(Photo credit: UBC Public Affairs)
As our project aimed to identify teaching practices that positively influence student wellbeing, we wanted to hear from both the instructor and the student. From our interviews with instructors we hoped to learn more about practical teaching strategies that they believe enhance student wellbeing.
Specifically, we wanted to talk to instructors who were already promoting the wellbeing of their students, so that we could learn more about the teaching practices they use and the implications of engaging in such practices. But how to identify these instructors?
We asked the students of course!
On the 2015 Undergraduate Experiences Survey (UES) we included a question asking students to identify instructors who positively impacted their wellbeing over the previous year. From the students’ responses we compiled a very, VERY large list of names which we filtered down to a manageable number of instructors to interview. It was encouraging and exciting to see so many faculty members nominated by students, but we needed to start with a smaller group to do the interviews.
Our first step was to organize the list, grouping mentions together. The next step was to identify the correct spelling of the instructor’s name and which department he/she taught in. From there, we created two lists of instructors: one for the Faculty of Arts, and one for the Faculty of Science (these two faculties had formally partnered with us on the project).
These lists were still rather large (well over 100 instructors each!), so we had to filter them down some more. For the fall term interviews, we invited five instructors from Faculty of Arts and five instructors from Faculty of Science (one per department) who received either:
- A large total number of nominations, or
- A high percentage of nominations (total nominations divided by the number of undergraduate students taught in the 2015/16).
9 of the 10 instructors agreed to participate! It just so happened that they were evenly distributed across genders. Almost all were from Educational Leadership stream (more info on UBC’s tenure process and the Educational Leadership stream). For the winter term, we used the same criteria, but purposefully selected a balance between Professoriate (research) and Educational Leadership (teaching) streams from each faculty.
Upon learning how we recruited instructors, do you think there are ways we could improve how instructors were recruited? Feel free to comment below. We would love to hear your thoughts!