Two years ago, Michael Brown approached the podium in Kane Hall to teach an introductory geography course. He stared out at a sea of faces—about 500 of them—and wondered how he would hold their attention for ten weeks.

Things went downhill from there.

“It was just a nightmare,” recalls Brown, assistant professor of geography, who had recently arrived at the UW. “My smaller classes were going great, but the lecture course . . . it was awful. At the end of the quarter, students rated me in the bottom one percent of all faculty. I could only go up.”

When Brown was assigned to teach the course again two quarters later, he knew he had to do something to improve the course and his attitude. He contacted colleagues and campus resources for guidance and returned autumn quarter with a substantially revised course. It paid off.

"Not only were my student evaluations very high this time, but I enjoyed teaching the class,” says Brown. “The students learned more, and so did I.”

Brown’s successful efforts to improve his lecture course are inspirational but not unique. Across the College, many faculty struggle with the questions, “Can I improve my teaching? Is there a better way for students to learn this material?” Sometimes the changes they make are subtle and incremental. Other times they rebuild a course from the ground up. Either way, the goal is to help students learn more effectively.

Michael Brown: Ditching the Textbook
How did Michael Brown magically transform Geography 100? No magic. Just hard work.

Michael Brown

Brown first contacted the UW’s Center for Instructional Development and Research (CIDR), which works with faculty to improve instruction on campus. Angela Linse, then on the CIDR staff, observed Brown’s class and interviewed students in depth about their experience with the course. Then she shared her findings with Brown.

“She helped me so much,” recalls Brown. “She reminded me that it was my course and that I shouldn’t let the textbook define what an introduction to geography could be.”

Linse also helped Brown see things from the students’ perspective. “I learned that packing in too much material, especially in a large lecture setting, is just overwhelming for them,” explains Brown. “In this case, less is more.”

Brown also sought advice from colleagues teaching large classes in other departments, who met regularly to share ideas. “I wanted the peer support, and I welcomed the opportunity to learn tricks of the trade,” says Brown, who credits the group with changing his attitude about large classes. “I saw that there are people on this campus who are teaching large classes and teaching them well and enjoying it.”

Having collected all this information, Brown spent his summer revising the course. He altered the content to reflect what geographers are talking about today—the political, economic, and cultural restructuring of the globe over the last 30 years—rather than teaching from the textbook. By autumn quarter, he was ready to face 500 faces in Kane Hall with confidence.

“The first day back, I walked in and there was a PC at the lectern,” Brown recalls. “Turns out the UW was experimenting with technology in some classes. I asked if I could use it, and when I was told I could, that added a whole new dimension to the class.”

Brown quickly created a website for the course—in the days before websites were common—which he used for class presentations and for providing information outside of class.

“I’d do the web material for each class session one week beforehand,” he recalls. “At that point, it became more of a fun challenge for me. I’d think, ‘OK, where can I go on the web to find examples or learn more?’ And it made the material feel very current to students. Their response was very positive.”

With all the revisions he made in the course, which does Brown think led to the dramatic increase in student ratings? It comes down to the basics, he says. “Honestly, I think a lot of it was just the effort I put in,” he says. “Students recognized and really appreciated that I put in effort, and they could see that I was excited by the material. That really turned things around.”

Monty McGovern: Getting to Know Your Audience
For Monty McGovern, professor of mathematics, putting in effort wasn’t enough. “I was always committed to teaching and I tried different approaches, but students never seemed to respond,” says McGovern. “Everything I tried seemed to backfire.” It got so bad that McGovern “felt a sense of dread each year when the envelopes with the student ratings arrived.”

	Monty McGovern

Still, it took years for McGovern to seek help with his teaching. He says his delay is probably due, in part, to his chosen discipline—mathematics. “There is a strong tradition in math that people tend to be fiercely independent,” he explains. “We feel like we should be able to work out our problems ourselves.”

McGovern finally sought help when he faced a review for promotion. CIDR staff member Karen Freisen videotaped one of McGovern’s classes and spoke with students about their experience in the course.

“You get comments on the written evaluations every quarter, but those tend to be completely unfocused,” says McGovern. “Students were not articulate about their frustrations. With Karen serving as a facilitator, the information was much more useful.”

McGovern also attended a workshop offered by the UW’s Institute for Teaching Excellence, at which faculty discussed teaching projects they wanted to pursue. “I got some specific ideas there,” he says. “One simple one was to have students write down why they are taking the course on the first day. That information now influences my choice of material. If I know students have an interest in a certain field, I can choose examples relating to that field,” he says.

McGovern also is more attuned to the cues students give during class and teaches the material from their point of view. “Before, I focused too much on content—on what I was going to say. Now I try to split it 50/50 between content and audience. I try to adapt the content to the audience.”

All of these changes led the Department of Mathematics to ask McGovern to serve on a recently formed committee on teaching quality. McGovern was more than willing. “In the past, there has been a perceived indifference to teaching in this department,” McGovern admits. “We’ve really been trying to change that. I’ve definitely seen a change in the last few years.”

Merrill Hille: A Natural Evolution
For Merrill Hille, professor of zoology, student evaluations were not a factor in making course revisions. Feedback from students was positive, and the department was satisfied with her approach. But when students in her 400-level cell biology class responded enthusiastically to a specific assignment, Hille saw possibilities for improving the class.

	Merrill Hille (second from left) with students in her zoology course..

The assignment was to have students critically analyze a published scientific research paper. She’d had students do this before, but this paper was a bit different: the author provided data but offered no conclusion—no interpretation of why the findings might be important.

“The author offered just the facts, but reviewers for Science magazine wrote about why the paper was so important,” recalls Hille. “So I had students read the paper and, working in groups, come up with their own interpretation. I had to push them to see that there was a more significant point in the paper than the author was willing to suggest. And they got it.”

Recognizing how the project challenged her students, Hille created other assignments in which she provided a scientist’s data and methods but not the scientist’s conclusions. She asked students to write up their own conclusions based on the data.

“I call these assignments ‘virtual experiments,’” says Hille, “because students pretend they went into the lab and got this data and now they need to figure out what it all means. They are essentially becoming scientists.”

In the beginning Hille assigned one ‘virtual experiment’ each quarter and lectured the rest of the time, but as she witnessed the assignment’s effectiveness she began to lecture less and add more experiments. “They turned out to be the keystone of the course,” she says. “It was what students enjoyed the most and what helped them think best.”

In a recent course evaluation, one student wrote, “I have learned more in this class than in any class I have ever taken.” Others offer similar comments, praising Hille’s approach.

“I can’t cover as much material, but I’m covering it in a depth they haven’t had before,” Hille says. “And I’m covering it in such a way that the concepts they learn can be used in other courses. I just can’t teach any other way anymore. I really like students to think on their own.”

Lisa Coutu: Shrinking the Class with Technology
Lisa Coutu, a lecturer in the Department of Speech Communication, also wanted students to think on their own. But teaching an introductory course with up to 280 students and only one teaching assistant, she knew that even discussion sections were an impossibility. So she lectured five days a week.

“My evaluations were pretty good, but I was getting feedback from students that they wanted opportunities for discussion in small groups,” says Coutu, “and that just wasn’t possible.”

Lisa Coutu

During a collegium on large class instruction, offered by the UW Office of Undergraduate Education, Coutu heard dozens of good ideas about how to make things better in large classes. At the end of the retreat, George Bridges, associate dean of undergraduate education and associate vice provost, asked participants to make proposals for implementing something they had seen that weekend that inspired them. Coutu jumped at the chance.

“The folks from UWired had shown us what could be done with technology,” she recalls. “They had the tools and infrastructure to make student engagement of instruction online really easy. So I proposed using online exercises and discussion boards to encourage students to engage the material more actively.”

Based on Coutu’s proposal, the Office of Undergraduate Education funded two TAs for one quarter and provided a small stipend to help Coutu revise the course. “That was a huge gift,” she says. “It made me feel like the UW was supporting my efforts.”

Now Coutu’s introductory course meets four days each week. The fifth day is for students to complete assigned online exercises and discussions, which the TAs have been instrumental in designing and monitoring.

The exercises require students to apply concepts introduced in class. For example, after talking about ethos, pathos, and logos in class, the online exercise was to explain and apply those concepts to George W. Bush’s inauguration speech.

For the online discussion board, which Coutu describes as “sort of a virtual quiz section,” Coutu provides a question and requires that students discuss it online. She divides them into six groups with 40 students per group, with a TA monitoring each discussion.

“I give them guidelines about what constitutes a substantive answer and then I let them loose,” she says. “But they can’t just get on there, say what they think, and sign off. They have to evidence some knowledge of course concepts and they have to link their comments to what others have been saying and add to it. And they have to participate in each discussion board at least twice.”

Coutu has been impressed with the impact of the online assignments. “The students are really making an effort to link with each other and to learn from each other,” she says. “And I know students feel more engaged. They have commented about how much they have learned from doing this work online.”

While she was revising her course, Coutu figures she spent 40 hours per week on the class. Now her schedule is back to normal. “Setting this up was a huge amount of work,” admits Coutu, “but it was worth it. I’m no candidate for sainthood. I did this because it makes my life better. If I’m enjoying what I’m doing in the classroom and students are learning, then I’m doing my job well.”

And, Coutu emphasizes, she’s not alone. “A lot of faculty at the UW are putting in considerable time and effort to make students’ education richer,” she says. “I know people don’t always hear about their efforts. But the students know, and that’s what really matters.”

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When Political Science Professor Anthony Gill began teaching at the UW, his teaching evaluations were poor. But soon he found his own style and received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999.

Transforming the Curriculum to Reflect Diversity
Through the Curriculum Transformation Project, faculty and students work together to incorporate the study of race, class, gender, and ethnicity into UW courses.

[Winter/Spring 2001 - Table of Contents]