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INTRODUCTION TO TEACHING

1.0 Welcome, There's Your Desk, Good Luck

As everyone knows, skilled professionals routinely receive training before being certified to practice independently. Electricians, machinists, and chefs get preliminary instruction and then serve for months or years as apprentices. Accountants, physicists, physicians, and psychologists spend years earning degrees in their fields, and the physicians spend still more years in internships and residencies. It would be unthinkable to allow people to practice a skilled profession without first being well trained for it, especially if their mistakes could cause harm to others … unless they are college instructors or certain K–12 teachers.

The standard preparation for a college STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) faculty career is taking undergraduate and graduate courses in a STEM discipline and completing a research project on a topic someone else has defined. Once you join a faculty, your orientation may consist of nothing but the heading of this section, and perhaps a half day on such things as health and retirement benefits and the importance of laboratory safety and an hour or two on how to teach. The unstated assumption is that if you have a degree in a STEM subject, you must know how to teach that subject.

The situation is somewhat better at the high school level. Most high schools require their teachers to get and maintain teaching licenses from their state governments, which means they must have degrees in education or at least receive some teacher training. However, many other schools hire STEM degree holders with no pedagogical training, especially if the schools are in regions with inadequate numbers of licensed teachers. Again, the assumption is that if you have a degree in chemistry or mathematics you must be able to teach those subjects.

Anyone who has ever taken STEM courses in high school or college knows how bad that assumption can be. What student has never had a teacher who taught at a level ridiculously above anything the students had a chance of understanding, or flashed PowerPoint slides at a rate few normal human brains could keep up with, or put entire classes to sleep by droning monotonously for 50- or 75-minute stretches with no apparent awareness that there were students in the room? If you teach like those teachers, no matter how much you know and how accurately you present it, you probably won't enjoy looking at your students' test scores or your teaching evaluations from administrators, colleagues, or students.

Being a competent STEM teacher requires knowing many things calculus and chemistry courses and short teaching workshops don't teach, such as how to design courses and deliver them effectively; how to write assignments and exams that are both rigorous and fair; and how to deal with classroom management, advising problems, cheating, and a slew of other headaches teachers routinely encounter. Figuring out all those things on your own is not trivial.

Although there's something to be said for trial-and-error learning, it's not efficient—and in the case of teaching, the ones making the errors are not the ones suffering the consequences. Many new teachers take years to learn how to teach well, and others never learn. Getting a degree in education and/or getting training in teaching of course doesn't guarantee that the recipient will be a good teacher—a lot depends on the recipient's aptitude for teaching and the quality of the training program—but it considerably improves the chances of it.

Things don't have to be this way. Proven methods for teaching effectively—that is, enhancing students' motivation to learn and helping them acquire the knowledge, skills, and values they will need to succeed in high school, college, and their professions—are well known. Many of those methods are not particularly hard—you can just learn what they are and then start using them. That doesn't mean they make teaching simple: teaching a course is and always will be a challenging and time-consuming task, especially the first time you teach it. The point is that teaching well doesn't have to be harder than teaching poorly. The purpose of this book is to help you learn how to teach well.

1.1 Learner-Centered Teaching: Definition, Warning, and Reassurance

The great philosopher and educator John Dewey said, “Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned” (Dewey, 1910, p. 29).

That statement may seem obvious but it isn't to everyone. If you look up the word teach in a dictionary, you'll find variations of two completely different definitions:

• Teach: To show or explain something.
• Teach: To cause someone to know something.

By the first definition, if everything the students are supposed to learn in a course is covered in lectures and readings, then the instructor has taught the course, whether or not anyone learned it. By the second definition, if students don't learn something, the instructor didn't teach it.

Many STEM instructors subscribe to the first definition. “My job is to cover the syllabus/curriculum,” they argue. “If the students don't learn it, that's their problem, not mine.” They use teacher-centered instruction in which the course instructor defines the course content; designs and delivers lectures; creates, administers, and marks assignments and tests; assigns course grades; and is essentially in control of everything that happens in the course except how the students react and achieve. The students mainly sit through the lectures—some taking notes and occasionally asking or answering questions and most just passively observing. They absorb whatever they can and then do their best to reproduce it in the assignments and exams. That model pretty much describes STEM education as it has been practiced for centuries throughout the world, and it's entirely incompatible with what we now know about how people actually learn.

John Dewey, whose quote began this section, clearly believed in the second definition of teaching—to cause learning to occur. That definition lies at the heart of learner-centered teaching (LCT). The teacher of an LCT-based course still sets the broad parameters of instruction, making sure that the learning objectives and lessons cover all the knowledge and skills the course is supposed to address, the assessments match the objectives and are fair, and the course grades are consistent with the assessment data. The difference is that the students are no longer passive recipients and repeaters of information but take much more responsibility for their own learning. The instructor functions not as the sole source of wisdom and knowledge but more as a coach or guide, whose task is to help the students acquire the desired knowledge and skills for themselves.

Weimer (2013, Ch. 2) surveyed the voluminous research literature on the various forms of learner-centered teaching and observed that properly implemented LCT has been found superior to teacher-centered instruction at achieving almost every conceivable learning outcome. We will use LCT as a framework for the rest of this book. In later chapters we'll discuss specific LCT techniques—what they are, what research says about them, how to implement them, what can go wrong when you use them, and how to make sure it doesn't.

Before we preview the book in the next section, though, we'll warn you about something you might find troublesome. When you make students more responsible for their own learning than they're accustomed to being, they won't all leap to their feet and embrace you with gratitude! Weimer (2013) offers the following cautionary words:

Some faculty [members] find the arguments for learner-centered teaching very convincing. With considerable enthusiasm, they start creating new assignments, developing classroom activities, and realigning course policies. By the time they've completed the planning process, they are just plain excited about launching what feels like a whole new course. They introduce these new course features on the first day, sharing with students their conviction that these changes will make the class so much better. And what happens? Students do not respond with corresponding enthusiasm. In fact, they make it very clear that they prefer having things done as they are in most classes. Teachers leave class disheartened. The student response feels like a personal affront. (p. 199)

If you haven't used learner-centered teaching yet, the resistance you may encounter from some students the first time you try it may come as a shock. You may envision your teaching evaluations plummeting and your chances for career advancement shrinking, and it can be easy for you to say, “Who needs this?” and go back to traditional lecturing.

If that occurs, fight the temptation to retreat. Several references on learner-centered teaching methods discuss student resistance: why it's there, what forms it might take, and how instructors can deal with it (Andrews et al., 2022; Felder, 2007, 2011; Felder & Brent, 1996; Seidel & Tanner, 2013; Weimer, 2013, Ch. 8). We'll explore this issue when we get into active learning, cooperative learning, and...