S4 E36: Recognizing the Value of Investing in Teaching

How do we develop, support, and recognize effective teaching across career stages in higher education? In this episode of Keystone Concepts in Teaching, host Dr. Rachel Yoho is joined by Christi Wilcox, Director of the Office of Outreach, Student Success, and Engagement in George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, for a wide‑ranging conversation about faculty development, graduate student preparation, and the recognition of teaching and learning work. Together, they explore why investing in pedagogical training, especially early with graduate students, strengthens both institutions and the profession. Additionally, Christi provides listeners with strategies for how to make the value of teaching development visible and why faculty should strategically advocate for and document their teaching‑related professional growth. This episode invites faculty across disciplines to rethink recognition, professional development, and the many ways effective teaching contributes to student success and the broader higher education ecosystem.

Resource: Faculty Podcast Credential: https://stearnscenter.gmu.edu/credentials/keystone-concepts-in-teaching-podcast-faculty-credential/ 

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Rachel 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited for our conversation today because I have a colleague from the College of Engineering and Computing joining us today. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Christi 0:29

Hi, Rachel. Thanks for having me. I am Christi Wilcox. I'm the Director of the Office of Outreach, Student Success, and Engagement here in the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University. I'm happy to be here.

Rachel 0:42

Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. So can you tell us a little bit more about your role and your work in the College of Engineering and Computing?

Christi 0:52

Sure. So I would say that I have a role that runs the full supply chain, so that means that I work with students, faculty, and staff in the Office of Outreach, Student Success, and Engagement. We do some faculty development where we think through with faculty their pedagogy as it relates to student success. We work closely with human resources when thinking about how to bring in faculty, specifically new faculty, and set them up for success because successful faculty leads to successful students.

Rachel 1:30

Thank you for that, Christi. Yeah. I really like what you said about how successful faculty create successful students and I think that's kind of the theme of our episode, and we haven't even had our conversation yet. Um, but I think that's really looking at some of the work that we've done together, especially when we're thinking about how do we create the educational environments. So we started working together right after I started Mason, I think you're maybe one of the first people from outside of the Stearns Center who I started working with, and we just jumped right in immediately. So can you help our listeners understand what you're doing now?

Christi 2:07

Sure. So for our listeners, I would say that I came into George Mason University anywhere between nine to 12 months before Rachel did. And one of the first things that I was tasked with in my role was to think through how to develop faculty as it relates to teaching and learning. So what I did was develop a module that looked at faculty and it really looked at teaching faculty. They don't engage in research. They're more pedagogical based. And what I originally built was an engagement or a development tool focused on inclusive STEM pedagogy that would exist over the summer. And that we hoped to scale and scope to something that existed across the academic year. In the midst of building that and working with our external partners, what was really evident was we might be starting a little late in the development of faculty pedagogy when you really think about how much impact you wanna make and what tools you want to immediately put in the hands of individuals who are going into academia, and that's where my mind was when Rachel came in a year later and did take over the faculty aspect of our faculty development for inclusive STEM teaching. I said to Rachel, I really think this program should sit with graduate students because ultimately, if we are teaching graduate students how to teach in a regularized and robust way, specifically graduate students in STEM, then we're halfway there by the time they walk into an institution that has teaching and learning. And Rachel really took that idea and ran with it, and that's how we really got going.

Rachel 4:11

Yeah. And it's been good stuff, well, at least from my view, since, but as we think about that, I think we're also looking at taking that step back. We work with faculty across, like you said, experience, years, appointment types, and then stepping back into graduate students, to me, is also not just an investment in our institution. It absolutely is. But it's also an investment in the profession. Our students may be going on to professional careers. They may be going on to instructional or research careers at other institutions, postdoc appointments, whatever that might look like. So this is, at least from my view, an investment in everyone. If we look at it that way, what's good for investing in professional development is good for the field, the discipline as a whole. So, as we talk about this, let's talk a little bit about the planning, why we were looking at this. One of the things that we talked about was really making sure our work with graduate students really mapped onto that work with faculty. We wanted graduate students to have a piece of our faculty training, right? And so that way we make sure that our instructional preparation, if we think about it holistically, is moving in the same direction. So do you wanna talk a little bit about some of that alignment?

Christi 5:30

Yeah. So, I mean, you said it really well. We wanted something that was gonna be fluid in that students and our grad students and what they were learning and gaining from the workshop was really something that was in conversation and in alignment with what, you know, at the very least, new faculty were getting. But frankly, what faculty got from their teaching and learning, and for me, my real kind of wealth of knowledge on how to do that came from benchmarking and exposure to people in the American Society of Engineering and Education. Just being in rooms where I saw faculty and graduate students presenting on the same work dedicated to the teaching and learning of engineering, of computing, of technology. And then having that kind of fluid back and forth where it just seemed like the graduate students were as informative to the learning of pedagogy as the faculty was. That was something that was really important to me to be able to put into the hands of the grad students. The other thing that was really important to me, 'cause I can be a really nuts and bolts person, was giving the individuals who I think had a really high touchpoint with students, the tools that they needed. I don't know what your grad student experience was like when you were doing your graduate degree, but for me as a grad student, and I wasn't a STEM student, full disclosure, I was really the frontline of defense, for lack of a better metaphor, right? I taught a large number of freshmen and sophomores, and so that meant that my voice had a lot of impact, and I TA'ed for large rooms where I was the person who was giving that feedback to students. So it was really important to me, not just that our students had the opportunity to have a workshop like the one that you built and you're currently executing, but that they had something that was really substantive, and that we really kind of looked to the research to inform the practice and then use the practice to inform the research and went back to the audience to really help guide us with the knowledge that we wanted them to have this impactful, robust kind of skillset that would put them in conversation with, even on par with, their faculty.

Rachel 8:23

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the biggest hurdles or one of the biggest challenges that we see for, whether it's graduate students or instructors, across disciplines is that everyone's being pulled in so many different directions. And I think one of your particular skill sets, Christi, is helping people see the value in the time investment. So can you speak to that a little bit? Like how do you market to people? How do you get people involved and excited about like, hey, professional development in their teaching in the College of Engineering and Computing?

Christi 8:58

Some of it's by force. No. Um, but, but a lot of it is pragmatism, right? And you've heard me say this so many times, but you spend all this time developing yourself in your craft, right? Whether your craft is in the humanities, in the social sciences, whether you're fully STEM, and so you become an expert in that. What you aren't, if you spent your time becoming an expert in your craft in academia and you go through that particular gauntlet of bachelor's to master's to PhD, and you come up with an engineering or computing or a technology PhD, you are not an expert in education. That, that's not what you are an expert in. Um, and, like the business that we're in is education. We are in the business of developing the minds of the nation. And so for me, when I'm in those conversations, and I'm either sensing or I'm met with skepticism as to why time should be given to this, I'm like, this is the business, like your bottom line is to educate. And you could tell me about materials and heat transfer all day. But if you can't tell the students about it in a way that translates to a positive outcome, which is an ROI as it relates to student success and retention, then you need help. And that's what I do. That's what Rachel does. And like, help me help you. And sometimes, you know, I have to get really transactional in that conversation. But once you kind of lay it out like that to say, you are in the business where the desired outcome, and they know what that is, is the graduation of students and the graduations of students who are gonna go on to be successful in their careers. Then you have to get involved in making that business successful, and for a higher education institution, it is teaching and learning and being able to cultivate a multiplicity of minds in the room. And so I think what can happen with faculty is that kind of clear cut way to say, your job is to educate, but your skillset may not be how you educate is actually, for as simple as it sounds, a really effective way to like get buy-in and you use that as your platform for marketing.

Rachel 11:39

Yeah, absolutely, and we're people who spent many, many years developing expertise, it's hard to hear like, Hey, you might not be the best at something. But I think here we're also looking at the opportunity, and I really like how you frame that as like, this is what we're here to do. Yes. We might also be here to do research. We might also be here to do committee work and all the other things as well that pull us in so many different directions.

Christi 12:03

Right.

Rachel 12:04

But here when we're teaching, we're not having the conversation that we are, you know, pandering to students. We're not trying to give everybody an A. We're creating environments where students can be successful, where we create the graduates who want to still be involved, who want to come back and mentor, who want to find interns, who want to give back to the institution. And also obviously have their own successful careers and lives. And so as we do that, I think one of the other things that we look at is how do we look at recognition? And that's also one of the things that you and I have worked on quite a bit is how do we not only make the work visible, but how do we make the work be recognized? How do you recommend advocating for yourself, like you did a professional development opportunity, how do we as an individual, make that more visible?

Christi 12:56

I think that we're in a time where self-promotion, whether you want it to be something that you're engaged in or not, is a really useful tool. So if I'm starting from just the base level, you've engaged in a course, a workshop, a professional development opportunity, and you've come out the other side with any kind of knowledge, some kind of certification, don't wait for the acknowledgement to come externally. Acknowledge it yourself. I did this thing, I learned these things. Say it to the people who will move the needle forward. So that could be your departmental chair, that could be somebody who is ahead of you in your, if you're a tenure track, in your trajectory of your career. That could be somebody who is a key player that doesn't sit in your department or in your school, but you know has leverage in a way that is utilitarian for you. Say it and then put it on a professional platform like LinkedIn. That is normally where people stop. I think what you have to do is look at the system of leveraging that. When you say it to your departmental chair, then write it i n your performance review. Also, kind of track it, right? If you learn three things and you wanna see what those three things look like implemented in your class, document it in some way, shape, or form. And it's the same thing that I would do if I'm somebody who I was saying, oh, I wanna get a promotion. What do I know my job requires? I know my job requires X, Y, and Z. Okay, I've done X, Y, and Z. What did they yield? Who am I telling what they yielded? Where can I show my successes and how can I track my failures and not think of them as anything but information to make a better informed decision for the next time I implement? And I think that when you think about recognition, you have to be really strategic in deciding that you are gonna be your own recognizer. And then you are going to use the systems in play around you, whether or not they're formalized to acknowledge teaching and learning or not, to make what you've done be noticed. And so a lot of it is kind of saying, where am I going to get involved in my own recognition and how strategic can I be in utilizing the systems that are in existence around me, to give a value add to the recognition? As opposed to waiting for somebody to say, this is of value.

Rachel 15:49

I think that's such a great point, Christi. I think here, you know, we see a lot of opportunities to look at the system. What is recognized, where are the pieces that you can play into the recognition? So I mean, this could be opportunities for writing articles about your teaching. This could be opportunities for writing, not just research-based articles, this is maybe an op-ed type piece in a journal, you know, recommendations, best practices. Or maybe it is research. Maybe we're looking at engineering education or whatever your discipline has as far as teaching and learning practitioner type articles or how do we talk about this to students type of posters at a conference?

Christi 16:28

Yeah.

Rachel 16:28

This might fall under, in some cases, the general umbrella of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Or maybe we're just taking something that we learned in a workshop, turning it around, applying it, and writing about our experience in some sort of less formal type of article. And I think that's really one of the things that when we think about creating successful faculty, I think here it's looking at what are the opportunities. And so one of the other things that you and I talk about a lot, Christi, are engaging with training. So engaging at different career stages and basically how do we create that culture of continuous improvement? And so what are some of the things that you see as advantages, no matter where someone is in their either experience with teaching and learning, professional development, or just career broadly, what do you see as some of the advantages, whether it's in conversation with that person or just how we discuss and how we market, why is this worth our investment, basically?

Christi 17:33

I mean, I just don't think that training is ever not going to be a return on itself, right? So for example, we have the Center for Teaching and Learning, which means that there is an internal built in pathway toward development for faculty. And that's building itself out into being an internal pathway toward the development of students who are interested in maybe not just engaging in faculty, but just being better articulate at communicating what they know to another individual. So a lot of the concepts of teaching and learning are gonna be a value to you. So that's a value add. That's a benefit. That's an advantage.

Rachel 18:17

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we've talked about in other episodes of the podcast before that something like, "I don't know," is one of the hardest things to say in higher education.

Christi 18:27

Yeah.

Rachel 18:28

But I think here, seeking out training is not necessarily showing or demonstrating an "I don't know." It's more that "I want to grow" and that "grow" not only obviously, is good for the students. You know, if we learn to teach better, we learn cool techniques, we learn ways to engage our students and improve learning outcomes, that's great for our students. Wonderful. We love that. But also, when we talk about this, the training is good for faculty as well. Whether that's our efficiency, whether that's how we run the classes, whether that's creating a better environment for everyone in the space, including the faculty member or the teaching assistant, all of these things kind of feed back into each other. But I really wanna draw this back to what you were talking about earlier is really the recognition piece. Obviously we want one thing, the good outcomes for our students. We certainly want good outcomes for our faculty, our instructors, our teaching assistants, our aspiring teaching assistants. But we also want that to be recognized, and I think that's really our keystone concept for today, is not just that successful faculty create environments where we can have successful students, but how can we be creative about showing that recognition? How do we help people recognize the investment of the time, the effort, the cool things you're doing with your students? You can do the coolest things in your classes. Your students may acknowledge and appreciate that. But sharing those with others can be something that's really powerful there as well. And so some of that might be across some of these different ideas. So I think that's such a great point. Christi, anything else you wanna add? Other thoughts you have here?

Christi 20:07

Some other thoughts about recognition, and how maybe we could do a better job or a clearer job, or just think about it more deeply outside of the clear pathway of, I'm a teacher who is tenured and I got this research grant that led to X amount of dollars, which means that my research is funded and I get to support a grad student in this way. That's a very clear return on investment pathway,

Rachel 20:40

Yeah, a hard one.

Christi 20:42

Like, it's a, it's an incredibly hard one and I haven't even brought in the solar system of what we ask of faculty. Right. But I also wanna talk about the other parts of higher education that I'm always just like, we should be thinking about the recognition and how these things can be as valued. So I'm going back to that, I'm a teacher or I'm a teacher administrator and I have regularized contact with the community and industry partners, and that positive relationship means that I have continuous and consistent relationships and pathways with people If I'm embedded in the community who trust me enough to feed their community members into our school. That's a value. If you have somebody whose pedagogical practice has led to some kind of wonderful K through 12 engagement, and now we have enrollment that's impacted. Or we have a faculty member who engages in a course or somebody like you or me who runs programming that engages industry partners that can lead to excellent belonging and sense of self and self-efficacy for a student who then gets hired, that's alumni engagement, right? And that's a return on investment. But all of this stems from different types of value and recognition put on teaching and learning, and I think that we can get kind of lost in like that one note of research and not think we have all these other parts of higher education, which really the heartbeat of higher education is. And so that's the final note that I would say. My boss likes to say we should look for reasons to say yes. I would say look for all the pathways of recognition in the space that you are in to add value to what somebody is doing in their part of the higher education ecosystem.

Rachel 23:05

Absolutely. I think there's a lot of positive contributions we can make from whatever our appointment type is, from whatever our role is. And as we do this, when we think about, higher education as a greater good, whether that's the research impact, it's definitely also the teaching impact like we've been talking about, but recognizing that, recognizing the individuals, thinking creatively about how we can be recognized can be really important there. So thank you so much, Christi, for joining us. I really appreciate your time, your collaboration, of course, and also your insights here and helping us, helping our listeners hopefully think a little bit about their professional development ways they can be recognized for that. And a very shameless plug, for those of you affiliated with George Mason University, we have opportunities to even gain professional development recognition from listening to the podcast. So thank you so much.

Christi 23:56

Thank you Rachel. Thank you for thinking creatively and breaking ground with me. I appreciate it.

Rachel 24:01

Yeah, absolutely. I encourage you to check out our episodes. We post every couple of weeks during the fall and spring semesters. So yeah, thank you so much.