“A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled”

– Plutarch

For me, the most important and motivational part of teaching is working with and for the students. There is something transcendent about walking into a room with 30, 100, 500 or even five students and working with them to expand their knowledge and understanding.  I get a lot of creative satisfaction and joy from developing activities that demystify confusing and challenging concepts within the curriculum. In recent years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with students at multiple levels, from first to fourth year and beyond. As a result, I get to know the students very well and see their growth from novices into expert geoscientists who are much more skilled than I. I love it.

There are many, many skills that go into managing a learning environment. There are also many perspectives, philosophies, models, and ideas about what to focus on when you teach. A teacher needs to keep an eye on everything, from mechanical skills such as speech, movement in the space, or how long to wait after asking a question to much more complicated skills such as how you model the cognition and understanding of a group of students, making the classroom a safe space for all, or what overriding approach or framework you use in any given class. I find as a teacher that there is a hazard of being “blown about like a kite without a string in the pedagogical breeze” depending on what happens to be popular at the time. In my own practice I try to apply what I find useful from multiple approaches, while keeping in mind George Box’s dictum:

“All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.” 

What follows is a (short) selection of some concepts I use to help guide my teaching.

Student Motivation

Gaining the attention of potentially hundreds of students from an equal number of different backgrounds and then convincing them that landslides, for example, are a topic worth learning about while remaining engaging and monitoring how the class takes in the information is a herculean task. In recent years I’ve focused much more on motivation, student mindset, and student sense of belonging, basically how students feel in my classrooms. I think about how to craft each lecture into a cohesive story that fits together, supports itself internally, and connects to larger ideas or frameworks in the course. My ultimate goal is to make students so interested in a topic they will keep investigating on their own. In my teaching evaluations one year I received the comment: “I never thought I would read about landslides in my spare time.”  Me too, nameless student, me too.

Student motivation varies depending on the expertise of the student and the topic. For lower division courses, I need to remind myself to explain to the students why any given topic is important. “So, who cares?” is a question that comes up frequently. Students at this level often don’t know why they are here and don’t know how the information is useful. Their motivation is very different from mine, it is very important to remember this difference. Students are much more self-motivated and engaged with course materials by the third or fourth year. However, at this stage of their degrees, they are often taking   six courses during a term. As such, it is still important to explain why the topics can be useful to them, but it can be less of a focus than in earlier years. At all levels, I also find it very rewarding to point out how amazing and beautiful the content is, and how they are developing “superpowers” that will allow them to interpret the world around us.

“A good teacher must be able to put themself in the place of those who find learning hard.”

– After Eliphas Levi

The Nature of Knowledge, Active Learning, and “Being Wrong”

Our students arrive in our classes with major misconceptions about the nature of knowledge. They believe that a person with a good grade is “smart.” They believe that their brain should operate like a computer and forgetting information is a mark of failure. Some have imposter syndrome and believe that they don’t belong at UBC. They believe that being wrong is the worst thing that can happen to them in a class. Worst of all, they believe that if they are not a perfect student, then it is a personal or maybe genetic failure on their part. These beliefs about learning hinder their ability to succeed.

In humans, knowledge is constructed. It is combined with our past experiences and built into frameworks over time. The best scientist is not the person who knows the right answer, but that’s what school and culture has taught students to believe. Science is not truth, but a process of finding better and better answers. In reality, mistakes and errors are vital part of science. In fact, instead of avoiding errors, as scientists we need to embrace them, we need to understand when our knowledge is incomplete so we know where to focus our efforts either as scientists or as learners in general.

“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

 – Jonathan Swift

In my classes, I ask students to embrace being wrong. Active learning is a very important part of this process. I use low stakes activities or personal response system questions for students to check their knowledge. I ask them to tell me when they don’t understand a concept, after all, they are probably not alone. I challenge them not to avoid the things that make them uncomfortable, to take them as feedback. In my classes, but especially first year classes, I ask each of them to put up their hand and answer a question in class at least once each semester. I tell them a wrong answer is more important that a right one. After all, if they always have the right answer, why are they taking the course?

“Better learning will not come from finding better ways for the teacher to instruct but from giving the learner better opportunities to construct.”

– Seymour Papert

We also discuss how the grade they receive in class is not a reflection of their worth as an individual or of their ultimate ability to grasp the concepts covered in the course. Rather, it is a combination of their background, experience, and how much effort they put into their learning. If they are not happy with their grades the answer is not despair and to give up, but to consider it feedback and to change how they approach the material. Changing perspectives on failure is especially important as students coming from high school are used to very high grades that are, in most cases, likely to drop when at university.

 

Community, EDI, and Accessibility 

I work to build community and belonging within the first few minutes of every course. In fact, this sense of community and comfort is one of the things that helps me get over my own fears of standing in front of a large group of people. I use icebreakers as much as possible, because there is a palpable reduction of tension and fear after the first time you get students to talk to one another. I try to make sure each student knows they belong, no matter who they are, what their background is and, importantly, what grades they achieve in the class.

 

In recent years, equity diversity and inclusion (EDI) has received much more attention than when I first started my teaching practice in 2001. This is particularly rewarding for me as I have been involved with EDI initiatives for many years. I feel that EDI is vital in ensuring students feel comfortable in any learning environment. My goal is for each student to have both a sense of belonging in the class, hopefully with friends and colleagues they can count on, but also an understanding that they personally can excel at the material given the right approach. To do this I try to model a variety of inclusive activities in the class such as sharing my preferred pronouns and using examples with people from a variety of backgrounds when showcasing important researchers in our field.

 

One important example of my commitment to EDI is my pedagogic research around accessibility. In 2013, I developed and ran one of the first truly accessible field trips for the Geologic Society of America (GSA) and was a co-founder for the international Associate for Geoscience Diversity (IAGD). Since then, an accessible trip is run each year at GSA and the IAGD has developed into a diverse global community. I aim to keep such practices at the forefront of my courses and create learning opportunities that are accessible to the broadest cross section of students.

 

Mentoring and Developing the Next Generation

I believe that mentoring is one of the most important parts of my teaching practice. Training the next generation of teachers is for me both teaching and Educational Leadership. I am involved in several projects that train graduate students how to teach and I am also a mentor both officially and unofficially to many graduate students and faculty who are just starting their teaching careers. My teaching in EOSC 516 (Teaching and Learning in the Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences), my role as Associate Head Undergraduate Affairs, my involvement as the academic co-lead of the Center for the Integration of Research Teaching and Learning, as well as the training I provide for International Relations in Education all help me to fulfill this very important task.

A great teacher never strives to explain his vision. He simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

– R. Inman

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Once again, though teaching is at times almost ludicrously difficult, I find it a supremely rewarding experience. For me teaching is not showing them how much I know, it’s about helping them realize how much they can learn.

 “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

– Pat Cross