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Hello %$firstname$%! We’re so pleased to offer you an article from our lead associate coach, Professor Emerita of Sociology and long-time faculty developer, Susanne Morgan. If anyone is an expert on teaching, Susanne is it! Warmly, Gina
Teach Faster; Write More! by Susanne Morgan
Teaching Takes Time that You Could Use for Writing It is easy to spend time on teaching and teaching prep. But how much time should be spent on these activities? It’s easy to let teaching take up way too much of your time. Let’s look at it from the point of view of Stephen Covey’s Time Matrix, which you can find in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The elegant chart he created has been filled in below with examples from academic life. He makes a distinction between important work, which has no short-term deadline but really matters for you in the long run, and urgent work, which usually involves other people tapping their feet and waiting for you to produce something by a certain date. Teaching is important work: For grad students who have the opportunity, it is critical career prep For many professors, it is the bottom line of evaluation for tenure or promotion For students, this is their chance to learn more about the important field that you teach! Teaching is usually urgent work, as there are always: Classes to prepare or improve Assignments to design and grade Students to see The trouble is, spending lots of time on teaching takes away from your writing time. Writing is extremely important – you MUST finish your dissertation to get your degree, you MUST publish enough in order to get tenure, you MUST write enough additional articles and books to get promotions or a better job. But (here is the important point,) writing is not nearly as urgent as teaching. Writing long projects typically falls in that “important but not urgent” corner, and in our daily activities it is often squeezed out by activities that are “important and urgent” and, sadly, ones that are “urgent but not important.” How to save time on grading What would you think if you knew that the leading book on grading, Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College … Begins with: “The way to save time, make every moment count… is to plan your grading from the moment you begin planning the course….” Asks “Why spend the time grading student work that doesn’t address your most important goals” Reminds you to ask yourself “Is the workload I am planning … feasible, reasonable, strategically placed, and sustainable?” What do Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson mean? They mean that you should focus on student learning goals for the course. They mean that you should say to yourself, “by the end of the course, I want my students to be able to…..” Focus on what students will learn to do, rather than on what you will do. Do you want to waste your time and your students time? Well, you ARE wasting their time if you give assignments that do not measure student progress toward these goals. If your goal relates to mastery of concepts and you assign open essays, you will spend a great deal of time reading the essays but not necessarily clearly identify whether they know the concepts. If your goal is critical thinking, and you assign tests that measure recall, you will spend a great deal of time creating the tests but not actually measure critical thinking skills. These authors suggest that good teaching requires a feasible workload. It is not good teaching to set assignments that are not sustainable. And, as we know well in Academic Ladder, you cannot work on your oh-so-important long-term writing projects if your teaching is taking an unreasonable amount of time! So the best teachers make grading as efficient and effective as they can. How to save time on class prep What would you think if you knew that the leading expert on faculty success …. Found that the best teachers spend LESS time than their less-successful peers? Advises you to “prepare for class before you feel ready?” It’s true! How do those faculty members do it? Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus, whose studies on academic writing underlie Academic Ladder’s approach, also studied new professors. His research found that successful new teachers use “…simple, effective strategies.... to work efficiently….” They prepare for classes in brief, regular sessions. They spend only 2 hours preparing for each one hour in class, unlike their peers who spend 4 hours for each class hour. They report short, more frequent, planning sessions (e.g. break the 2 hours of prep into 2 one-hour sessions), so that ideas about the class float in their heads between sessions. To learn from successful faculty, remember that good content knowledge is not the same as good teaching. You probably already know the content very well. Why waste your time learning even more? Your primary goal is student learning, and you should plan each class period around a limited set of learning goals for the students. For each class, begin with the two or three main objectives of the class period, and then recall what assignments you’ve planned to measure learning in that area. Then think, “How can I help students to succeed on that assignment?” There is the core of your class plan. What combination of lecture, student interaction, and student feedback will help the students learn that material? Sure, you do not feel ready. But when you let go of telling the students everything you know about the topic, you notice when they are confused or inactive. When you focus on today’s main learning goals, you will end class with a direction for the next class. Start today to save time on teaching! You can use that precious time for your important, but not urgent, writing project! Resources: Web resources IDEA Center: theideacenter.org. The Knowledge Base includes very brief articles on many aspects of teaching. Especially relevant to this article are: IDEA Paper No. 42, Fink, Integrated Course Design POD-IDEA Notes: Instruction. Item #12: Walvoord, “Giving tests and projects that convey the most important points of the course” Boice, Robert. (2000). Advice for new faculty members: Nihil nimus. Needham Heights MA: Allyn and Bacon. Covey, Stephen R. (2004). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Revised ed.). New York: Free Press. Walvoord, Barbara E., & Anderson, Virginia Johnson. (2010). Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College (second ed.). San Francisco Jossey-Bass. **Warning: Shameless Plug Alert: Join the Academic Writing Club. It will give you the ongoing encouragement, gentle nudges, and a group of supportive colleagues to help you get clear that You are the experiment, and your behavior is the data. Joining the writing club will help you get real about your work and get on with it.
David Emblidge Publishing Advisor / Manuscript Consultant
David Emblidge launched his editorial career at Harvard University Press and moved on to Cambridge University Press, in New York, where he was a humanities acquisitions editor. He was executive editor also, for Continuum, a hybrid publisher of monographs and reference works. His editing career rests on solid academic training: BA, English, St. Lawrence Univ.; MA, English, Univ. of Virginia; Ph.D., American Studies, Univ. of Minnesota. David then transitioned to trade books for general readers, founding Berkshire House, a press that was eventually sold to WW Norton, one of America’s best publishers. Later, he ran David Emblidge -- Book Producer, a book-packaging firm, creating series for major publishing houses, and then served as Editor in Chief at The Mountaineers Books, in Seattle. Currently, David is a tenured Associate Professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Dept. at Emerson College, in Boston. He gives publishing courses in the MA in Publishing program. His publishing workshops have been presented at the Univ. of Virginia, Univ. of Massachusetts – Boston, and twice for the Associated Colleges of the St. Lawrence Valley (St. Lawrence Univ., Clarkson Univ., SUNY Potsdam). David offered a series of tele-classes about academic publishing via AcademicLadder.com. Various publishers – scholarly and trade – have published work by David Emblidge: Oxford University Press, Da Capo Press, Stackpole Books, Watson-Guptill, and others. He has published many articles in literary and scholarly journals, and in 2007 his essay “The Palmer Method: Penmanship and the Tenor of Our Time,” won the McGinnis Prize for best nonfiction in Southwest Review. He is now completing a book manuscript about American Bookstores and has launched another, Great Snafus in American Publishing. His personal web site is davidemblidge.com. David has space in a busy schedule for just a few manuscript development consultations. If you are interested in discussing how he can help you advance your book from concept to completion to contract and publication, you may contact him at: demblidge2@gmail.com
People Are Saying...	Quotes of The Month
A glowing testimonial about our services: "Participating in Academic Ladder made it possible for me to complete my dissertation giving me the tools and support I needed to continue to put the dissertation first throughout years of competing demands on my time and attention. The friends I made on Academic Ladder will last a lifetime. Thank you." Carla Lesh History PhD University at Albany, State University of New York [used with permission]	Whatever you want to teach, be brief. Horace The true aim of every one who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds. F. W. Robertson We learn by teaching. James Howell Never try to teach a pig to sing....it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Anonymous
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Introduce the Academic Writing Club to a friend, and you each get a discount! Do a friend or a colleague a favor, while helping yourself. Know someone who could benefit from the Writing Club? This is your chance to give them the opportunity to try the Club and get $10 off, while getting a $10 refund of your own. This applies to both current members and those who have never been a member -- so find a buddy and sign up together. Just ask your friend to enter the word "REFER" into the coupon code in the shopping cart page, *and also tell them to enter your* name (the referrer) into the comment box at the bottom of the page, so you will get your refund after you sign up yourself. If you're already a member, you will be sent a $10 refund, too! Tell your friend, colleague, or student to go to http://academicwritingclub.com now, and join! Get 8 or more people to sign up together, and you each get a $10 discount! Ask your chair, director of graduate studies, dean, p.i, faculty development office or provost office if they would be willing to help their students of faculty members become more productive writers. If they have it in their budget, then you and 7 or more of your peers can participate in the Writing Club with $10 off per person. Just write info@academicladder.com** for more information.
Ready to finish your dissertation? Coaching can help you complete it more quickly with less pain. Write us about individual or group coaching. Overwhelmed with the responsibilities of being a junior professor, or worried about getting tenured? Write us about individual coaching or our writing/time management groups . Stay tuned to this newsletter, which will give you hints, reminders and practical suggestions for staying on track and creating the career you deserve. And check out the writing/time management groups on our website The University List is Growing! Wondering who signs up for the Academic Writing Club? You may be surprised at the length and scope of the list of universities represented by our members. Check it out here: http://academicwritingclub.com/universitylist Is your university on this list yet? If it's not, and you've been a member of the Academic Writing Club, let me know and I'll add it. If you haven't been a member, join us for the next session! Are you on an academic listserv? If you feel that this article was helpful to you, why not let your listserv know? Just pass along the link to signup for this newsletter: http://www.academicladder.com/ezines I really appreciate your support - we grow and will be able to bring you more of these offerings by your passing on the news about Academic Ladder. Resources Take an online assessment Would you like to assess your progress on your dissertation or on the climb to tenure? Check out the assessments on the website . What is the Academic Writing Club? Find out here What is Tenure Coaching? Find out here What is Dissertation Coaching? Find out here Like our Newsletter? Forward it to a colleague or friend in need. Maybe one of our hints, essays and reminders will help them out of a slump, give them a boost, jolt them into action or make their day. They can sign up at the website AcademicLadder.com is read by people from all over the world, including Denmark, Romania, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, South Africa, India, Singapore, Luxembourg, Israel, China, New Zealand, Canada, and Indonesia. Your Subscription Details To change your email address OR remove yourself instantly and automatically from this newsletter subscription, use the links at the bottom of this page. This ezine was sent to <$name$> at <$email$> by request. The Academic Ladder is published by Gina J. Hiatt, Ph.D. Email: info@academicladder.com © 2012 Gina J. Hiatt, Ph.D. All rights reserved