FA L L
2017
Out of the lab, into the classroom
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hat awkward period during which new professors might find themselves with unusable labs, few or no students to fill them, and a lot of time sitting behind a desk with their thoughts comes to an abrupt end in September. Overnight, the arrival of students wakes college campuses from their sleepy August state. On a picture-perfect September day in Evanston, hundreds of teenagers in purple “Class of ’20” T-shirts lined up across the street from a wrought iron arch, the emblematic gateway to Northwestern University. Parents hooked an arm around their new college freshman’s shoulders, posing for one last emotional family photo before a makeshift marching band ushered everyone to a welcome ceremony. An event organizer waved a pack of Kleenex at passersby, yelling, “Tissues? Anyone need tissues?” A few blocks north, inside the school’s “tech” building, Julia Kalow is oblivious to the purple parade going on outside. But the campus awakening has definitely spread to her group. She gestures at burgeoning signs of life in her labs. “We’re filling the central corridor now,” she notes with a satisfied nod. Kalow’s labs are spacious: 16 gleaming hoods that she inherited not because of some expectation of immediate output but because that’s all that were available when she joined the faculty. Much of the lab will be empty for a while; Kalow knows better than to try to grow too fast. Traces of her expanding group—by September, she had two graduate students, an undergrad, and a postdoctoral researcher—could be found throughout the space. Although students’ time was being frustratingly occupied by a weeks-long orientation, reactions were under way in the lab, and a few of the adjacent desks were strewn with stray papers and the occasional backpack. While the official start of the school year made the job feel more real, it also marked the arrival of an aspect of the job that strikes fear in the heart of many the novice professor: teaching. Unlike in the humanities, where graduate students commonly depend on teaching to support themselves, many chemists can get through their Ph.D. without putting in more than a year or two in a classroom. Often that experience is as a teaching assistant; they’ve never had to actually create a syllabus. To ease the transition, chemistry departments try to take it easy on their junior faculty during that first year. Many new professors are allowed to take on just one or two classes, often graduate-level courses in their area of expertise, rather than being thrown into a large lecture hall full of undergrads. Universities do offer optional teacher training, and some might even have a learning center where experts observe classes and provide feedback for how to do better. But by and large, folks are walking into a classroom with little more than a few days or weeks of guidance on how to do that aspect of the job. And although, as UCLA’s Nelson points out, “people who get this job are pretty well spoken in front of a crowd,” the ability to give a smooth talk about research might not directly translate to being a good teacher. “Being charismatic and smart is not enough,” he adds. Thinking back, Kalow realized it had been seven years since she’d last taught a course. “Teaching was hard as a grad student. I
wasn’t particularly good at it,” she says. Still, she was excited about her first course on organic reaction mechanisms, a class she wished she’d had as a grad student. Through Twitter, Kalow had stumbled upon a paper in Journal of Chemical Education in which two professors at the University of North Carolina laid out what she considered a brilliant syllabus for her graduate-level class. And she had at least a little bit of preparation for what lay ahead. A few weeks earlier, she, Lin, and Schmidt had all participated in the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative New Faculty Workshop, a twoday training meant to help early-career chemists with this daunting aspect of their job. Developed by Andrew Feig and Rory Waterman, chemists at Wayne State University and the University of Vermont, respectively, the course is meant to give professors a few tools to bring their
Schmidt’s prior experience teaching made her least anxious about that part of her new job. teaching into the 21st century. Students today are used to being taught using an “active learning” approach rather than simply being lectured at, Feig notes. Some new professors might never have even taken a class in that style. Although UCSD’s Schmidt wasn’t teaching her first quarter, she was excited about testing out that active learning approach in her classroom. In addition to the Cottrell workshop, she’d taken two syllabus-writing classes, including one focused purely on an interactive syllabus, while doing her postdoc at Princeton. And she had an edge over her peers: During college, Schmidt was a substitute math and science teacher at a middle school. “I got out of that nervous space about being in the classroom then,” she says. “If I can handle a class of seventh graders, I’m good.” Feig and his colleagues want early-career professors to be creative in their teaching, but their larger purpose is to show them how to be as efficient as they are effective. “You can spend all your time being a superb teacher, but your job is going to be relatively short,” Feig says. Indeed, one of the first things new professors realize is how much time teaching will suck out of their already busy schedule. “Even though you’re teaching a course that maybe you’ve taken before, no one really tells you how much time it takes to write a single one-hour lecture,” Vanderbilt’s Buchanan says. “It seems really simMAY 22, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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ple, like, ‘Oh, I can write a few weeks’ worth of lectures in an afternoon!’ ” In reality, one lecture might take an afternoon or longer. Part of that time is spent relearning concepts you haven’t thought about for years, Buchanan, who started out teaching a physical chemistry course, adds. The hope is that when a student lobs a question at you, “you’re not standing up there dumbfounded,” laughs Travis White, a new chemistry professor at Ohio University. After his first go-round teaching a graduate-level organic synthesis course, UCLA’s Nelson realized he would need to switch up his syllabus to better match his Kalow meets interests. He’d felt pressured to cover certain material with a first-year that was outside his comfort zone, and it hadn’t gone graduate student well. “I don’t know how to describe how many ways it who joined her lab was a disaster,” he says. in November. That initial course load and its attendant anxieties come just as all the other responsibilities of the job are ramping up. Departmental meetings abound, and hiring or admisBecause quarters go by fast, Kalow wanted to squeeze in a good sions committees are suddenly in full swing. That unfettered time assessment for students before the deadline to drop the class. But in the lab that these new professors not too long ago enjoyed as it turned out her first test was way too hard; afterward, her class a postdoc? That’s a thing of the past. Keeping up with everything winnowed down to 18 people. That was fine—she’d had quite a few requires a degree of organization that goes beyond what some have undergraduates in the class—but Kalow also knew she’d need to get previously experienced. better at judging the difficulty of the material. As the school year got under way at Cornell, Lin was feeling the Although classes present a challenge, many new professors pressure of juggling so many different and new responsibilities. are actually keen to teach in that first half of the year. Their secret “Right now, it’s from teaching,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been workstrategy? To use that regular face time with as-yet untethered grading every day, but I’m not getting things done.” uate students to recruit one or two for their group. Lin taught three times in graduate school—a lab course and twice Every new professor walks onto campus with a target number of leading a two-hour-long discussion section for a sophomore-level graduate students they’d like to add to their team. Students will alorganic chemistry class—an experience he looks back on fondly. ways gravitate to the big-name professors, but new professors hope But he was having trouble pacing his lectures and figuring out they can convince a few aspiring researchers to take a risk with a how to get students excited about learning. “It’s funny—maybe it’s new lab. because the way I teach isn’t efficient enough—but the students Somewhere between late October and Thanksgiving, depending haven’t been interactive.” Their lack of participation was making on the school, most graduate students have committed to a group. it hard for Lin to gauge whether they actually understood the By Nov. 1, Lin had three new first-years in his group; by Thanksgivmaterial. ing, Kalow had added two—one of whom she thinks was compelled Clearly an analytical thinker, Lin asked some senior colleagues to to join after her class—plus a second-year graduate student who sit in on his class to get an outside perspective on his teaching skills. had transferred to her team in mid-September. He hoped their honest feedback, no matter how brutal, would help Both were pleased with the outcome, but that first go-round at him be better at this job. And it did. As the semester progressed, he recruitment can be tricky. Osvaldo Gutierrez, who started at Unistarted to relax in front of the class. versity of Maryland, College Park, in June, had underestimated the By mid-quarter, Kalow was starting to find her groove—at least difficulty of selling his science to prospective students. “That’s the when it came to preparing for class. The magic number of pages of one thing I don’t think I was prepared for at all. I knew how to mennotes to fill an 80-minute lecture? Seven. The best number of Powtor, but not recruit,” he says. erPoint slides to include in a class? Zero. She had quickly realized In some instances, the ability to recruit students is simply out of that slides took way too long to prepare and the hands of a new professor. UCSD had a switched to primarily using the blackboard small incoming crop of Ph.D. candidates— to teach. about 25% fewer students than in a typical That isn’t to say everything was going year there, just and just two of whom perfectly. Kalow laughs thinking about the planned to focus on organic chemistry. As a many moments that she plans to do difconsequence, Schmidt didn’t get any firstferently next time around. A few teaching year graduate students. experiments fell flat, and she was keeping But a second-year had transferred to notes about the parts of her course that her team, which also included a master’s didn’t go over well. student and two undergrads. And another Nearly every new professor was realizing master’s student planned to do a rotation in how tough it is to write a reasonable exam. her lab the next quarter. It requires stepping outside your own deep The smaller-than-expected group affectknowledge of a subject and considering ed how she balanced her time. “Because I the different levels of training and interest don’t necessarily have the immediate group sitting in the chairs each week. Even though that I envisioned, I have taken on a lot more the questions seem totally obvious to you, projects for myself than I probably would students simply might not get it. —Lauren Buchanan, Vanderbilt University have otherwise,” she says.
“Even though you’re teaching a course that maybe you’ve taken before, no one really tells you how much time it takes to write a single one-hour lecture.”
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | MAY 22, 2017
