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Joy of Teaching

Why do some long-time faculty members continue to take delight in classroom teaching while others come to view it as a chore?

Finding and keeping a sense of joy, for some professors, may derive from circumstance, at least in part—being at a school that shares their educational agenda, teaching highly motivated students, and having congenial colleagues—but it can also be a product of attitude, philosophy, choice, and action. At this year’s Spring Teaching Forum, participants shared how they have found and preserved their own joy as teachers, sometimes despite setbacks and challenges.

Bill Rando, director of the Graduate Teaching Center, pointed out, “This year’s forum, ‘Finding the Joy of Teaching,’ concentrated on the experience of the teacher—a departure from previous events and from most of what the GTC does, which is to focus on enhancing the learning of students.”

After introductory remarks by Rando and Graduate School Dean Jon Butler, the keynote address was presented by Yale Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Stephen Stearns.

In his talk, adapted from his essay, “Designs for Learning,” posted online at www.eeb.yale.edu/stearns/designs.htm, Stearns asserts, “Teaching matters deeply both to the students who experience it and to the scholars who do it, for it endows the academic life with a type of meaning not available in research (which has other important rewards)....Good teaching is based on understanding how people learn: people learn best when they take ownership of and responsibility for their own education as active agents rather than passive recipients....

“The aim of teaching intellectuals is to help them to become colleagues as rapidly as possible. Why do I want to help my students become colleagues as fast as possible? Well, we each have only about 4–6 decades of mature rationality in which to create a valued life, and it goes by quickly. Value is not given to us. We create it by investing time, energy, and emotion into things we choose for ourselves. The sooner we start, and the more wisely we choose and invest, the more years we can have doing things that we value. I want my students to lead valued and valuable lives, and they cannot begin to do so until they learn to take risks, make choices, and live with consequences. “It is also more fun to interact with colleagues. Students who are inspired and confident pose questions and challenge assumptions in ways that make me see fresh angles and new insights. It is only when they start teaching me that I know that I have started to succeed at teaching them....

“The implicit messages of the social structure of a course are just as powerful in transforming students as intellectual content. And the implicit messages conveyed by the structure of an educational institution leave imprints on its students that are just as deep and as lasting as those left by any course or professor. Not all those imprints are intended, and some may come as unpleasant surprises to those who run the institutions. They deserve analysis....

“The art of teaching consists at least in part of designing a structure that is effective for learning because it exploits the innate interests and motivations of students, then knowing when to shut up and get out of the way.”

Stearns earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Yale, his master’s from the University of Wisconsin, and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. After a postdoc at U.C. Berkeley and a five-year-stint teaching at Reed College, he moved to Switzerland, where he taught zoology at the University of Basel for 17 years. In 2000, he returned to Yale, where he is the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Stearns’ research focuses on evolutionary genetics and evolutionary medicine.

The Teaching Forum panel discussion featured David H. Smith, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and senior lecturer in political science; Karla Britton, lecturer in the School of Architecture; and Jennifer Frederick, associate director of the Graduate Teaching Center. Each participant spoke on the topic of the day, and then took questions from the audience.

Smith described two kinds of joy that he has experienced in his 40 years in the classroom: the joy of performing a task well—communicating information clearly and conveying its importance—and the satisfaction of building social relationships with students. “You’ve got to get to know your students,” he urged. “That makes it much easier to enjoy the experience of teaching.” Based on a long-ago confrontation with a student who said, “Do you realize just how intimidating you can be?,” he recommended “showing one’s fallibility” as a way to diminish the “power differential” between students and professors.

Smith joined the faculty at Yale in 2007. Prior to that, he taught at Indiana University from 1967 to 2003, serving as chair of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. A Yale alumnus, Smith earned a B.D. from the Divinity School and a Ph.D. from Princeton.

Britton acknowledged that finding joy in teaching was unpredictable and that her own pleasure in the topic she was teaching wouldn’t necessarily be echoed by her students. She encouraged the audience to “try to appeal to as wide a public as possible,” and to connect to the “society of scholars, colleagues with whom you want to belong.” Britton earned her m.a. from Columbia and her Ph.D. from Harvard. Before coming to Yale, she taught at Columbia and directed that university’s New York/Paris program.

“Teaching has always been what energizes me,” Frederick said. She recalled an eye-opening moment she experienced at the University of Bridgeport, where she held her first tenure-track appointment and was teaching an accelerated course in organic chemistry. A student came to her after class one day and said, “This is a good course, but you should smile more.” Suddenly she realized, “Oh! This is a roomful of people!” After that, teaching became more of a two-way street. She created ways for students to interact more and demonstrate what they had learned. When they made mistakes, she could see what they didn’t understand.

A key source of joy for Frederick is the need to continually update her courses to include scientific developments and relevant events in the news. “I love teaching a subject that extends from the makeup of our cells to world news headlines. It keeps my teaching fresh,” she said. “It’s not as much work to teach when you’re having fun,” she observed, but noted that concentrating on pedagogy “is not easy in a culture that values publications over teaching.”

After completing her Ph.D. at Yale, Frederick was a postdoctoral fellow at Neurogen Corporation and then taught chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Bridgeport and Western Connecticut State University. She returned to Yale in 2007 to assume her present position in the Graduate School.

An Innovation Fair followed the panel discussion, at which presenters demonstrated and discussed interesting classroom approaches and technology likely to engage learners and assist them in mastering information and skills. Participants included the Graduate Teaching Center, the Collaborative Learning Center, the Instructional Innovation Internship Program, Digital Commons, the Library Research Education Program, Teach for America, and the Resource Office on Disabilities.

“Whether graduate students came to the Spring Teaching Forum looking for innovations to help infuse joy into their own classroom or simply to reflect on their teaching in light of others’ experiences, participants got the message that joy can be a central element of teaching,” said Frederick.

Committee chair for this year’s Spring Teaching Forum was Sarah Rabbitt (Psychology) and for the Innovation Fair, Andy Cantrell (Astronomy). Other members of the team were Neil Arner (Religious Studies), Susie Bedikian (Physics), and Daryn David (Psychology).

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