Teaching
Kirtly Parker Jones, PhD
S. Mckenzie Skiles, PhD
S. Mckenzie Skiles, PhD also describes how she finds teaching incredibly fulfilling. She loves watching her undergraduate and graduate students grow in their scientific thinking and understanding of the world around them.
Cynthia Burrows, PhD
Cynthia Burrows, PhD also cites a young environment and constant student turnover as her reason for teaching at a university before her career took a research-oriented turn. It seems that even as educators, there is still learning to be done.
However, there are unique challenges when it comes to teaching. Especially within the first year that students arrive at institutions of higher learning. Students might need different amounts of time or support in order to make the necessary transition from secondary education to college. Sometimes the class size of introductory courses make it difficult for professors to directly address the needs of every student.
And then, you know, the unpleasant part is we have to give exams and we have to give grades at the end. So that is always an ongoing challenge... I mean, the good students can also can often do well, no matter who the instructor is and what the method is, whether it's traditional lectures or flip classroom, a good student will almost always do well. And a poor student can really struggle in those.
But you know, on the other hand, if you teach to the lower tier of the class then you are, maybe you risk losing the upper tier of the class, who are the great students that you want to motivate, right? You want to inspire [them] to go on and do other things. So finding that balance between extremes is really challenging, uh. But what I like about it is that every once in a while there is a personal interaction that really pays off."
Large and often less personal class sizes, along with the new social environment of a university or college may lead to a student falling behind in a class, even if they did well in traditional learning environments prior to entering college. Chemical Education researcher Regina Frey has studied different styles of learning in regards to this problem, and suggests that a growth mindset is very useful in helping underrepresented or minority students succeed. A growth mindset is a way of viewing intelligence or understanding of material not as a fixed limit among students, but rather as a constant, evolving practice. By using the growth mindset in a random-assignment classroom experiment among entry-level college students who were taking General Chemisty 1, Frey and her partners found that achievement gaps between minority and majority students were minimized, or in some cases, completely eliminated.
Even educators themselves can learn from this practice—Dr. Burrows recounts a very positive experience with a teacher's assistant in graduate school that influenced her flexibility in approaching problems she didn't understand immediately. While she does not explicitly mention a growth mindset intervention, it seems this method is useful even when it is not purposefully implemented by name. A growth mindset is important because it can encourage students to achieve, especially women or students who have historically been told they are less capable and intelligent than other students.
And the fact is you probably do know the answer. And do you know, that did a world of good for me, that approach. I realized that, yeah, I probably do know the answer in the end, even though my first response may well have been, I don't know. Oh my gosh. But that, that helped me a lot, even in, you know, a lot of research areas where someone will ask a question and you're thinking: oh, I never thought about that before. But instead of saying that, you kind of restate the question and then go on to say, well, here's what I do know about that area. And therefore, maybe I can answer this question, you know? So, so that was pretty helpful."
When this growth mindset is paired with a challenging curriculum and a supportive environment, women and other minorities have the opportunity to succeed in STEM fields. Dr. Holly Sebahar found that this teaching philosophy gave her the tools she needed to succeed when she was in school, and now, she uses this philosophy with her own students.
I think I got the most out of the class when I was really challenged when the bar was set extremely high, maybe higher than I thought I could get over it. I think that was the ideal place, […] just barely above where I considered myself having the potential to reach […] then, having a really supportive environment of, you know, the teacher creating an environment which said, ‘I want you to succeed, I want you to do well’ [...] then providing the resources to actually make that possible. So [creating] a challenge but providing the support network so that as many students as possible can kind of make it to that end goal.
You know, I do my best to try to challenge students enough, but not too much, not too little. I think there's a sweet spot in there where you feel like [...] it's hard, but doable, right? So it's sometimes– even during the semester, I have to really change the way I'm writing exams or worksheets depending on this specific class, right? [...] How well are they taking in this information? It might be different than the one before.
-Holly Sebahar, PhD
Teaching is a massive accomplishment in any academic’s life. The required mastery of a subject is a huge feat that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. For some women, incorrect suffixes and the prioritization of underqualified males as an alternative to a female academic are a reality to the profession. Dr. McKenzie Skiles says,
Yeah, I think that all women professors probably get not being recognized the same as our male colleagues. And this is usually small things like not being called Dr. Skiles or Professor Skiles but being called Ms. Skiles. And that I try not to let that bother me too much but you just wish that students would just not treat women and men professors differently but it's something that I just try to politely correct or just say at the beginning of the semester, I prefer to be called Doctor or Professor Skiles or just McKenzie. They'll use either one of those. Just call me by my first name.
The comfort level of people being willing to ask for help or like trust that you can provide help has been an interesting aspect of this that I didn't really expect. I will sometimes have a male TA and students will ask the male TA for help before me, they're like, oh, well, I just thought he would be able to help me. And I don't know if that's a perception of like maybe they're asking him because they think that he has more time, but also I wonder if they're asking him because he’s a male. So it's hard to like really understand where that's coming from. But I do feel like there's some differences in the way that female professors are treated by students and not all students but enough for it to be obvious to me.
-S. McKenzie Skiles, PhD
These challenges illustrate a lack of respect for female professors, especially when comparing Sikes’ academic experience with that of her male TA. Her expression of a noticed deficit between the respect given to male and female academics is alarming and illustrative of a patriarchal system.
Page written and researched by Abigayle Kendall, Kaylee Martin, Rachel Nelson, Eva Quintus-Bosz. Edited by Simon Lee and Lily Jones.