Around a long, oval table: fifteen students, laptops flipped open, the thrum of keyboards fills the room. And, perched in two of the chairs that line the small classroom, sit two professors, one with grey-swept hair and the other with an iPad balanced on her knee. The next morning, in a lecture hall in WLH, two professors sit, side by side, at the front of the lecture hall. Starting at 9:00 a.m., in a Greek grammar class and a L5 Spanish course, until a history of Japanese art class and a physics lab that end on Friday afternoon, faculty have crossed from behind the lectern into the classrooms themselves. It’s “Faculty Bulldog Days.”
This week, for the first time, Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning ran a weeklong initiative that aims to start a dialog about teaching at an institution that has historically prioritized research output over teaching excellence.
“Yale doesn’t tend to encourage opportunities for faculty to attend courses,” History of Art Professor Diana Kleiner told me. She stood at the front of her classroom in a Loria lecture hall on Thursday morning, talking over the scrape of chairs as students filtered out of the room. “I know that at many institutions, including those I was at before I came to Yale, they encourage faculty to attend the classes of their colleagues just to see what they think of their teaching. We’re not really encouraged to go to each other’s courses, either by the University, or by our Chairs.”
Scott Strobel, Jenny Frederick, and the other faculty at Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning are trying to change this. That morning in the Loria lecture hall, there were two new faces among those in Kleiner’s class: Lawrence Staib, professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Music Professor Daniel Harrison.
Kleiner’s course was among 106 classes that professors opened to their peers this week; over one hundred faculty signed up for classes, and these faculty filled nearly three hundred seats – on average, each professor signed up for three courses, although they were free to attend as many or as few classes as they wanted.
Scott Strobel, who became Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning, hopes that this is enough to crack open the door to classrooms.
“I want teaching at Yale to be more of a public property, where what goes on in any classroom is made accessible to everyone,” Strobel said. “If I’m doing something relevant and interesting, I want other members of the community to be able to come to my classroom to learn about it, and vice versa.”
But Strobel told me that in general among faculty, conversations center around scholarly work rather than teaching. This reflects a larger trend – of a faculty that generally prioritizes research over improving their teaching, at least in part because hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions place more importance on scholarly output than teaching excellence. “Dialogue is a regular part of scholarship at Yale, but dialogue about teaching is a more isolated event,” Strobel said. Strobel hopes to start this conversation.
The idea for the bulldog days came from a University two hundred miles north. Strobel and Jenni- fer Frederick, the Director at the Center for Teaching and Learning, had been visiting teaching centers at various universities throughout the fall, when, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, they discovered a “teaching week,” during which faculty visited one another’s classes. Strobel and Fredericks proposed the plan for their own week of opening teachers’ classrooms to Tamar Gendler, Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School Dean Lyn Cooley, and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway who, as Strobel said, “thought it was an excellent idea.” He said that, after con- versations with the FAS chairs, they talked with Departmental DUSes. “They thought it was a great idea, and that we should go for it,” Strobel said.
Last month, the course offerings for the event were made available. Economics Professor Doug McKee told me that he was thrilled to sign up—“My only little bit of regret is that I only signed up for one class,” he told me. This Tuesday morning, McKee sat in a lecture hall in LC as English professor Cathy Nicholson dove into her lecture on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. He said that, while he enjoyed learning about the play, he was primarily focused on the execution of the lecture itself.
“The professor was really animated,” McKee said. “To me, reading Shakespeare is like reading a foreign language. But there was something about the way she read it, her tone and voice, that put a lot of extra meaning into it. When she read it, I understood it. There’s a power to how you say things that I never understood. I never realized how much of a difference it makes.”
McKee said that, beyond her style of addressing the class, he noticed that Nicholson used what he called a “classic college lecture style.” Nicholson talked to the students about the text, he explained, without much active discussion between her and the students. “It’s a very traditional style: one which if done badly is awful, but if done well is pretty good,” McKee said. He credits Nicholson with fantastic execution. “I don’t teach lecture classes like that at all,” he said. “For me, it was like observing a different art form.”
The next day, French Professor Constance Sherak sat in Robert Frank’s introductory Linguistics course. In an email, Sherak wrote that she had been excited to return to the classroom from the other side. “I enjoyed being back in a classroom as a student,” Sherak wrote. She continued that the visual aids that Frank used were key to his teaching: “I appreciated the professor’s visual illustrations. The diagrams and examples shown on the screen were central to my understanding the lecture,” she said.
Kleiner said that the extent to which the Bulldog Days al- lowed professors to observe colleagues in other departments was key. “You can learn so much from the techniques that teachers in other departments use,” Kleiner said. “As a teacher, you can only do what works for you, but at the same time you can learn when you watch other people do it well, and you can get some ideas. I just think this Bulldog Days is a great opening to more sharing of teaching techniques.”
McKee said, too, that sitting in the lecture itself was not the sole benefit. After the lecture ended in LC, McKee said that he and Nicholson went out to coffee and talked about teaching for over an hour. “Maybe the most inter- esting and important outcome of the whole thing that it started a dialogue,” McKee said. “It was glorious.”
At the front of nearly-empty battle chapel, Psychology Professor Laurie Santos stood behind the lectern. Someone took down the projector screen from the front of the chapel, where it has stood below the stained glass. Minutes before, her “Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature” course had been packed with students – and three other professors.
Santos said that, while she opened her class to other faculty, she was unable to attend another class herself. “I actually wanted to go really badly, but there weren’t any courses that fit with my busy DUS schedule,” she said.
It is this crunch in time—of professors citing days already filled with teaching, research, and
demands for engagement in the community—that is one of, if not the, greatest issue holding back improvements in teaching.
Desiree Plata is an assistant professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. She said that, while she knew that Faculty Bull- dog Days was going on, she, like Santos, had too many commitments to take time out of her busy week. “The schedule for the event was available, and I’m sure there were plenty of great opportunities,” Plata said. “But I just didn’t have the time to go.” She mentioned that she is new to Yale this year, and has a young child, and so does not have a schedule that accommodates lecture visits. “Time is of the essence,” Plata said.
Beyond the issue of teachers not having the time in their weeks to devote to improving their
teaching, the question of which teachers were targeted arose. And, indeed, most of the professors who opened up their courses also attended others; thus, it seems, the hundred who
opened their courses likely formed a large fraction of the faculty that registered to go to classes.
When I voiced these worries of self-selection to Kleiner, she acknowledged that this is a real possibility. “Professors who are more confident in their courses will be more willing to offer them,” Kleiner said. “And the ones who really care about teaching are the ones that are anxious to go and see what people are doing and learn things from others. I don’t think we know that for sure, but I agree, it may not be attracting those who would benefit from it the most.”
But Frederick said that targeting a specific population of teachers was not the goal. “We’re assuming an interest in teaching, but you also have to remember that no one participating in the program is going to achieve all of our goals,” Frederick said. “There are probably quieter, subtler ways of getting the people who really need help with their teaching to improve. That’s not necessarily happening with this kind of very obvious visible headliner program.” She continued: “If you’re not comfortable with your teaching and you know you have to improve, this definitely is not the best way to approach it.”
She believes that reaching out to less eager instructors requires other, more nuanced methods. “One of the things that we want to do is, by having more people know what happens in each other’s classrooms, is to increase the recognition of the excellent teaching that is here, and to create some positive peer pressure so that people understand that there is a high standard for teaching, and try to reach up to it,” Frederick said.
Absent from this sense of peer pressure, though, was any com- prehensive system for providing feedback, or evaluation. As Santos said, each professor, un- prompted, sent her an email after sitting in on her class. “They all sent me nice notes, saying, ‘That was so cool, and I liked this part, and had questions, et cetera.’ But there is no formal set-up. It’s not like people are coming in to evaluate you, or anything.”
Strobel says, though, that this will change in future semesters.
“For this version, we’re letting the experi- ence be the main goal, and are looking for an- ecdotal responses.” But, next semester, he said, “I want there to be more ag- gressive effort in assessing impact.”
Kleiner agreed: “The achievement I think will be the most important this time is to just highlight the importance of teaching at Yale.” Strobel told me that they will hold the Bulldog Days again next fall, and anticipate holding it each semester after that; for now, he acknowledged, “One event in one week have some impact, but not revolutionize things.”
McKee said, too, that the Bulldog Days is only a first step.
“I really would like undergraduate education to be seen as more important than it is now,” he said. “The number one goal of the University to produce research. The secondary goal is to educate the undergraduates. Though there is a lot of value in having un- dergraduates being taught by people doing big research, right now the pendulum is too far over on one side. I don’t know what the optimum is, but I know what direction we need to move in to get there.”