This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk. Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker,
and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci, educated educators talking education.
Yeah, of course it is. Tim and Johnny Busted Pencils fully-ledded education talk, educated
educators talking education.
July 4th, Johnny, happy 4th, my friend.
Absolutely, man. What a great day. Hopefully, if you're listening, you're also just
enjoying a nice day. Maybe with friends, family, you know, you're out and about, hopefully,
enjoying the great weather that we always cross our fingers and hope because, you know,
you can always hold your breath for 10 seconds and the weather's going to change, especially
for our Wisconsin listeners, right? But, you know, great place to go if you're out and about,
and even on the 4th is Monaco Brewing Company. Busted Pencils is sponsored by the Monaco Brewing
Company. Big time advocates of public education. They're always working hard to build community,
make great beer. The most sued brewery in America. Monaco Brewing Company is making Wisconsin
great again. One beer at a time. Check out Monaco Brewing Company.com to see where you can buy
their progressive beer. Happy 4th, Tim. It's summer. We're in the throes of it. We've been
having amazing conversations with our listeners. We've been having great guests on so many guests,
Tim, that we haven't even had that opportunity to just chop it up together. You know, the
banter has been almost outlined and welcome. We welcome that sideline because we've had awesome
guests. But we're in there to both of us, Tim, is quality of teaching. I mean, we're both teachers.
We teach teachers. And, you know, it's close to our heart, even in our research, our own scholarship
as professors has often been centered around. Let me add to that though. Yeah. We teach teachers how
to teach. Three teachers there. Teach teachers how to teach, right? Okay. Go ahead, man. I just
wanted to make sure that everybody understood what we mean by us teaching teachers how to teach.
Well, yeah, Tim. And it's like, so if you're a newer listener, you tuned in recently. And we
hope you keep tuning in because we love your input. They don't, Tim and Johnny, both of us taught
in schools, right? So we both have a teaching background somewhere along the line. You know,
we realized in that process, whoa, what's going on in schools? This is, this is, this is not
really working for most kids. And in fact, not really that supportive for most of what we understood
to be good teaching. Right. We were taught to be good teachers. And here we were in schools. And
well, you know, there's a whole, I always say school happens and school seeps in. It's like
the conditions and sort of the, the ways our school, our schools are structured in the United
States, especially, right? It's like we talk about all the time in the show. It's testing heavy.
It's very focused on definitions of academic achievement, which is important. You know, we want
kids to be strong readers. We want them to be great at their mathematics and understand,
build a scientific literacy, right? And understanding of history and civics and, you know,
put that all together, but so much of it was focused on what gets defined as academic achievement,
that it just didn't feel like the, like the structures were in place to really be present
for all of our students. And, you know, I'm sure Tim, similar to myself, we both talked about
before, but for listeners tuning in and getting more familiar with who are these two guys who talk
about education. You know, we both thought, you know, come on, there's got to be things we could do
differently in schools. Well, that led us to furthering our own education, you know, with like
fast forward, a couple of guys getting their PhDs in education and becoming teacher educators.
That's right. Tim said it earlier on the show teachers who teach teachers. We also teach people
who are research and education because we're educational researchers. So maybe it's former
teachers, sometimes it's people who just care a whole lot about changing schools. And we say,
well, you can't just have an idea and want to change things. They got to have some research at
the back that up. So both of us got PhDs, you know, and we went into with a strong mission to what
could we do to make our schools in this country great for every kid. And by every kid, yeah,
Tim, we met all of them, not just the kids who are already coming to us like, hey, I'm great at
school. You know, all the kids, whether that's diverse learners or children from diverse cultures
or children experiencing poverty, right, or children who had adverse childhood experiences,
all of those things were like, hey, school too often isn't set up in a way where we can one do the
kind of teaching we were taught to do and two, can't support all our learners. So here we are,
Flash Forward, you know, a couple of guys with a radio show too and you know, stack of publications
and we get to teach our courses. But I will say Tim, the kinds of conversations we've been
getting to have on busted pencils help keep that fire going that there, there is change.
There is change that's possible. There's so many different things we can do. And Flash Forward
Tim to recent conversations we've been having with our peers, other folks who teach at colleges
across the screen around the world about how that is also about learning to teach because too
often, and we had a guest on recently, Jonathan Garco, if you haven't gotten to check out that
podcast, you can go to the civic media website and kind of scroll down a little bit because it was
Tuesday last week that we spoke almost recently. And you can see that Jonathan from the ACUE
right has a whole commitment in his research and his team to improving the instruction
that students get in our universities and in our college systems across this country.
So it's really fascinating because we often think, hey, you're an expert, you must be able to teach.
But boy Tim, if two guys come together and say we know what we don't know, even having been
teachers ourselves that were pretty successful. We got all the accolades you could get in a classroom.
There was still a whole lot we knew we weren't able to do and we wanted to get better at. And just
getting our PhDs didn't necessarily make us better teachers. No, man, we were set up to become
pretty good college professors because we have some teaching experience and we spent a lot of
time research and good teaching. It trickles into your teaching, but doesn't even guarantee it.
And that's a couple of educated educators being honest and vulnerable about our own teaching.
So imagine if you're like the world's leading expert, Tim, and molecular biology, it is likely
that you haven't been taught to teach or that when you have been taught to teach,
it's just a tiny little piece of that larger education that you were part of.
And understandably so. I mean, you're studying to be the world's leading expert
in molecular biology. There's not a whole lot of time to become a great teacher.
So I was stoked to learn about Jonathan Girko, his work, the organization that he represented.
And also to be having this conversation, Tim, about how do we, what do we do if we want to be
better teachers? So if you're listening out there that either goes to college,
knows someone who goes to college, you went to college, or maybe you're also a university instructor,
a teacher, a professor, you probably know all too well that there's a big difference between
professing and teaching. And you put that in the chat because we have a chat room here for folks who
can't, you can't see that we can. Tim says there's a big difference between professing
and teaching. So it's also about that difference. Well, you think about that, right? I mean,
put the terms and define them when I stand to profess, right? I'm telling. I'm telling.
And if you remember, and it doesn't necessarily have to be professors too, I bet people can go,
I had a fourth grade teacher who spent a lot of time telling, right? And so that's what we're
talking about. The difference between telling and teaching, we typically sometimes try to think
that mostly teaching is occurring in K12. A lot of times in college is professing is happening
and telling. And Johnny, what you said, though, is this to why does the telling seem to be
the model that kind of always permeates people's memories of sitting down and being a student
is being talked to, being told to is what you just said, though, is because what we narrowly focus
on, which is measuring academic gains on test scores. And guess what? And we don't even know if
this is the best way to increase academic gains. But for the longest time and we can remember,
we typically tell people what they don't know because Johnny, you don't know what you don't know.
I know what you don't know, but I'm going to tell you what you don't know. Johnny, your job then is
to learn it and then give it back to me. So professing and telling is a far cry away from engaging
learners, designing situations that elicit curiosity that dig students into wandering,
or potentially even rattling the way they thought about something to know that holy crap things
are changing. That's teaching. And Johnny, to understand how to get to teaching a wave from
professing, for some people, that's a huge leap to get to that place. Because when you are,
as you point out, the expert in microplastics, you know, so much. And the biggest thing,
and you're looking at me, and so you're looking at me, Tim Slecker, you're going,
Tim doesn't know a darn thing about microplastics. The number one thing I can do as a professor
is tell him everything I know so that I can start bringing him up to speed. And that is largely
that model of what it means to be a college teacher or a professor when we talk to Jonathan
Gerkho from the Association of College and University Educators is to say their organization
is saying, wait a minute, there is teaching and teaching is an art and a craft. And we have a
responsibility as professors in higher education to lead a movement that is pushing for teaching
as opposed to professing and telling what we're talking about though, how do you get to that point?
And I will own this Johnny Lupinati. I have in times found myself telling way more often than I
would like to teach sometimes because it is easier. It is what I remember. And it is the socialization
process of learning to be a teacher that I witnessed the most and that all of us have witnessed.
And so it's also, how do you create the escape velocity to get out of the traditional paradigms
that you actually were socialized into? It takes a lot. So what we're going to talk about, Johnny,
you said this, I remember this. So when was it that I realized that I wanted to truly engage
teachers and when did I want to engage teachers who are going to be teachers? That was when that
realization was I then need to step up my game. Boy, I wish back then though. And we're going to talk
more about this when we come back after the break. When you have that desire to be better, what can
you do? It's busted pencils. It's fully-led at education talk back after the break.
Oh yeah, we are on the streets today. We're on the street every day and we're on the radio,
the airwaves every weekday, right here at Civic Media, plus to pencils, fully-led at education talk,
educated educators talk in education. They're back in this segment to Tim.
And what you were sharing in that first segment, it resonated with me, right? It is so true
that we, all of us, we've spent how many years in school that we were socialized into what it
kind of meant to be a teacher or be a learner. And that's very different than often what we
understand, what we learn is good teaching. So we have this primary socialization,
the, you know, our first encounters and our most frequent encounters with learning in school,
we're kind of in the patterns and the culture of like school, like you explained,
like kind of sit down and listen to the teacher. The teacher is going to tell you everything
you need to know. Tim, we had a great guest a couple of weeks back and she'll be back on again
and accompanied by other great educators, but Dr. Sierra, Cailer Jones, director of rethinking
schools talked about the banking model of education. And so what is it that Tim referenced? We are
socialized to as educators. Is this understanding? And I think this is, this is getting to that,
that difference between professing versus teaching Tim, is that banking model introduced by
Apollo Ferre, right, that it's a metaphor that sort of think about like a bank, like money,
you deposit it or you take it out. And the whole idea is describing that most schooling is happening
under the assumption that the teacher has the knowledge or in this metaphor, the money, and they
put it into the bank. And so the student's mind is a container and you put the information into it
as a teacher. And then that student has it in there in the container of their mind, right,
that they can recall or put back out. It's transactional. And so that, that metaphor is really helpful
to understanding that that is not good teaching, right? Sometimes direct instruction or Tim
telling a great story about sharing your experience is really great teaching. But if by and large,
the learning experience is dominated by the idea that I'm the teacher, I think that Tim,
you're the student and that you're an empty container. And then I just got to get that knowledge
that I have as the world's leading expert on something. And just somehow get you that in your brain
that you could take out and spend when you need to apply it. And that metaphor sets us up
for failure in a lot of ways, right? And so it's not the discredit direct instruction. A lot of
teachers out there know sometimes you just got to teach stuff. But also not everybody who has
the knowledge is really good at sharing it, right? Doesn't have good practice around sharing it.
Also, you know, what we know about that banking model is that doesn't promote thinking about it,
doesn't promote creativity, ingenuity, it doesn't promote long lasting experience. So even if we
memorize something, we might not be able to always so often pull it back out and apply it.
Some things you just got to memorize, but it's that real application stuff. It's that the content
that we thought about that we wrestled with that we had conversations about that really helped
that learning stick. And then I'm like, so flash forward Tim, if most of us learn to teach
in a banking model where we as teachers were being taught as though we're empty containers and
you're just going to put good teaching information into our brain, then it's likely we can know it,
but not always do it. And so that's something also really important to think about. And this is
even teachers learning to teach what we know about research tells what the research tells us.
This is where teacher educators, we want to know like, how can we actually get people becoming
teachers to change how they teach? Well, that's much easier said than done because we're up against
that socialization, Tim, that you talked about in that dominant banking model. That's sort of like
a cultural habit of mind for students, for parents, for teachers, for everybody associated
in education. We think of teaching as well, the teacher has the information, they put it into the
kids' minds, and then the children recall it and apply it. But Tim, you know what I'm really
excited about is the research tells us that for teachers, and this shouldn't like we shouldn't
need a bunch of research to tell us, that change in instruction, changing in how we teach, change
of instruction is connected to teachers, talking with other teachers about teaching. I will say
it one more time. There you go. Change of instruction has been researched, been shown that we only have
evidence of change of instruction when teachers have, are supported to have time to learn through
talking to each other about teaching and specifically about the students they teach.
So we could say is like most classrooms where we learn to teach best are setting the table,
at best are inspiring us or introducing us to new concepts. But if we really want to see those
concepts or those practices applied, then what the research tells us is we have to spend time
talking to each other about our teaching, the successes and the failures, the struggles,
and the ease, the joy. We have to share it all with one another and process it together,
specifically related to our students. That's a kind of higher order of thinking and learning.
It's not something we could get by reading just reading a book. Now it's something that reading
a book can accompany as long as there's supported time where teachers are talking with other
teachers about those concepts related to their teaching, specifically to the students they teach.
We know that that is in a sense that the anecdote, the magic, I call it the magic ticket,
right? That's the thing that we want to support. So if you're a teacher out there, you kind of
might be saying, oh, that's why that concept of professional learning community's PLCs
or time we spend together. Now if you're a seasoned vet teacher, like Tim and Johnny or like the
people we talk to, like we have educators amplified on all the time every week on Wednesday,
we're always sharing like, are we really giving time to teachers to have those conversations and
to talk about because teachers know what they need. But so often, we don't really have that kind
of time and space to really become better teachers. And Jonathan Girko, our guest last Tuesday,
was telling us we especially don't afford that kind of time to college teachers. Even even a perfect
in a perfect system, we're saying, well, the info structure is there. I think we're doing that in
K-12. Tim and Johnny are here saying, well, we're not always doing that in K-12, but we should be.
But the info structure is there. We're definitely too often not doing that in higher education.
It's just sort of assumed, well, they're experts. They should become great at teaching. They could do
that too. We know it takes more than that. So Tim, I don't know, man, but you are a guy who's close to
this stuff. And as we unpack this in this, you know, in this show tonight, I really want to ask you
like, so you've taken this on, you've really said like, how can we support college teachers
becoming better teachers, especially when Jonathan has told us, look, it's actually the research shows us,
it's not in their interest if they're, if they're looking for economic or career gain. However,
it's really important. So we got to talk about, I'm curious like for our listener,
dispelling the sort of myth of what the professors do and how can we get better at our teaching.
So it's going to be a bang. I'm going to interview you Tim when we come back.
All right. Some questions. So stick with us, listener. When we come back, Tim's going to talk
to us about becoming better teachers.
You know, sometimes it feels like that. Plus, it depends only let it education talk,
educated educators talking education. And actually today, teachers talking, teaching,
and how to, we had you put that up there just teachers teaching how to teach or teachers,
teaching teachers how to teach. How about that for those three educated educators talking
education or teachers teaching teachers how to teach. And actually, Johnny and Tim educated
educators talking to each other about the experience of what it means to become a teacher.
Johnny, you really laid out in that last segment just a depth of truly taking us to that point
of going, wow, we have a banking model. You know, we typically remember that. It's like, hey,
you know, open with depositing information into kids' heads. And so the best teachers know the
most information to put into kids' heads. And the whole just, you know, banking model. And I
said, yeah, you know, think about that too. That model is so powerful that you take any second
grader, any group of second graders and ask them to play school. And they will line kids up in
rows. And they will put somebody in the front. And that person in the front will be telling
the kids what to do. And so that model is so powerful. So, Johnny, you're saying, how do we get
teachers to move away from that banking model, from that direct instruction model? It requires them
to have that opportunity to really converse with each other to analyze practice, to talk about
teaching, as you were saying. And I think you're going to ask me about my teaching, you want to do.
Well, yeah, Tim, I mean, because here we come up on the topic, actually, it's like, so what do you,
what do we do to improve as teachers in college, like higher education? So post, you know, secondary
education. So after high school, wherever that is, whether that's at community college, whether
that's at, you know, university, whether that's, you know, in adult learning, professional development
contexts, you know, how do we become better educators and not just, you know, teachers who reproduce
those cultural habits of schooling that are framed in the banking model, but that are about, you
know, like, I know a lot about this, like, even in another career, maybe sales, I'm a really successful
salesman. Let me tell you what I do. Right. And that can be that information itself can be helpful.
But it doesn't necessarily fit resonate or translate to learning from the learner,
being becoming a great salesperson. So, you know, this isn't only for, you know, how do you teach
English better or how do you teach history better? It's in general, how do we, you know, improve
as educators, primarily who are educating adults, maybe they're young adults, if you're teaching
like 19-year-olds in college, right? But as many of us know, you know, professional learning occurs
at all stages of our life. And so that's kind of what I'm really curious about. You've been,
you've been sort of taking that on almost not like not quite as a researcher, but sort of as,
you know, investigative journalist as a guy who cares a lot about this, but, you know, we scratch
the surface of it often in the show and we talk about how do we improve good quality education?
Like, what can we do? And one of the things is like, we've heard from listeners and from
guests is like, hey, you know what? Professors also need to be better at teaching. Well, we had
Gaston and we've been talking with an organization to him, you went to the ACUE conference,
right? To learn more about this. So I'm just curious two things. One, I know about life of a professor
because I've been a professor now for, you know, about 13-some years. That's not even that long,
but I'm pretty familiar with the days, the daily routine of it. But, you know, for our listener,
so one, what, like, what's the life of a traditional life of a professor? And I know it's a little
different depending on who you are, but someone who teaches college, right? And two, how do they get
better at what they do? So, I mean, who better to ask that, too? Then, you know, a professor in
education. Tell us a little bit about, like, you know, kind of in general, what does it professors do?
I mean, we know, we know you guys are smart and stuff, right? You know, we know you know what you know,
but what do you do? Like, what's the job? Oh, man, the job. Well, you know, we have to frame it
very specifically and maybe we'll do that then, too. You know, my, my main preoccupation or thinking
about what my job was when, when I was in front of the classroom college students. So, imagine I have,
you want to learn how to be an elementary school teacher, right? Well, there are content areas
that you need to learn. And then there's how to teach those content areas. My specialty was
social studies, American history. So you might come to my class and my class is me teaching you how
to teach social studies in history to kids. And so how do I then translate that information to
learners because college students sitting in front of professors are learners. They're there to
learn. They're not there to listen. Listening is sometimes part of what you do to learn.
But when I sit down and so I think of this and going, how would I inspire 19 to 20 some year olds
to look at little kids and go, I want to make them totally excited and learn everything there is to
know about social studies or even just say American history. How do you inspire? And I come from
that inspire. And then though, how do I get them to question what I had said, the model they learned
how to teach because they watched first grade teachers, second grade teachers, third grade teachers,
fourth grade teachers, fifth grade teachers, teach them social studies in American history.
They have an idea of what they think it means. And once I get them to examine that, as you just
said, that practice, how do I get them to change or move away from the telling them because when I
ask all of my students, did you enjoy learning social studies in history? It's almost always,
no, it was so boring, Dr. Sleger. You know, nobody ever says social studies in history was so
hard. It was always so boring. I was like, okay, let's start right there. What is your goal then?
Your goal in my class, and you're going to even fake it a little bit if you have to, your goal is
to not be a boring social studies teacher to the second, third, fourth, fifth graders, the way
you experience it. So challenge one, how are you not going to be boring? And then, Johnny, I think
about that and go, how do I then turn that into an experience over a semester that is going to take
them from that standpoint? And maybe over the course of three months, get them to recognize and go,
ah, now I feel like I can do that differently than how I experienced it. That's what, that's a day
thinking about, how do I get ready to imagine my class? And then there is all over those three
months over the semester, creating activities and experiences that will engage these students
in situations and, you know, real life times where they can experience teaching and learning
social studies in history differently. That's day to day. And you know what, I spend a lot of time
doing what I'm doing. I spend a lot of time after class with students coming up to me going,
ah, I'm so confused because I thought I knew what I was doing until I started taking this class. And so
that's my first goal, Johnny, cognitive dissonance is for students to start questioning and saying,
wow, I hear what you're saying. And then from that state, I realize that once cognitive
dissonance is there, I have something to work with. How did I get to that point of knowing that, Johnny?
I did not, to be honest, because of being an educated educator and taking classes in education,
I had preparation and actually learning some of these things. I though nowhere along my way did
anybody, did I have the opportunity to use like a Jonathan Gurko in an organization like the
Association of College and University Educators and a national conference like I attended in Minneapolis
where professors are meeting together to talk about how they make their teaching great. And so like
I could have been meeting with chemistry professors, history professors all in the same room,
talking about my desires and that story I just gave you, sharing that with them so that they can
then share their stories with me and how we bring that together. How do we make that? I would have
loved to have had an opportunity like that instead of just always meeting with professors of education,
the idea of bringing the professors across campus, the historians, the chemists, the statisticians,
the educators, putting them together to actually experience and talk about teaching and what works,
what doesn't work specifically, Johnny, when the goal is learning, learning, right? That is the
big deal is learning. I want those students in front of me to actually say, I learned something,
not I remember something. I don't know. Is that kind of an open tip?
I look at that because as we're talking about it, you know, I'm thinking about, you know,
we're having this conversation with a real base understood like we have an in-depth understanding of
what the day-to-day work requirements, what's the job of being a professor? And so I'm going to
share that a little bit. I'm going to generalize it because there are different ways that people
become professors, you know, in colleges, you know, like they get involved in being educators
in higher education. I don't even like that term higher education. It's just like post-secondary,
you know, because secondary is high school and so we have these labels for it. But, you know,
in general, you're an expert in something. So for like what you're explaining, you're understood
as an expert in social studies education. So you have that expertise in the form of a PhD
and your job experience. So you might be teaching college because you're an expert in something.
Maybe you are someone who's phenomenal at business and marketing and you're teaching a business
and marketing course. Maybe you're someone who's phenomenal at fashion design or at, you know,
at sewing and you're a seamstress and you have expert knowledge of that. You may even have an
MFA, some advanced degree or work experience equivalent that constitutes you as an expert.
And so I'll use that generally. And so then that the idea is that we want those experts
with the future experts. So we want to put experts in spaces where our learners are learning from
the foremost thinkers or doers in those fields. So then you get a job say, okay, I'm an expert.
I have this advanced degree and I have where I have this equivalent experience. And I'm going to
teach maybe I'm a sound engineer and I'm really good. I got industry cred and I'm really good at
what I do and the end, you know, the a local program or school hired me to teach you to sound
engineers. Great. So, but now you're in that role in that day-to-day role, Tim. And most of our
university structures or college structures require three things in different proportions,
depending on where you work. So the three job responsibilities that most college instructors and
that's what I mean by professors have is that they have research that they have you that to stay
up on their field. So if I'm saying like, if I'm like a world leader in fashion design,
I also have to keep doing my fashion design, right? And I have to be innovative in a leader in
that have to be identifiable as a thought or, you know, as a creative leader in that. So they have
that responsibility. You have to maintain sort of your status, your cred. And for a lot of people,
that's the research. You also have teaching responsibilities. You got to teach classes.
You also have service responsibilities, which means you have to do some of the day-in-and-day
out work that helps make a college run. You may be advising students, you're going to meetings,
you have to be part of committees that make decisions about what order the courses go in different
things like this. So you typically have three areas of work as a college teacher that you have
responsibility for in different proportions. You may have heard that like, well, I'm going to a
research institution. Most of your instructors have a lion's share of their work requirement
dedicated to their research. Then they have another proportion of that dedicated to their teaching.
And most common is like a 40, 40, 20, 40. There you go. 40% teaching, 20% service work,
meeting with students, non in a teaching capacity like advising, being in meetings, part of committee
and service. So those things. So in some cases, maybe I have a teaching position. It's like 80%
teaching, 20% research and service. So there are different things. But we have three main
responsibilities that we're attending to as college instructors. So kind of that brings me to
so Tim, where and within that do I have time become a better teacher? And what ought the priorities
be? So we can be a little critical of this. If we want really great teachers and higher education,
might we have to think differently about this? Folks, stay with us, listener. I hope you learned
a little bit more about what these crazy professors do, right? And we'll talk more about it when we come back.
Kevin Dust, who's out for a summer? Well, who was in its busted pencils, fully-led education talk,
educated educators, talking education, teachers teaching, teachers how to teach all the conversation
here. Deep, deep, deep. Donnie, though, the 40, 40, 20, the ratio of a college professor. I'm so
glad you put that out there because I think that is for people to go, it's like what do college
professors do all day, other than, you know, stand in front of people and tell them things. Well,
hopefully we're trying to do a little bit of dispelling that, you know, sometimes standing in front
of people telling things isn't really the best way to quote teach. But on top of the teaching
responsibility, so I gave a really long description of me just getting ready for one class that I would
have to teach. So Johnny, just to give a little bit more of an illustration of that 40, 40, 20.
So when I was particularly at a research institution, but at a campus that had a focus on teaching,
that ratio really did try to stick where it was like, you're a great teacher at this institution.
And it matters. And you better do some research. And the service you provide is also really important.
And it probably turned into more of my responsibilities was 60% teaching.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe 30. I don't know, and this is where it gets weird. The research
and the service and the service and the teaching, they kind of start to cross over. But I spend a lot
of time. So I would teach four different classes a semester in that row, in that ratio. Two of them
would be social studies preparation for teachers. One would be a course in intro or, you know,
the beginning of what does it mean to become a teacher exploring education for people that want
to think about becoming a teacher. And then I would teach either a graduate course in teaching
social studies, or occasionally I would teach a three credit American studies course for all students.
And so that was what I would teach throughout the semester. And then I would have the responsibility
or the assumption that I should at least publish one to two articles throughout the course of that
year doing my research. And then that service thing, boy, that really gets in there and starts going.
It's like, when do you have time to work with advisees? When do you have time to serve on committees?
When do you have time for the chancellor or the provost who calls you to be on a special task force?
Those are all those things. So that when you say 40, 40, 20, that's kind of like just an estimation.
And so me being at a at a research institution, but being at a campus that was focused on teaching,
that was my teaching was really the bulk. And so you hear about, yeah, I'm teaching four different
courses to two different, you know, preps that are the same and then two other preps that are
different. So getting ready, I'm spending a lot of time preparing lesson plans and teaching
because I'm teaching a lot of students within that. That's maybe, you know, between anywhere from
60 to 100 students that I'm seeing every week throughout the semester and those semesters are
typically 15 weeks. So I'm spending all that time teaching. When do I have time, Johnny? This is
the question then too. So imagine, and I'm an educated educator talking and teaching education.
Now, imagine my colleague who's there, who's a communications professor who hasn't had preparation
in teaching and that's their teaching responsibility. They're teaching four different classes. When
do they have time to get better? Well, Johnny, you asked that question, I'm going, well, who's typically
in charge? Well, you know, it's either an academic provost or somebody in charge of academic affairs
or a dean. You ask him, does teaching matter? And that's the question, does better teaching matter?
And if they say, yes, it does, well, then you ask the question, you're going, well, what are you
doing to help teachers? Like the way Tim just explained, he's teaching a four, four load.
How do you help him find a way to get better? How do you help your faculty who are teaching
outside of education to get better? You got to devote time. Or Johnny, and I think the way you
said this during break, or are you coming at this from the, hey, look, people are just great teachers
because they're born that way. And we don't have to invest time into them becoming a better teacher.
I've seen that and I've heard that, but I think we're coming more and more down the deep
understanding of going, good teaching is a skill. I think there are people who have
proclivities towards being better, but boy, you can teach people to be a better teacher.
And why does it matter today? And why does the work of AQ, the Association of College and
University Educators matter so much? Because learning, learning matters, and the responsibilities
that we have towards students, it really matters, especially today, Johnny. We need students coming
out of their courses, talking about how deep and rich the learning experiences were, how much
they are engaged, and how much that contributes to their satisfaction and their overall growth.
I think that really is, you know, we have a responsibility of changing the narrative around what's
going on in those college classrooms. So I don't know, I hope in this episode really kind of
gives people a sense of going, man, there's a lot to this teaching and learning. They take it
seriously, though. And in fact, though, how do we help Jonathan Gerko and AQ create that movement?
Well, if what we're talking about is interesting to you, Johnny, you know, we should be talking about
it more. And then the other thing, though, too, Johnny, one of the best places to do a conversation
like this outside of the classroom and outside of the college campus, tell them where, Johnny.
Oh, well, Tim, I mean, that's a no brainer. It's Monaco Brewing Company, you know, that they're big
time advocates for public education. And you know, just a great place to go and grab a brew.
If you're in Madison or if you're up in Monaco, stop by, grab a brew, have some good conversation
with the good folks over at Monaco Brewing Company. Or if you're not close by, you can check out
Monaco Brewing Company dot com. See where you can get their progress beer. Tim, I love this.
It's an age old question. I ask it all the time, especially of educational administrators,
deans, provosts, you know, principals, superintendents. Do you think that people are born good
teachers or that we learn to be good teachers? It's that age old nature versus nurture. You brought
it up. I know just like amplified that when we are talking between segments earlier this show,
but I really mean that because if you believe that people learn to be good teachers and taking
time to support them being a good teacher at the level they're at, it needs time, it needs money,
it needs support. I love that we're talking about it because I think both of us believe that,
sure, you can be born to be a great talker or be, you know, a certain kind of teacher,
but everybody can learn to teach. And so how do we become better teachers? How do we support those
movements across our campuses, across our country? And really, I'd like to say, match the great
strong efforts that our students coming out of K-12 system are experiencing. So they have,
they've seen good teaching. And they're like, hey, how come I'm not getting that in college?
And so it's over, it's trickling up. So college folks, if you're out there either in class or
you're teaching classes, you want to be part of the conversation. Tune in and join us, right? We
love to hear from our listeners. You're going to keep having this conversation, Tim. It's near and
dear to both of our work and our hearts. Always good to chop it up with you, Tim and Jess. Busted
pencils, fully-ledded education talk.