Reflecting on our Values and Practices
By Alexander Diaz-Lopez
Dr. Alexander Diaz-Lopez
As we embark into the 2022-2023 academic year, I would like to encourage all of us to take a moment to reflect on our values and practices as teachers, colleagues, and individuals. In this article, I will share a set of questions; I encourage you to stop and reflect on each question before continuing the reading.
As teachers
What are your teaching goals?
For many faculty, teaching is an essential component of our job. Yet, it is still the case that many of us have limited formal teaching training. Often, we choose/develop teaching methods and strategies based on practices of our former professors and our previous experiences as students. While this can be useful, if this is our only source of teaching strategies, we are limiting ourselves in who we could become as teachers. Have you ever sat down to think about your own teaching goals and whether you are using teaching methods that align with them?
If your teaching goals include helping students acquire mathematical skills and knowledge, helping students learn how to learn, understand students’ approach to problem solving, or providing experiences where students are (re)discovering mathematical knowledge, there is research out there about teaching strategies that have been shown to be effective in helping faculty and students achieve these goals. Even better, recently, the MAA published the Instructional Practice Guide (IPG), which summarizes some of these teaching strategies and provides vignettes of how they can be used in the classroom. Here you can find some guidelines on where to start reading the IPG.
As a whole, the mathematics community has struggled to implement effective teaching practices widely. The recent AAAS Levers for Change report presents some recent data and studies that suggest more than 60% of mathematics faculty use mostly lecturing in their courses, with a very small percentage (<5%) using mainly active learning methods; the remaining use a mix of lecturing with some active-learning methods. While the numbers might not be as bad as some would have thought, it is still the case that more than half of us math faculty do not follow evidence-based teaching practices. Why? I do not have the answer to this question but here are two reasons that delayed my own transition to using more active-learning methods.
Lecturing is easier for faculty. After all, in a lecture, we have full control of what is covered, when it is covered, and for how long. Most of the attention is placed on the faculty. (Is this aligned with your teaching goals?)
Lack of experience and confidence in deviating from whatever has been our regular teaching practices.
If you find yourself struggling to implement active-learning methods in your courses, I suggest starting small. Here are some actions you can consider:
Pick one class meeting and introduce some think-pair-share activities;
Ask students to discuss a problem/scenario and present their findings in class;.
Develop a 20-minute IBL activity at the beginning of class;
Give students a problem that introduces a topic for them to try as homework and start class with a student-led discussion about it.
It’s less intimidating to commit to 10-15 minute activities in selected class meetings than to overhaul a full course.
Who do we value in our classrooms?
Some of us would like to answer that we value every one of our students. Instead, let me ask: Who gets airtime in your classes? Who gets emails from you? Who gets encouragement from you?
Most of us don’t purposefully discourage students from participating in class (in fact, we try to encourage them). However, if we only offer students a single venue for them to participate (e.g. answering a question faculty ask during a lecture) we are giving them very limited opportunities to engage in class and are only motivating more experienced or extroverted students to participate. We could, instead, offer multiple ways for students to engage with class and the material. Some options are:
In think-pair-share activities, all students get to have an opportunity to contribute individually and then in groups;
Use websites like Padlet to have students post an answer to a question (this is my in-person version of asking a question via Zoom chat and asking students to submit their answer at the same time);
Use polling like Poll Everywhere to get an idea of what students are thinking;
Have students complete an exit-ticket where they summarize what they learned in class.
As colleagues
Who is valued in your departments and institutions?
Some of us would like to say that we value every member of our department. Do we? Instead, let’s ask: Who gets to make decisions in your department? Who gets promoted? Who gets paid? Who gets work benefits?
In my institution, until recently, only tenure-track faculty could go up for promotion and could lead departments. The university then created a promotion process for continuing non-tenure track, which, in some sense, is similar to that of tenure-track faculty. Still, voting power and access to positions of leadership is vastly different for tenure-track faculty when compared to continuing non-tenure track faculty. Adjunct faculty (as is often the case) face very difficult work conditions: low pay, limited benefits, and limited space are only some of the many areas where we should do better.
It is easy for faculty to state that these are all institutional policies and we, as individual faculty, have no power over these decisions. In some sense, I am sympathetic to the comment, but disagree with it. Faculty, when coming together, do have power in institutions. Most institutions do have a faculty senate/congress that negotiates and/or discusses different aspects regarding faculty rights/benefits/responsibilities. Department statements and actions can be another source of pressure for institutions to act. Opinion articles, blog posts, and similar publications can also create some pressure for institutions to address certain faculty issues. We could do more. We should do more.
As individuals
I want to end this blog post with some reflection questions about our personal and professional goals.
What are your professional goals? More precisely, where do you see yourself in five years? Are you aware of what is needed to achieve these goals?
Where are you spending your time and energy? Are these activities aligned with your goals?
Which social justice projects do you want to engage with and spend your time/energy on?
I hope that by reflecting on these questions, we can all continue our growth as teachers, colleagues, and individuals.
Alexander Diaz-Lopez is an associate professor at Villanova University, Green ’16 NExTer, and recipient of the MAA Henry L. Alder Award and the Villanova’s Junior Faculty Teaching Award. He has been involved in initiatives/organizations such as Lathisms, SACNAS, Math SWAGGER, and some local Villanova programs such as DREAMS and Co-MaStER. He likes spending time with his family, traveling, and playing sports. This post is based on his 2021 MAA Alder Award talk.