Imagine sitting in a fluid dynamics course as an undergraduate biomedical engineering student.  What teaching techniques could your instructor use to keep you engaged?  Students of Professor Joe Bull can tell you quite a bit about that question--and about great teaching in general.  In 2012 Professor Bull was honored with an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship, an award that recognizes outstanding undergraduate education at University of Michigan. 

Bull’s students might tell you that...

• he organizes each of his lectures around a practical problem that they can readily recognize as relevant to their everyday lives. Whereas many initially dread a course based around, say, the principles of biofluid dynamics, they quickly come to enjoy his clear lectures about how blood moves through chambers of the heart.
• his lectures are sometimes a "choose your own adventure" game, as he comes in with more than one outline prepared and decides upon the direction based on the questions students pose.
• he uses technology to stay connected with students. For example, during a term with demading travel obligations, he did not want to decrease his accessibility to students, so he used Google+ Hangouts to hold office hours.

Search committees around the country are asking:  "What's your philosophy?"  Research shows that a majority of academic search committees, at all kinds of institutions, ask for a statement of teaching philosophy at some point during the application process--sometimes as a part of the initial application, and sometimes later, after the selection committee has narrowed the field of candidates.  Whether you're in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, odds are good that you'll need such a statement as part of your dossier if you're planning an academic job search.  

What can you do to make sure your teaching philosophy is an asset in your application? CRLT has many resources to help you develop and refine your statement. 

• An occasional paper by CRLT's Matt Kaplan and Deb Meizlish highlights their research on the importance of teaching philosophy statements to search committees, provides tips for getting started writing, and includes a rubric to evaluate your statement. 
• Our collection of teaching philosophies written by graduate students and post-docs at U-M includes examples from humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. 
• Additional resources on writing your teaching philosophy can be found here. 

I've written it -- what's next?

If you have a solid draft and would like to make it more effective, you may be interested in attending "Revising Your Teaching Philosophy," a CRLT workshop on November 7, 2012. This workshop is especially useful if you are headed for the academic job market within the next year.

Today's AnnArbor.com features a story about U-M faculty who are providing feedback on student writing via video. Using a technique called screencasting, instructors create a personalized video for each student paper. Free software records whatever is on the instructor's computer screen, along with their verbal comments, so instructors can open a student's paper, talk though its strengths, make suggestions for improvement, even pull up further resources on their computer screen, and then send the video directly to the student.

Instructors say that making feedback videos takes about the same amount of time as traditional grading with written comments--and may even save time. Many students say that video feedback is more personal and easier to understand than written comments. 

The story features comments from several instructors using the technique and reactions from their students. You can also see an example of a screencast video and learn about free screencasting software. Read the full story here. 

Related CRLT Resources: Creating and providing feedback on writing assignments

Would you like to discuss screencasting in your course? Request a consultation

Another example of screencast use at U-M: Joanna Mirecki Millunchick, Winner of 2012 Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize

How can a lecturer engage an auditorium full of undergraduates in analyzing the subtleties of a poem written more than 400 years ago?  That was one of the questions motivating Theresa Tinkle's teaching innovations in English 350, a course surveying literature written before 1660.  

Along with her team of GSIs, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Language and Literature set the goal of improving students' skills at literary analysis, and then they focused their teaching efforts on replicating the advantages of a small course in a large lecture setting.  The group creatively deployed technologies like iClickers and CTools online quizzes to ensure students completed readings and engaged actively with lectures.  And they created assignment sequences that allowed students intensive writing practice and provided individualized feedback (without significantly increasing anyone's grading load).  This combination of strategies resulted in significantly improved student skill with the complex task of close reading.