See also my CV Flipsen-CV-PacU-tenure and my 2013-14 annual reflection Flipsen-2013-14-self-reflection.
REFLECTIONS ON MY TEACHING
This represents the closest I’ve ever come to stating formally what it is that I feel and think about teaching. As with many other doctoral students who attend a top-tier research university like the University of Wisconsin, I was taught to be a researcher, and it was simply assumed that if you know your topic area very well, you should be able to teach it. Such an assumption is of course blatantly inadequate. I have never had any formal instruction in how to teach nor have I ever taken any coursework in pedagogy. What follows here is simply my crude attempt to describe what I’ve done in my approach to the teaching process and my awkward attempts to become a better teacher.
My short stay at Mankato seems a distant memory now. It was probably the classic experience most new academics have of struggling to get classes prepared the first time. One thing I remember vividly is often being only a lecture or two ahead of the students for most of the first year. It was here that (as noted previously in my discussion of “My Path”) I realized that clinical teaching was not for me. In my four years as a practicing clinician I came to feel confident in my abilities, but explaining the finer points of how it is done (i.e., the moment to moment decision process) is difficult for me. As such watching students struggle with clients was quite frustrating. It was all I could do to keep from running into the therapy room, telling the student to leave, and then just doing the assessment or therapy myself.
Classroom teaching has been quite a different matter. Early in my first year or so of teaching at Tennessee, I remembered that I had previously received a well-worn copy of book on teaching from a former professor at UW-Madison. When she gave me the book, she said that this was the classic work on teaching, and that I would do well to read it. Faced with 50+ undergraduates my first semester I realized that now was the time to do so. The book is “The Art of Teaching” by Gilbert Highet, published in 1950. Although the publication date initially gave me pause, I found the book quite stimulating. Interestingly enough, upon arrival at ISU, all the new faculty were given a copy of “What the Best College Teachers Do” by Ken Bain, which was published in 2004. Despite the more than 50 years between them, the two books provided me with surprisingly similar insights. Keep in mind though that while I understood the main points being made in these books, I didn’t really feel fully connected to them until I had my “epiphany” (see below).
In any event, both Highet and Bain state that a teacher must be both very knowledgeable about his subject matter and willing to demonstrate his enthusiasm for it. My doctoral training certainly laid some of the groundwork for this, but it was by itself insufficient. In my 18 months at Mankato and my years at Tennessee, ISU and now Pacific, I have been amazed at how I have changed (for the better) relative to both knowledge and enthusiasm. First, I have found that the old adage “if you want to learn something really well, try to teach it to someone else” is very true. In the course of preparing lectures and more importantly, in dealing with students’ questions, I have been forced to discover a lot more of the intricacies of my sub-discipline that I thought I ever would. At Tennessee we frequently talked about how at a Research-Extensive university the faculty are engaged in cutting-edge research which offers great benefits to our students. While this is very true, I have also found that the inverse is true; my teaching has informed my research. Students have a way of putting a spin on things that causes one to constantly question assumptions about what we are attempting in our research. And I continue to find that this is true.
As to the second requirement, the issue of enthusiasm for the subject matter, for me this has been very much more of a work in progress. I do like my sub-discipline very much, it took some time to discover how very important it is for me to convey that feeling to my students. In hindsight this only makes sense. Why should they be interested in what I’m talking about if I don’t appear to be? While it is still a work i n progress I’m finding that as my confidence in my knowledge of the content expands, I’ve become much more relaxed in front of a classroom. Being more relaxed does allow me to be more enthusiastic about what I’m presenting. I used to be almost embarrassed to talk about my own research, but now I realize that this is where my enthusiasm comes from. I no longer apologize for doing so. That has helped a great deal.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still have some challenges with teaching. I still find myself less than certain about how to motivate students to participate in the interaction. I struggle somewhat with encouraging them to “explore” the topic with me; that’s why I still tend to use a mostly lecture format. Some of it also probably derives from being an introvert myself. I’ve never felt comfortable being called on in class as a student and thus I never single out any student in class. I try to pause regularly and ask for questions but they are generic and to the class as a whole. That said, in the last couple of years I’ve noticed it’s been somewhat easier to set up specific questions for discussion with the class. And I’ve been mostly pleased with the outcomes.
On a practical level, I find myself constantly working at refining the process. As I teach, I regularly make notes about what has worked and what hasn’t. Then as I sit down before each semester to try to organize my upcoming courses, I consult those notes and try to throw out or modify those things which have not worked and incorporate any new ideas I may have thought of. I continue to be somewhat dissatisfied with my teaching overall; I hope that such feelings never fully fade as they stimulate me to continually try to improve.
Also on a practical (and less positive) level, I had thought I had my “mode” of presentation in my classes worked out. While at Tennessee I had created a website (on Blackboard) for each class which included copies of all my powerpoint slides. Students were able to download these before class. In principle, at least, students then could focus on what I was talking about, and they would need to spend less time worrying about copying down everything they saw on the slides. In practice, I realized that I was probably being too accommodating. Perhaps I was giving them too much. Many students seemed disengaged from what is going on. I don’t regularly take attendance, but it was obvious that many students felt they didn’t need to come to class, because they already had what they needed in the form of the notes. However, eliminating the pre-prepared notes would mean that I’d have to slow down somewhat, and I’d have to reduce the amount of material I covered.
My Epiphany: The level of disengagement by the students was reflected in my teaching evaluations at Tennessee which were not all that great at least in the first few years. And as I struggled to figure out why, despite all my accommodations, things weren’t working well. I also realized that my level of enthusiasm in the classroom had been dropping for some time. It really hit home, when one day in the middle of class at Tennessee I caught myself having what is best described as an epiphany. It was almost an ‘out of body experience’ where I heard myself responding to a student’s question with a bitterly sarcastic tone. I realized much to my dismay that this tone had probably been there for some time. It occurred to me that I was becoming that arrogant old know-it-all that all students hate who appeared to dislike his students. I finished the lecture and went back to my office and was almost at the point of tears. I spent several hours trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I wasn’t sure initially.
Then something serendipitous happened. I am a recipient of regular informational email messages (1-2 per week; nobody responds to these) from something called the “tomorrow’s professor” listserv. It’s just information about various aspects of being a faculty member at a college. One message I received shortly after my epiphany was titled “Death by Powerpoint”. I could have sworn the author had been in my classroom. He was describing exactly what was happening. The students were disengaged and so was I. As I thought about it, I could have not bothered to show up and set the slides on a timer to change every 30 seconds or so and the result would have been the same. I was just standing there reading the slides – something the students could do themselves.
At the beginning of the next semester, I took a radical detour and stopped using powerpoint altogether. I modified the course websites to only include ‘extra’ material. I also returned to a more traditional, off-the-cuff lecture format using my previous powerpoints as working notes only (never sharing them with students). Two things happened. First, I felt more engaged and my own level of enthusiasm rebounded. And second, I was getting more positive responses in class from the students and my teaching ratings improved considerably. This then stimulated my enthusiasm even more, so it all seemed to feed back on itself. No one has been more (positively) surprised than me.
One other insight I gained from the books by Highet and Bain relates to the demands one places on students. Both books note that there is nothing wrong with setting high standards. In fact, Bain notes that surveys of past college graduates suggest that in the long run students most appreciate those professors who demanded a lot of them. My doctoral mentor, Dr Lawrence Shriberg, was a case in point. Like me, he too readily acknowledged that he wasn’t the greatest teacher in the world (he has now retired from teaching), but the thing that I most admired about him was that he always set a high standard. In fact, I admitted to him at one point that I had hesitated in asking him if I could study with him, because I was intimidated by the quality of his work. I don’t at all regret the decision to ask however. That’s a big part of why I co-authored a book of essays in his honor. He set the bar high and the authors of the various chapters in the book all admire that fact. As for me and my teaching, I am discovering that although students may grumble about asking a lot of them, if you are clear in laying out your expectations and fair in your evaluations of their work, they can be quite accepting of high standards. And hopefully they will eventually realize that the high standards are to their ultimate benefit.
Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t think I’m God’s gift to college teaching. I’ve improved from my early days but overall I probably don’t rank much higher than the middle third of the pack; I’d like to think I’m doing a pretty decent job. And given what I’ve learned so far and the changes I’ve made, I certainly feel more positive about the process and the direction I’m heading.
My conventional lecture style may seem somewhat out of date to some. I don’t use a lot of technology in the classroom, and I may only pose one or two questions to the class each time I lecture. BUT as noted above, I think my enthusiasm for the material makes a big difference and students have told me that my ability to infuse real clinical examples into the mix makes a big difference. It seems to work for me.
Online Teaching
When I arrived at Idaho State in the summer of 2007 I was walking into a very different teaching environment. The faculty in that program were split evenly over two campuses (main campus in Pocatello and satellite in Meridian) separated by 250 miles. Classes were all taught via interactive video link so you would have half the students in the room with you and the other half on a TV monitor on the other campus. Both groups were live and each student had a microphone, so it was fully interactive. This was referred to as “distance” teaching. I had known about this during my job interview. What I didn’t remember hearing about was that the department was beginning to offer their “post-bac” sequence of courses online using the Moodle learning platform. It quickly became very successful with up to 80 students registering for each class. Students were located literally throughout the world (though most were in the US). By the fall of 2010 the department also decided to begin offering their graduate program in a fully online format as well.
I was skeptical at first about the prospects, but my colleagues assured me that they were working hard to ensure that the quality of the online educational experience would be as good as that of the on-campus students. My skepticism arose from a combination of inexperience and my recollection of reading excerpts from Clifford Stoll’s 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Stoll had noted that when they had first appeared radio, movies, and television had each been touted as the new cure for what ails education. None had really lived up to their promise, so why should the internet?
Skeptical or not, as with the rest of my ISU colleagues I jumped in. From a financial perspective it was good that we did. Students were quite willing to pay more for the convenience of not having to relocate and being able to set their own hours for class. And the “great recession” of 2008-2012 hit state universities particularly hard. Without the extra income generated by the online programs, our department would have had a much more difficult time than it did. We actually added faculty during that time while other departments were cutting.
As shown on my CV I taught 7 different courses online, each more than once. But does it work? Broadly speaking my sense is that it can and it did for me. My conventional lecture style where I tend to have limited direct interaction with each student translates well to a world of narrated powerpoint presentations and lots of prepared notes and handouts. And with the post-bac classes where students are learning a large new body of fairly factual information the use of computer-mediated objective exams seems to do the job. I am less convinced with graduate classes in an applied discipline like ours however. For faculty who enjoy lots of direct student interaction the use of Google hangouts and chat rooms (neither of which I use) and venues like that it may be much more workable. But to do it well (i.e., to make it comparable to on-campus classes) it likely becomes difficult if you expect to include more than 10 students per class. Such numbers make the economics of doing our program at the graduate level much less attractive.
Could this translate to Pacific? Other than a brief mention in a meeting with the Dean the topic of online teaching never came up in my job interview at Pacific. In hindsight my experience was probably a feather in my cap for being hired. As it turned out one of my classes in spring 2014 had to be canceled due to low enrollment; I was not surprised when I was quickly assigned the job of developing a proposal for Pacific to begin offering its CSD post-bac courses online. The basic proposal has been developed and I expect to have the first course developed and available for students for spring 2015. We’ll see how it goes.
My Teaching at Pacific
Coming to a brand new program has proven interesting. There have been no major surprises, but one broad issue that came up relative to my teaching is something specific to the CSD program at Pacific; it is a SCSD policy to use what might be called competency-based accountability (my term). This was a new concept for me. At previous institutions students were judged to have met the clinical training competencies that the class was supposed to incorporate if they passed the class (i.e., if they earned a final course grade of at least a B-). It is a policy in SCSD that any time any student scores below 80% on any element of the class (i.e., any assignment, project, quiz, exam or paper), the instructor and the student are to meet and develop a plan to remediate the low performance. This posed a bit of a psychological challenge for me relative to my teaching. I initially saw it as simply extra work for everyone, and it took me a while to buy into it. But I now realize the value in making sure the students have achieved a minimum level of mastery for all aspects of the course.
Relative to my specific courses at Pacific I offer the following. First I present below a table which summarizes the numerical scores from the student evaluations I have received for the three classes I have taught during my brief time at Pacific:
| CSD 201 | CSD 503 | CSD 517 | |
| n | 15 | 34 | 27 |
| Expected grade | 3.4 | 3.88 | 3.89 |
| Your level of participation | 2.47 | 2.03 | 2.07 |
| Course as a whole | 2.73 | 1.88 | 2 |
| Course organization | 2.33 | 1.42 | 1.56 |
| Relevance and usefulness of content | 1.8 | 1.24 | 1.56 |
| Evaluations and assessments | 3.07 | 1.97 | 1.78 |
| Course syllabus | 2.53 | 1.64 | 1.48 |
| Effectiveness of readings | 2.67 | 1.97 | 1.78 |
| Relevance of assignments | 2.54 | 1.64 | 1.59 |
| Use of assignments to encourage exploration and understanding | 3.15 | 1.94 | 1.85 |
| Clarity of assignments | 2.31 | 1.58 | 1.74 |
| Clarity of student responsibilities | 2.4 | 1.42 | 1.54 |
| Difficulty of material / concepts | 2.4 | 2.91 | 3.15 |
| Amount of effort | 2.67 | 3.15 | 3.26 |
| Amount of time | 2.67 | 3.21 | 3.33 |
| Instructor’s contribution | 2.53 | 1.55 | 1.44 |
| Instructor’s knowledge | 1.13 | 1 | 1.07 |
| Instructor’s facilitation of learning | 2.86 | 2.06 | 1.74 |
| Instructor’s enthusiasm | 2.64 | 1.88 | 1.85 |
| Instructor’s availability | 2.8 | 2.76 | 1.85 |
Two things to note here. First the ratings from CSD 503 and CSD 517 represent the same cohort of students. Second the ratings for CSD 201 are clearly not as good as those for the other two courses. Some of the discrepancy is discussed below.
See also the raw data for each of the courses:
I then offer the following relative to each specific course. Note that this is adapted slightly from my 2013-14 self-reflection:
CSD 201 (Phonetics; fall). Syllabus here: CSD 201syl-2013
I consider this class to have been a success in that although I have taught it many times before at other institutions, this was the first time I had ever taught it for only 2 credits. I have always done it as either a 3 or 4 credit class. I was advised that it had originally been a 4 credit class but that a major section on acoustics and speech physiology was removed and become a separate class (CSD 203). My challenge was to condense the content to a bare minimum. I was able to do so for the purposes of this one semester, and was able to cover the basics. But I am sad to say that I feel the students who took this class were somewhat shortchanged due to the omission of several important topics. I also felt somewhat disconnected from the students and this is reflected in some of the student comments. Meeting only once a week meant I only saw the students 12 times. Fortunately I was able to convince my SCSD colleagues that this course needed to be more than 2 credits (because it should include developing both a detailed understanding of speech sound production and phonetic transcription skills), and because it needed to include a significant discussion of dialects which are not covered anywhere else in the curriculum. That led to the development of CSD 209. All future students in the UG minor and post-baccalaureate program will take the expanded CSD 209. CSD 201 has been removed from the curriculum.
Student reviews for the class were adequate but not great. Comments were not the most positive. This was not a huge surprise for me. Trying to cram so much material into a 2 credit class (despite having removed a lot of the content I usually cover) forced me to rush through much of it and not have the time to engage the students. Hopefully the expanded scope of the class will address most of the issues they raised.
CSD 503 (Speech Sound Disorders; fall). Syllabus here: CSD 503syl-2013
This is a class that I have historically taught as a senior UG class on the assumption that it would be followed by a graduate class which explored some of the major issues in more depth. Students in the Pacific undergraduate minor (and post-baccalaureate program) do not take such a course. Given that speech sound disorders make up as much as 60% of speech-language pathologist’s caseloads in the public schools, I was able to successfully convince my colleagues in SCSD of the need to add a more advanced course (CSD 517) to the curriculum. One dissatisfaction I encountered midway through the term was with grading for the course, which may not have been the best way to evaluate graduate students. I am rethinking this. The assignments I used generally worked well, but the strictly objective (multiple-choice, T/F, matching, fill in the blanks) quizzes and exams may need to be tweaked. This may not require as much integration of knowledge as it probably should for graduate students in such an applied discipline. Another challenge is (similar to CSD 517) to incorporate more applied activities into the class. I will be adding at least two lab sessions to the class.
Student reviews were again not a total surprise. As noted earlier my general style is a conventional lecture, and it appears to have been generally well received. I work hard to be organized without being too dry. I also try as much as possible to infuse clinical examples throughout the course. Adding the labs should be a welcome addition. The comments about limited discussion are well noted. I will need to rethink my approach somewhat, since I have been used to teaching this class to undergrads. I had assumed students would have less to discuss as this is one of the first classes CSD students take related to disorders, and they are not yet directly involved in clinic. Clearly that was a mistaken assumption on my part.
CSD 517 (Adv. Issues in Speech Sound Disorders; spring). Syllabus here: CSD 517syl-2014
This class was added to the graduate curriculum (as noted above) and represents the typical graduate class that I have taught at other institutions. In this case I was especially pleased by how the class went. Previously I felt constrained by students coming in from other institutions who had taken the UG class from someone else. As such they would not be familiar with my framework for approaching the topic. In the current class I felt I was able to get better discussions going in class, because all the students in 517 had taken 503 from me the previous term. One additional positive result of this is that I realized part-way through the term that I am now better able integrate the course content across the two courses; that also means I won’t have to repeat myself so much. A somewhat bigger challenge I faced was something that I picked up from my new and younger colleagues; that is the need to incorporate class assignments and activities that are much more applied. Our clinical model (with no in-house clinic) means I can’t rely as much on students all getting a similar basic application model outside of class. While I was unable to do much with that this term, I have already thought of a way to do it. There is a speech sample analysis project that I have the students do, and my plan is to expand the scope of the project to include goal-setting and treatment planning. I may yet add other elements.
Relative to student reviews this was exactly the same cohort as took CSD 503 in fall term, so it is not surprising that the comments were similar. The comments about not seeing applied examples is a valid one. I don’t have any of my own videos to show, but the text I use includes video examples for many of the chapters. I had planned to show more of them but felt somewhat rushed in the second half of the term. Rebalancing the content between CSD 503 and CSD 517 should help by removing some of the redundancy between the two courses.
My Load
To the casual observer the above list of courses would seem like a light load. While true it should be noted that my complete teaching load has not been fully resolved until recently. Some of that reflects the fact that our program is so new and the curriculum itself has been in some flux. I was apparently the last of the full complement of faculty to be hired and we appear to have mostly settled what the program will include at least for now. As for my load, I was hired in large part because of my particular expertise in phonetics and speech sound disorders. In 2013-14 that is what I taught and that will not change. But some additional courses have been added. Partly because of my personal interest in multicultural issues I am now teaching CSD 505 Seminar on Diversity CSD 505syl-2014-b. And in spring 2015 I will take over teaching CSD 301 Professional Orientation (a class similar to one I taught at Tennessee: ASP 499). Thus my load going forward will be:
FALL TERM: CSD 209 Clinical Phonetics (4 credits); CSD 503 Speech Sound Disorders (3 credits); CSD 505 Seminar on Diversity (1 credit; 2 sections)
SPRING TERM: CSD 301 Professional Orientation to Communication Sciences and Disorders (2 credits); CSD 517 Adv. Issues In Speech Sound Disorders (2 credits)
Peer Review of Teaching
I will readily admit that having someone else evaluate my teaching makes me nervous. This is especially the case now that I am (for the first time) working within a college where many of my colleagues are teaching “professionals”. I have only ever allowed such reviews when absolutely required to do so and have always done it by videotaping myself in class rather than having a live colleague in the classroom.
This past spring (2014) I videotaped one of my lectures in CSD 517 and asked a colleague at the University of Montana who shares my particular specialty to write a review based on the video. My goal was to have someone who could evaluate both my overall approach and my ability to deal with the specific content at the same time. Here it is:
flipsen 2014 peer review glaspey
The only other reviews I’ve had done were while I was at the University of Tennessee (no peer reviews were required during my time at ISU). Although not strictly required at Tennessee I did them because of a strong recommendation from the Provost that all faculty include them. They were both done by the same colleague based on two observations about 6 months apart. They were also done from video recordings:
Flipsen-TeachingReview-03-24-04
Flipsen-TeachingReview-09-20-04
Evidence of Student Learning
Here are some examples from each element of each of my Pacific courses taught thus far:
CSD 201
CSD 503
CSD 517