Teaching was part of the environment Mark Micale grew up in. His father taught high school history and economics. “There was a lot of talk in the household about schools and classes and students,” Micale said – though it didn’t prompt him, as he started college, to pursue a career in education. Two great college teachers did that.
Kim Graber wanted to teach from the time she was a small child. Her parents bought her a desk as a gift. “Each day after school I would try to coerce my sister into pretending she was my student,” Graber said. She even administered math tests.
Andrew Alleyne remembers sitting in the back of the college classroom in which his mother taught on days he was sick and out of school. He saw the empathy she had for her students, absorbed her teaching methods. His father, too, was an academic. He saw their commitment and also the demands. “I was quite sure I was not going to enter the family business,” Alleyne said. But then he did.
All are now professors at the U. of I. – Micale in history, Graber in kinesiology and community health, Alleyne in engineering – all among several dozen professors recognized with campus awards in recent years for their skills and dedication in teaching undergraduates.
What makes for a great teacher? What inspires one to teach and do it well, and love doing it?
Parents who were “in the biz” is often part of the story, according to Micale, who has picked the brains of 20 of the university’s best teachers as part of a project he conducted in connection with a recent award. Even more often, he said, the best teachers have been motivated by teachers in their past who served as role models, who were “not just good, but inspirational.”
Great teachers also have a love for the subject they teach, Micale said, which could be said, of course, about most academics. The best teachers among them, though, also have a passion for communicating that love and knowledge to others, he said.
Alleyne, for instance, who once planned to work for NASA, gets excited about the “really cool stuff” of engineering. Then he asks “how do I convince all of these students that this is really cool?” and then inspire them to go out eventually and create cool stuff of their own.
Kelly Tappenden, a professor of nutritional sciences and another teaching award winner, starts her “Diet and Disease” course by asking her students for family health stories, hoping to immediately engage them in what they’ll be learning.
Many of her students will go on to be doctors or dietitians working in hospitals. “I really try to catch them where they’re at,” she said, “and then take them to the level that we need within the curriculum.” She wants them not only prepared with knowledge, but also confident in how to use it.
Micale’s challenge in his large Western Civilization class has been to engage hundreds of students from numerous majors in large lecture halls. He remembers how anxious he felt the first time he stepped in front of more than 300 students in the cavernous Foellinger Auditorium, which can seat nearly 1,600. That was about 15 years ago, already 10 years into his career. “It didn’t come naturally,” he said.
It’s a challenge he’s embraced, however, in part because of those two great history teachers he had in his own undergraduate days. They both taught general education courses like his.
Despite stereotypes to the contrary about these often-large classes – anonymous, overcrowded, teachers who don’t really care recycling their notes – “I knew these courses could be really substantive and serious and engaging,” Micale said.
As a further challenge to that stereotype, Micale has discovered a lot of “totally first-rate” general education instruction through his project. His list of 20 “master” gen. ed. teachers could easily have been a list of 50, he said. The subject areas they cover range from statistics to theater, classics to computer science, physics to art and design.
Like Tappenden, Micale engages students by making the subject relevant – in his case linking something from their world to his historical subject of the day, to show the “seamless connection between the past and present.” He avoids the dangers of the 50-minute lecture by moving around, recapping every 10 minutes or so, alternating the tone or type of material, changing the visuals, telling stories, telling jokes (and worrying about the jokes falling flat).
Micale knows you can overdo it, try too hard to entertain. Too many jokes makes you a comedian, not a professor, he said, and there’s a danger in thinking that popularity and successful teaching are the same.
He also knows from his interviews and watching other skilled teachers that there’s no one way to do it well. “The great teachers I’ve met don’t have a single style, they have often quite, quite different classroom personalities. What they all do have is a personality that works for them and their subject.”
According to Graber, who studies teaching as part of her research, “effective teachers are both born and made. Good teaching is far more than being enthusiastic, fair and likeable; the act of teaching must result in student learning. This takes years of practice, and good teachers never stop learning.”
Part of the teacher’s education, Graber has found, is learning how to work around student behaviors that can get in the way of real learning. There’s even a name for it: studentship. “It’s a set of behaviors undergraduates engage in in order to get through school with the greatest ease, the most success and the least amount of effort,” she said.
The most egregious example is cheating, Graber said, but there are other things that also qualify: letting others on a team project do the bulk of the work; projecting an image to an instructor to gain favor, known as “fronting”; saying things in a paper or class discussion that you don’t believe, but that you think the instructor wants to hear.
“These are all shortcuts students take that short circuit, I think, their education and what it is that they’re actually learning,” Graber said, and she works hard in her instruction to counter them. “In fact, I let them know that sometimes disagreeing with me will get you a higher grade. You just have to be able to support your beliefs.”
In a similar vein, Tappenden focuses early on in her classes on building a relationship with students that gets them past a tendency to be passive learners – just taking notes, just worrying about the grade. She wants students to know that she’s there to help them learn and be successful, but she wants them to think more deeply, take chances in discussion, risk being wrong.
She starts with various techniques to build an environment in which students can feel safe to discuss. As a result, “sometimes I have so much discussion that it’s hard for me to get through the material,” she said.
There’s also the point that good teaching is not just about classroom performance, “not just what you put up on the board,” according to Alleyne. “It would be a crime if they see the faculty solely as some figure for 50 minutes a day, three times a week.”Alleyne said he urges students to engage with faculty members, and not just in class or when they need something. “Don’t see them necessarily as gateways to an A. See them as potential resources to help you develop a skill set that’s going to help you be successful in life,” he said. “You might find some very good allies; you might find some very good lifelong friends and mentors.”
They might even get help with finding an internship or a job, thanks to connections that many faculty members make in their work and consulting beyond the campus, Alleyne said.
Which gets at the heart of what seems to motivate many of the best teachers: the students themselves.
Tappenden was doing research in a medical school, and enjoying it, but said she missed the undergraduates. “I wanted to be in an institution where research was an absolutely essential part of the activities, because I wasn’t willing to give that up, but I didn’t want to do that exclusively. I really wanted that undergraduate engagement too.”
One reason: “Undergraduates are absolutely wonderful in their sense of discovery and acquisition of knowledge,” Tappenden said. Taking them through that process of discovery, she finds, is “incredibly rewarding.”
“I enjoy being in the classroom on a daily basis, but seeing the progression from the beginning of the semester to a group of individuals who are really confident and know the material and can actually go out and apply it, that’s what’s most rewarding to me.”
For Micale and most of the professors he has talked to for his project, “there’s something about young adulthood and young minds that I think we find especially exciting,” he said. They are curious, bright and “yet wonderfully open-minded,” and “just an awful lot of fun.”
“The most satisfying element of teaching,” Graber said, “is watching the light bulb click on in someone’s brain, particularly after someone has struggled to understand a difficult concept. Another satisfying moment is when students indicate that you have somehow changed their perceptions in a way that has improved their life, or when they make the connection between what they are learning in the classroom and what will be required of them in society.”
“You can really open their eyes to a field,” Tappenden said, “and shape where they’re going, which is a huge opportunity.”
One benefit of teaching for some years, both Micale and Alleyne said, was that they hear sometimes much later from students about how they remembered something from a class, or how it influenced their life or work. It might be something as simple as a former student, on vacation in Paris, making a connection there with something they learned in class, Micale said, then telling him in a card or email.
Alleyne also added that his experience with industry shows him “why it’s important to train people well.”
Ultimately, Alleyne said, “it’s about the people. I’m telling you it’s all about the people. … That is what motivates me to be an effective instructor. … It’s to be able to sit back at the end of the day and go ‘yep, you know what, my time here was worthwhile.’ ”