I am about to start my fourth semester of teaching at Oxy, and I’ve started thinking more about how to collect meaningful longitudinal feedback. I took time over the break to automate some of the analysis of teaching evaluations, and in particular collating scores from the same questions over multiple years. One trend that caught my eye is the student response to “The instructor stimulated intellectual enthusiasm for the material presented”:
These drops are minimal on the absolute seven-point Likert scale, but even if they are not significant, they revive an old fear. One of my concerns before starting grad school was that I would have to suppress my intellectual curiosity. I’m not sure I ever liked the idea of studying a single topic, at least not at the expense of not pursuing other ideas. It was liberating to be done with grad school, and I did pick back up some old interests. My new worry, however, is that I will again be bored from teaching the same material semester after semester.
This is not an idle concern. Oxy is my first long-term full-time teaching job, but it would not be my first extended teaching experience with the same material. As an undergrad, I was a peer facilitator for Northwestern’s Gateway Science Workshop, and I taught the same faculty-created engineering worksheets for three years in a row. I didn’t need student evaluations to tell that I connected less and less with my students through the years. I stopped bothering with ice-breakers; I stopped asking about their non-academic life; I started following the worksheets more closely without wasting time to draw in additional concepts. It is the same narrative I took away from the plot above: following the same template semester after semester, growing comfortable with the material, but ultimately disengaging from the students and unable to inspire them to pursue the discipline.
Teaching at Oxy is very different from peer tutoring – for one, I have complete control over the material, which makes it easier to include new lectures and keep things interesting. Nonetheless, I am starting to feel that same slide towards apathy. To be clear, I don’t actually think I am losing enthusiasm for the material. Rather, what I think I am losing is the spontaneity and authenticity of presenting material for the first time. I could feel myself being less engaged the second or third time I reuse my slides. I suspect what’s happening is that I design my presentations with a lot of additional cues to keep in mind. The first time through, the class is only days (or hours) after my prep, so all the supplemental content is still in my head. When I revisit the lecture a semester later though, it’s no longer available, so I end up strictly following the content on the outline, to the detriment of the class.
The obvious answer is to start including speaking notes for my lectures, but that’s a lot of work and I honestly don’t prepare for class that way. I once heard a story, from someone who watched/shadowed a skilled teacher, who had apparently rehearsed their lecture down to pausing to put down their cup. At the other extreme is discarding all previous material and starting over, but I also worry about thereby lose the culminated improvements I’ve made over the years. The temptation of finding the middle ground is that it’s too easy to just take the material from the previous semester and use it wholesale.
One thing I might try this semester is to derive the goals of each class from scratch, before looking at old material. This would at least identify missing content and drive improvement to my classes. Separately, I’m resolving to rediscover my interests, if not in the lesson plans, then in introducing new students to the thought-provoking concepts in cognitive science and computer science.
How to Start a CS Department 