impact of graduate education in general?

(e) Between decreased Federal funding and the slow ramp-up of a set of endowed fellowships... how can the program be meaningfully sustained?

(f) Eventually, a cohort of cooperating institutions are needed... so that the undergraduates who participate in CSIE-like activities have a collection of stellar graduate programs to which to carry their experience, and so to for post-doctoral and ultimately to have these experiences valued at the point of hiring. Under what conditions might such a cohort be formed?

Contact Information

Contact persons for CID convening:

Professor Mark M Banaszak Holl (mbanasza@umich.edu)

Alan L Kiste (akiste@umich.edu)

Behind the curtain:

Professor Brian P Coppola (bcoppola@umich.edu)