S2 E18: How We Can Address Some of the “Big Issues” for Faculty Today

Drs. Raven Russell and Laurel Marsh join your host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, to discuss some of the key stressors and big issues for new and “less new” faculty today.  We explore strategies to make teaching easier and better for everyone in the space. 

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Rachel 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited to be joined by two super cool engineers today, and we're going to be talking about a number of pressing issues for faculty. So today I'm joined by Dr. Raven Russell, who's an associate professor focused on teaching from computer science, and we're also joined by Dr. Laurel Marsh, who's a postdoctoral fellow and occasional adjunct faculty member from the Department of Bioengineering. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us.

Raven 0:44

Thanks for having us.

Laurel 0:45

Yeah, excited to be here.

Rachel 0:47

Yeah. So let's kick off our questions. You know, in this episode we wanna talk about some of the pressures on faculty and how we support ourselves and how we support others. So can you get us started by talking about some of the main pressures that faculty face?

Raven 1:04

I think there are probably a million things that faculty face, especially when they're first starting out. It can be anything from just getting the material together to, especially if they're new, first time speaking concerns. So it's really a huge amount of pressures and most of us aren't trained how to teach in the first place, so we're also learning how to teach while on the job teaching. So, I think the challenges of all new teachers are our challenges, but we're far enough in our careers that people have great confidence in our ability to communicate.

Rachel 1:45

Yeah, we see that the challenges are for new faculty, but we also see different and changing challenges for more experience.

Laurel 1:51

Yeah, and one of the things as a new faculty that I was really trying to focus on, and that I had heard many of my teachers, even in my undergrad career talking about was like assessing knowledge, like assessing the prior knowledge and then the gain knowledge from the course.

Rachel 2:08

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's something that we perhaps don't talk about as often as we should with teaching is that we focus so much on just our course, but it's really how it fits in the sequence. What are the students coming in with? How do we build upon that? So when we're talking about so many different things, like you pointed out, Raven, how can we, how might we expand on how we could look at a framework of small changes or little improvements? Where would we even begin? Or what might we consider?

Raven 2:38

Well, there's, again, there's so much that can be changed that it really isn't practical for any of us to make major revamps every semester. So what you can do is try and focus down on one or two most important things for this semester because theoretically you're gonna keep doing this for many, many semesters and you have a lot of time to make those improvements. The nice thing about that is it takes some of the pressure off of you to fix everything. But it allows you also to assess whether those changes you've made actually changed anything, or whether they just make you feel better. You feeling better is important, but if it doesn't impact the students, but it's a lot of work for you to do this particular change, sometimes it's a change you go back on. But you can also see when small changes have had a big effect if you're focused down on those couple of small things.

Rachel 3:39

One of the things that, you know, I include in one of my workshops is really thinking about how we could plot time spent on changes. Basically the effort and the impact. Where are we putting our time? High effort, uh, low impact is not the space we wanna be in, but are there low or medium effort types of things where we'll have at least some low or medium impacts? Um, ideally high, but we can't have those all the time. Right?

Laurel 4:03

I wish I would've had that framework too going in because I was definitely thinking, okay, what changes should I make initially to the course? And I did eventually become confident with, okay, let me just kind of teach it as it was shown to me in the initial way. And I was like, okay, this is good. And then just throughout that semester I spent it as my, you know, my learning time. I was like, what smaller impacts can I make? But yeah, I wish I would've looked at it like that. Where it's just like, okay, what can I do? What simple changes can I make to have the highest impact? And in the end, that's what I went for, especially because of timing issues and just other responsibilities being a postdoc. But it worked out really well. But I was, for a while, I was putting so much pressure on myself. I was like, do I have to change this course? Do I have to make everything my own and revamp it? And the answer was definitely not like it worked out really well how it had been going. But yeah. So that's a beautiful framework of that you teach in your workshops and that Raven mentioned of what can I do that's low effort and medium to high impact?

Raven 5:05

I think a lot of people, especially when they start out, it's a great advantage if you can be paired up with someone who has taught the course before, or at least have fairly extensive conversations with them and just to follow what they did because they've worked for many semesters on it and they've created a course that's sort of customized to how they like to teach. That may not be how you like to teach the first time, but it gives you a nice starting place and that. You know, like, alright, I'll start here and I'll slowly migrate it over to things I like and things I want. It's also sometimes an advantage if there had been multiple people teaching it, and you can sort of take in your first try, take the best things from one person and another and kind of put 'em together into a nice shape and sort of see how that first role goes without having to start from scratch. I think one of the hardest ones really is, this course hasn't existed and I'm new to this. That's gotta be one of the biggest challenges.

Laurel 6:09

Oh, for sure. It was definitely invaluable to me being able to reach out to the former professor who had taught for several semesters. And what also helped me break out of just, oh, I can't make any changes, that mindset, was being able to talk to my advising professor who had once taught this and a few others, and realizing like, okay, it doesn't have to be this one teaching strategy and seeing how they taught the class was also really, really valuable for me to help me not feel too locked in. It's like, oh, there are other ways to present this. And so yeah, both having a strong, solid starting point from the previous classes, but then building in these other mechanisms is really helpful.

Raven 6:51

I think actually taking inventory of what is locked in about a course versus what is a preference or a style about a course is actually really important. Especially if you're going to be one of a set of people working on the course. Having that inventory of what really makes this course, this course, no matter who teaches it and what is totally customizable, gives you a lot more freedom to be comfortable trying certain things out, and then knowing that you can change them in the future if it doesn't work out. And I think that as a first step, what is the core of this course, is a really good starting place when you've looking at a brand new course that you've never seen before.

Rachel 7:40

You know, I think here, the more talking with others we can do about the course, whether that's a course coordinator, program director can really shed some light on that. You know, we're not out here changing learning outcomes or something like that. Those are pretty set. But where are the spaces for creativity and individual contributions? You know, our students love hearing our experiences. Is it, you know, can we integrate some of our research or past professional experience or just cool things from the news? Where can we make unique, memorable learning experiences? So one of the other things, Raven and Laurel, you both and I have talked about in the past is really how we document from semester to semester, what works, what doesn't work. 'cause you know, we can think as best we can, oh yeah. I'll remember what worked well in week four and what I wanna change for next time, and then we get to the next semester and it's like, no way. That was too long ago. So can you tell us maybe what might notes on what worked or what didn't work look like in practice or what it looks like for you?

Raven 8:45

I can speak to what I do personally and what works for me and what I've heard some other people do. I've heard everything from making like, just like a long single document of all the things that they want to do, and like a loving to-do list for the whole course.

Rachel 9:02

Hey I've done that.

Raven 9:05

I've know some faculty who have used like, bug reporting tools or Kanban boards, which is just think about your post-it notes up with tracking. And they actually like put in bug reports about their course. So I've seen everything from like the least formal to the most formal way. And I think really what it comes down to is making sure that the notes you have are in front of you when you need them, and whatever that means to you is what you should be doing. I think it's the mental equivalent of putting things in front of the door so that you take them with you when you leave. I personally will write for lectures, I keep a text document in with the lecture folder, you know, that has my slides and like little whiteboard examples of things I've written out for students and stuff for sort of inspiring things. And I just have a little text thing and I have in there. It's just like, this needs to change or just timings. And I'll look at them as I'm prepping the lecture ahead of time, I'll decide whether the changes I've suggested to myself are something I can do this semester or whether they're gonna have to wait till next semester. Which gives me a freedom that the note isn't lost if I don't do it, it just gets copied over to the next semester. And so that's what I tend to do on lectures. On homeworks, I tend to keep track of the common questions from our discussion board. And, as for an organization as this is, I will go and take those questions and sort of put them in for the next revision of the homework or if we do a similar one in the future. And so for me it's keeping the notes attached to the individual document I'm editing, as in is in the same folder, and doing that consistently. This also lets me take notes after I give a lecture when I'm too tired to make an edit now, but I can write down, haha, I should not have done that. Remember next time.

Laurel 11:13

Mm-hmm.

Rachel 11:14

Yep.

Raven 11:16

So I've heard the full range, but that's my personal system.

Rachel 11:20

Yeah.

Laurel 11:21

Yeah, I definitely take a twofold approach where my course is like specifically computations for computational methods for bioengineers, and so I can heavily edit my slides or my code and comment those really well. So what I really do is keep a big notebook, like a physical, I, I love OneNote for Microsoft, but I also keep a big physical notebook and have all my class lecture notes there. No matter if I'm gonna go off the PowerPoint or coding or writing on the whiteboard sometimes, I still have my notebook and I'll make all the changes there. And so I use that and that's always really helpful. 'cause then next semester when I'm going back to review, it's right there. And very much like you said, it's like putting it right by the front door, which I also use in my real life. I will forget things if they're not right there. So that's a really easy, clear way. And I picked it up from working in a lab where you have to note down everything and then when you go back to that experiment, you look it up. So that was really straightforward for me. And then kind of like I said, I can make straight edits on my slides, put in my notes. I love using the notes functions for when I'm reviewing for next semester. There are better ways, but I really loved making drafts in my email and then sending or snoozing them so that it will pop up next semester. Like I said, definitely better ways, but that's what works for me as up and coming professor.

Rachel 12:49

Well, and I think that's what's key here is the first and the biggest hurdle is just doing something, making some sort of notes no matter what it is. One of the things that we've talked about just briefly here, is lecturing, and that's kind of a big hot topic. But one of the pressures, particularly on faculty, is that showing versus doing. So can you tell us a little bit more about this particular instructional challenge?

Raven 13:18

So I've explained this to my students a few times because I think there is an inclination to prefer, especially when you're tired and at a 9:00 AM class you, you know, or you're at the end of your day to really just want to watch and to do sort of learning appreciation rather than to actually.

Rachel 13:42

Ah! That's great learning appreciation!

Raven 13:44

Go through the effort and I understand that it's a strong inclination of all of us and students have a lot going on. And so I've tried explaining this to students a bit along the lines of this, if I were to be a violin instructor, you could watch me play the violin and you would be like, yeah, that's a violin being played. I can appreciate that. It sounds great. I wanna do that. And I could explain to you, while holding the violin and you know, how to angle the bow and how to use your fingers. You would be like, yeah, I think I really understand what she's talking about. That makes sense. Holding down the strings makes them shorter and it'll change the pitch. That makes sense. But it's very different when I hand you the violin. So they're very inclined to believe that in watching and understanding somebody else's explanation, they have learned to do this. They have not been handed the violin yet. And the second you hand them the violin, they realize that the idea doesn't translate automatically into physical actions that they should take. And that it's a time consuming for them to do the practice necessary to be able to do things when asked. All of a sudden there's somebody walks by and says, play the violin now. You shouldn't need prep work to do that if you know how to play a violin. So I think that that's getting the students over that hurdle and remembering that it's an important step in the learning process for them to get them over that hurdle is a big sort of reason why we've had a lot of the more active learning, flipped classrooms were very popular, and those types of activities because you get to watch, you've handed them the violin and you get to watch them go through that struggle and you see that the presentation wasn't sufficient for their learning.

Laurel 15:56

Yeah, that analogy helps me so much. I've never even had to learn a musical instrument, but that really puts things in perspective to me, and it's so practical sometimes to just give them a fill in the blank code and just like, okay, watch me code. But that helps me realize too that sometimes that could be applicable if I just kind of wanna get to the output of the code, and I wanna run through the code with them and make sure they understand it. But like to actually teach them, they have to have more of that hands-on experience.

Rachel 16:25

But then that hands-on can look a little bit different in each field. In a lot of fields, so whether that's engineering or other areas, we have this phenomenon, that we might consider like a black box. You know, what students know or don't know, especially when we're talking about using different types of tools, whatever the tool might be in your field. So it could be AI related or different other programs and tools. So how do you help students frame their learning and approach with this and not have something be just a complete mystery in the middle?

Laurel 16:59

So one thing I love to do is start out by showing how bad the outcome can be. So whether that's using ChatGPT or running a really computationally expensive computational fluid dynamic simulation, like whatever it is. I like to show them that if you put in what we say in CFD a lot in engineering, if you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out. Just conceptually, I really like to emphasize something I learned as an aspiring engineer is that, I can teach anyone to write a script, run a software, or do these complex simulations with our engineering codes and everything, truly we can teach anyone to do that. The value added is engineers or scientists or anyone in any of these studies, what we add is understanding why we ran that simulation or understanding our input and then interpreting those results and translating that into something useful. So I really like to add or emphasize like where we add our value. It's not just being able to run chat GPT or run these softwares and simulations, but it's our interpretation, and it's our understanding of that knowledge. So you have to have that knowledge base too. So they have to come with me on this journey and they have to learn with me. You can't just, can't just expect to throw it in and then have your homework be done.

Raven 18:21

I think that there's two situations. One is they're treating something as a black box and they don't understand how it works, but they're able to assess both the input and output of it, and that's okay sometimes. Sometimes you want to, look, now is not the time for you to learn how this particular system works and you're going to have to accept that this is the mechanism but you still need to be able to know that what you got out of the black box is an appropriate thing. You can't just, oh, well whatever it said, it must be good. That doesn't work for any system. And so the other time is when they actually do need to know the internals of the black box, and that's two scenarios. You need to sort of decide in a lot of cases for the students, which of the two they need to be focusing on, and make them know that it's okay in the situation where it's gonna stay a black box that they don't understand and make them comfortable with that, but that they can't then skip the last stages. It's not input black box magic. Input black box, assess what came out.

Rachel 19:39

Right.

Raven 19:39

And so I've started talking to my students a bit on systems like chat GPT, and there's also copilot, which helps with coding. And I've talked to 'em about the fact that the way that these are trained is they're trained on millions and millions of millions of pieces of things people have already written. The way you get millions and millions of pieces of things that are already written is this is the stuff everyone already knows how to do. You also need to know what everyone already knows how to do. This is a way to speed things up. This is not a way to, well, it shouldn't be a way to replace you. If it's a way to replace you, then you're going to be replaced. Normally can read it and be like, that didn't make sense. Try that again. But if what you've come out with you don't understand. So this happens a lot with, you know, the people trying to generate, say research papers or something like that, and it's got a bunch of citations that are nonsense. Well, if you don't know what citations are supposed to do, you can't assess that those citations are nonsense. So it's one of those challenges to get them to understand that yes, we've got this cool thing that can do some stuff for you, but you're still gonna have to check that that makes sense. And you have to know that you put in the right things in the first place as well. So a little bit with the idea of calculators. When calculators were now and everybody's like, oh, well why should I learn how to do this type of thing? Like, well, did you put the right thing into the calculator? Like you need to know that input part. But in this case, you also have the calculator will definitely answer your question. Many black box systems do not directly, it's not a straightforward computation. If it was, there wouldn't have been a whole giant black box system made to build it. So I think I described this the other day to someone as, I like the term AI slop because it's a bit like somebody says, okay, I need you to paint this room. Somebody walks in with a bucket of paint, throws it at the walls and says, there you go, the walls are red, and you say. Okay, but the floor is also red parts of the ceiling. There's gaps here. And as someone who knows what a painted room is supposed to look like, you need to be in charge of saying, we're gonna have to take some additional steps to make this practical. So I think, these systems are a little dangerous for students because again, they don't know that it's not okay, not to at least be able to assess the output, even if they don't understand the internal workings of a system.

Rachel 22:38

Yeah. Raven, I think you have the best comparisons. These are, these are excellent and memorable. As we wrap up our conversation, you know, I think here we're really looking at a couple of keystone concept ideas. And so here from our conversation, it really seems like communication and transparency So that can be for instance, even communicating to our future selves about our course and actually making sure we do that, not relying on, you know, six months from now what will I think I did in week five or whatever. But also how we communicate with our students, not only the need, the practical value, the process and really going through that process, but increasing that transparency. You know, it's not just, engineering or STEM fields, but across all fields. How do we do this? And so, I guess let's leave this with, you know, any last thoughts, any parting words that you'd like to share?

Raven 23:32

I think as teachers we need to remember that we are also humans who sometimes need help, it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to find other people who know. We don't have to actually be the expert in all things all the time. We can go find other experts who can answer questions and who can help us out with our coursework, and also to make that humanness sort of apparent to the students as well. We are knowledgeable in our field. We know what we're talking about for what we're currently demoing, but we don't know all things. And even things like telling students like, yeah, I'm not actually sure about this. I'll get back to you on it. I'll go find somebody who can clarify this. And then going back to them and showing that that was what you did. So I think everybody really needs, especially new instructors, need permission to say, wait, I don't know what I'm doing, and that's okay. I will go find out. And I think it's something that a lot of people worry that they're now supposed to be the authority. They're an authority, not the authority.

Rachel 24:57

Yeah,

Laurel 24:57

Yeah.

Rachel 24:57

That's such a great point.

Laurel 24:59

For sure, and just going off what Raven said, like that was the one of the biggest, you know, most imposter syndrome type things for me was I'm teaching all these different computational methods in my class, not just the one I research and am most familiar with. So the scariest thing was, what if they ask me a question I don't know? And anyone that's gonna be new to TAing or teaching or anything like that, that was some of the coolest questions I got was when the students were just like, what about this part of the process? And I was like, actually, I have no idea, but let me look into that and we'll talk about that next class. And they come up with these interesting things that I had never thought of 'cause I had never dug too deep into these methods. And then it provided excellent discussion for next class. So just to say to all the up and coming professors and teachers, it doesn't have to be scary. You don't have to be the expert. And what I had been told a lot, but didn't believe it until I saw it in action was, you can say, I don't know, and they'll still respect you. You can come back and be like, let me look that up because I know how to research things and we'll talk about that next class. And so that was, that was really helpful.

Raven 26:13

I think it's also good to show them that you are excited to still learn stuff, so you're like, come back and you're like, okay, it turned out to be really cool. It works like this. And you are still excited, you know, much further in your academic studies than they are.

Rachel 26:32

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know, can be one of the hardest things to say. So thank you both so much for your time, Raven, Laurel, thank you for your insights. And we look forward to sharing our next episode with you every two weeks for the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. So thank you so much for your time.

Raven 26:51

Thanks!

Laurel 26:52

Yes, of course. Thank y'all.