For One Week, Professors Become Students

The lack of opportunity for professors to watch their colleagues in action moved Bennett Goldberg to organize Faculty Terrier Days. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Good teachers inspire their students. So Bennett Goldberg had an insight: why can’t they inspire their colleagues as well?

“Teaching is a personal and professional endeavor, into which faculty put much effort. But we don’t share it, except very rarely, and so have little experience with what other faculty do,” says Goldberg, a College of Arts & Sciences physics professor. Next week, they will share.

More than 70 BU instructors on both campuses will open 128 classes and studio and lab sessions to their peers. This first annual Faculty Terrier Days, conceived by Goldberg in his role as director of the provost’s STEM Education Initiative, is modeled on similar efforts elsewhere, notably at Yale.

BU has offered instructional innovation conferences and grants for innovative online education, but Faculty Terrier Days is different. “Talks about teaching are great, but they are not visits to classrooms, where the interaction between faculty and students, and student-to-student, can be observed directly,” says Goldberg, who is also a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering and of electrical and computer engineering.

Among the instructors welcoming peers is Toni Pepe Dan, who will open the doors to her Experimental Photograph class next Thursday. “I thought it was a perfect chance to connect with faculty from across campus,” the College of Fine Arts lecturer says. Her course involves hands-on work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines through photography; for her Terrier Days class, “we will be testing the timing and ratio of darkroom chemistry in order to change the permanency of a photograph,” Dan says.

“I want to cultivate a culture of curiosity in my classes, and welcoming faculty from other disciplines into the darkroom with us sets that tone,” she says of her interest in Terrier Days. “It is a wonderful example of lifelong learning, which is at the core of being an artist.” She’ll also practice this preaching by visiting an as-yet-unselected class herself. “I hope to get outside of my comfort zone and learn something new,” she says.

Binyomin Abrams, a CAS senior lecturer in chemistry and recipient of a 2015 Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, will open two classes as part of Faculty Terrier Days. He too isn’t sure which classes he’ll visit, but he’s determined to take in several.

“I think it’s great to see what my peers are doing,” he says. “As a group, we can grow much more than as individuals. Plus some of the classes sound like fun.…I hope to see a good cross section of instructional methods being used.”

In addition to numerous STEM faculty who will open their courses, other presenters include trumpeter and 2014 Metcalf Award winner Terry Everson, a CFA associate professor, Sophie Godley (SPH’15), a School of Public Health clinical assistant professor, and Sarah Madsen Hardy, a CAS Writing Program senior lecturer.

Goldberg has some experience in scholarly sharing: he opened his physics department’s new, tech-laden Physics Studio Classroom to colleagues during a semester in 2013; 35 of them took him up on the offer. “I think it made a significant difference in the growth of blended and studio learning and teaching on campus,” he says.

This week’s open classroom initiative, as Goldberg calls it, is also distinct from the kind of peer observations that are done during merit reviews and from student evaluations of teachers, he says: “It is intended to be casual, exploratory, collaborative, and engaging among faculty. If we are successful, then the annual event could lead to more and deeper conversations about engaged student learning and how we can, as a university, create the best possible BU student learning experience.”

Terrier Days is open only to BU faculty, of any rank and status. See a list of open classes and register for a visit here.