Logical equation: meaningful assignments, clearly communicated goals, and consistency in course presentation add up to success in the classroom, says Michelle Connolly

Megan Morr

Abundant enthusiasm for the subject helps bridge the knowledge gap between professor and student, says George McLendon, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. "It's hard to get students excited if you're not excited yourself." So, too, does a faculty member's genuine concern for students. "They care that you know," he says, "but they want to know that you care."

David Snider, a senior, says that with professors who don't seem to care, students will often skip class, borrowing a friend's notes to get caught up on the material. "I think more than anything else, what makes for an exciting class is a sense that if you miss it, lecture notes alone can't give you what the in-class experience was."

The in-class experience has changed over the years with the advent of new teaching strategies and new technology. Pedagogical research indicates that different students learn in different ways, and many of the best professors experiment with a variety of approaches in the classroom, including group work, class discussions, and multimedia presentations. Steve Nowicki, dean of the natural sciences for Trinity College, remembers one of the best courses he had as an undergraduate music major at Tufts University. It was a biology course team-taught by two professors "who would needle each other in the lecture. They were creating a dialogue that students could pick up on."

Faculty members, by and large, report that technology has not changed the definition of good teaching; it has simply provided them with additional tools, some of which are simply distracting but many of which are helpful in the pursuit. "Blackboard," a software program that provides class-specific websites where professors can post syllabuses, assignments, and source material, and where students can post assignments and comments, has become widely used at Duke, as on many other campuses.

Duke has also been home to the noted iPod experiments, with faculty members in various disciplines experimenting with different ways to use recording and playback technologies in the classroom. Robert Korstad, an assistant professor of public-policy studies and history, has students in his seminar on "The Insurgent South" download and listen to famous historical speeches, clips of oral-history interviews, and protest songs. Engineering lecturer Michael Gustafson, in "Computational Methods in Engineering," helps students break down popular songs into frequencies by plugging their iPods into circuit boards. Another common technology, especially in engineering and the sciences, is the personal-response system, a punch pad that allows class members to respond to a professor's queries so that a professor can quickly gauge a class' overall intellectual understanding. (The system works much like the "Ask the Audience" lifeline in the once-popular television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.) Other faculty members have recorded lectures and posted them on the Web.

Whether it's through the use of iPods, chalk on a blackboard, or in-class activities, Jerry Reiter stresses the importance of getting students caught up in the course material. Reiter '92, an assistant professor of statistics and decision sciences, has taught several introductory lectures. In one class, he told students that he was the best basketball player in the room and challenged one student to come forward for a "free-throw contest." As the student prepared to shoot a Hacky Sack into a garbage can, Reiter turned into a Cameron Crazy, waving his arms and making loud noises to distract the shooter. Then, stripping down to a Duke T-shirt and basketball shorts, he took his own shots.

There was method in his basketball madness. Afterward, he walked the class through an exercise to determine whether there was enough statistical evidence to say for certain that the student was a better shooter, even if she made only one more shot than he did. (There wasn't.) "My philosophy on teaching has always been to try to make it interesting," says Reiter. "You have to let that passion come through."

His passion does not end with basketball statistics. Rather than simply lecturing on the use of a scatter plot or a t test (two statistical tools) he asks students to use statistics to consider, for example, whether the Vietnam War draft lottery was fair, or whether birth order correlates with delinquency. "Forget about the statistics," he says. "You can get into the topic."

Reiter, like other professors, stresses that, in many cases, being enthusiastic about the learning process also means being available to meet with students outside of class. Alumnus Jonathan Morris still recalls a Duke political-science seminar on international security that he took with Benjamin Miller, then a visiting professor from the University of Haifa in Israel. "After every class," Morris says, "we would end up standing outside the classroom talking about current events and how they played into what we were learning."

With smaller classes, many professors will try to meet individually with each student at some point during the semester, among them I.B. Holley, a professor emeritus of history, who has been at Duke for sixty years and still teaches one class a semester. For larger classes, most professors are available to their students during posted office hours, but many say that students don't take advantage of them. That's been a perennial problem over the years. But the ascendance of e-mail as students' communication medium of choice has reinvented notions of faculty accessibility. In students' minds the window for contacting professors has expanded from posted office hours to 24/7, and e-mail messages have replaced more frequent direct contact. While that can increase opportunities for interaction, it isn't always the most effective means of communication. Connolly says that she will often receive e-mail messages at odd hours of the night asking complicated mathematical and economic questions. "Trying to write out in an e-mail how various graphs shift is difficult," she notes wryly.

Beyond answering basic class-related questions, sometimes the most influential teaching requires building a relationship with a student that extends beyond that of a simple lecturer/listener dynamic. Robert Iden '68 returned to campus this fall for only the second time since graduating to take in a Homecoming-weekend lecture by Sy Mauskopf, professor of history and the 2006 winner of the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. Iden says Mauskopf, even in his early years, stood out as a teacher who engaged course material and created close relationships with students. For his part, Mauskopf fondly recalls favorite students over the years, including one who completed an honors thesis last spring probing the Aristotelian influence on seventeenth-century physician William Harvey's embryological work. The two spent hours mulling over primary and secondary sources together and discussing new directions. "It was so different, so obscure. He put so much work into it!" Mauskopf says, his voice rising with excitement.

Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College and vice provost for undergraduate education, hopes to expand opportunities for the kind of shared-learning experiences professors like Mauskopf foster. Thompson has helped initiate a push for more research-based learning in Trinity College, with professors working closely with their students to develop new knowledge. While some critics see a conflict between Duke's research and teaching missions, he says the two priorities do not compete in a zero-sum game. He argues that Duke's renowned scholars and cutting-edge-research culture can and should provide real-world learning opportunities for undergraduates.

He acknowledges that the format will require professors to assume more of a mentorship role. "You're not so much transmitting information as helping an apprentice learn a practice."

Already this thinking has taken hold. Forty-one percent of the Class of 2006 participated in what Thompson calls a "mentored research project" during their time at Duke. That's compared with 15 percent of the Class of 2002, the first year the measure was taken. He says his goal is to push the number to 50 percent, and, "once I get to 50 percent, I'll just move it up from there." (Additionally, 15 percent of the Class of 2006 completed a thesis for graduation with distinction. He hopes to increase that to 25 percent.)

Duke is not alone in seeking ways to promote research opportunities earlier in the undergraduate experience. The Forum for Excellence and Innovation in Higher Education, for example, is a five-year initiative bringing together fourteen top-tier institutions to explore innovations in teaching and learning. Economics professor Connolly, who, along with Thompson and others, represents Duke at the Forum, says that in the past, courses teaching research strategies and methodology have been reserved for upperclassmen. At that point, she says, they are only useful for students hoping to pursue graduate degrees.