From Research to Teaching

A Guide to Beginning Your Classroom Career

Michael Kibbe

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830839193
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

It's a long way from the research carrel to the classroom. No matter your personality, your prior experience, or the specifics of your situation, the transition from graduate studies to teaching involves a set of challenges for which no one is ever fully prepared. In this practical guide Michael Kibbe, author of From Topic to Thesis, provides a helpful companion for the journey.With plenty of personal examples and tested advice, Kibbe covers preparation for teaching, best practices in the classroom, self-evaluation, and the discovery of your mission and method. He also reflects on the spiritual lives of professors, including social media practices, Sabbath, and relationships. From Research to Teaching is the concise, accessible resource every new and aspiring professor needs.

PART ONE

WHAT TEACHERS
MUST DO

Some years ago, I was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker, and in the transition from one project to the next, he said, “Okay, Mike, this job basically is the same as the last one.” Well, it wasn’t. Different materials, different dimensions, different everything. But, actually, not different everything—there was a fundamental continuity from one job to the next. When he said, “This job is the same as the last one,” what he meant was, “The really important lessons about how to make cabinets that you learned on the last job are going to be applied to this job; the only difference is the details.” The problem, as he and I found with ever-increasing frustration over the next few weeks, is that I hadn’t learned those really important lessons. I’d simply learned how to do that one job.

When you head from the carrel to the classroom, you might have the opposite problem as I did in the cabinet shop—or, more precisely, the same problem from the opposite direction. What little received wisdom exists on this topic tends heavily toward the negative. Undergraduates don’t care about how smart you are. Don’t overload them with information just because you think it’s interesting. Your dissertation is useless in survey courses. That sort of thing. You’ll hear a lot of “these two are nothing alike” (the opposite of what my boss was saying), and your experience will ring true to that sentiment. But, in fact, as my boss was trying to tell me, there are significant points of overlap that are fundamental to both tasks, and discovery of those common threads are the key to success in both ventures. The classroom is “basically the same” as the research carrel, but it isn’t always obvious at what level that’s the case.

1

BEFORE THE CLASSROOM

PREPARATION

Four things need to be done in order to get ready for the classroom. I don’t mean we complete these tasks before our first teaching experience (that would be nice but not realistic). I mean these are the things we begin to do to signify that we are moving from the carrel to the classroom. Doing these things proclaims, “I am no longer a graduate student!” Because you’re not. Even if I am technically still doing doctoral work as I transition to teaching (not recommended but frequently necessary), when I step foot in the classroom, I am not a graduate student. I am a professor. And these are the things that professors do. So I need to do them.

FINISH THE JOB

Whether you move into teaching while still writing your dissertation or after having defended it and submitted the final version, you aren’t done until it’s published. Be relentless in your pursuit of closure.

Sometimes there is a clear line between “you are a graduate student” and “you are a professor”—you defend your dissertation in the spring, publish it over the summer, and start teaching over the fall. Sometimes. It comes with some frustration to realize that the dissertation isn’t actually done when you defend it, isn’t actually done when you submit revisions, isn’t actually done when the official version comes to rest in the university or seminary library. A dissertation is done when it’s published. Meaning, I can buy it for an exorbitant amount of money on Amazon right now. Only then is your career as a graduate student truly over. And more often than not, that doesn’t happen until well into one’s teaching career. It’s theoretically possible, of course, to opt out of the publishing lane. They won’t take your degree back. But getting that thing in print, and doing so immediately, is crucial for several reasons.

First, and this concerns getting it published quickly, you really don’t want to do more research between defending and publishing. The longer you wait, the greater the chance that more literature appears on your topic that will render your project out of date. I have yet to meet anyone who enjoyed starting over with their research after they’d already defended the project. But I have read numerous dissertations whose research was several years behind before they hit the press because they waited too long and then didn’t get back up to speed.

Second, your doctoral research is a contribution to the academy as a whole, not only your institution. Unpublished dissertations used to be the norm; if you needed to read one, you could use ProQuest or InterLibrary Loan to access it. Now they’re the exception, and the fact is that there are so many published books that an unpublished one just isn’t going to get read, so if you want your work to be useful to other scholars, you’d better publish it. A busy researcher just doesn’t have time to dig that deep; they’ll assume it didn’t get published because it didn’t deserve to get published.

Third, you need the closure. “Finish the job”—my father used to say that to me constantly. Graduate school is a marathon, and at least in the biblical and theological disciplines, publication is you breaking the tape. Don’t quit right before the finish line. Who runs 26.1 miles and stops? Get it done, and get it done right away. This is the absolute final step of your journey, and it’s harder to teach when that one little piece of your heart is still in the library.

It’s nice, obviously, if you can get this done before you start teaching. And if that isn’t realistic (and it usually isn’t), the challenge becomes getting it done while teaching. This isn’t the place to walk you through all the hoops; your dissertation committee will be the place to go for advice on publishers, who to contact on the editorial board, etc. Here I simply want to tell you that you can’t fully make the transition from student to professor until this is done. If, like most of us, you’ve started teaching and the publication process isn’t complete, make the hard decision to take something off your plate so it can be.1

READ A BOOK

Be fanatical in your devotion to pedagogical research.

It’s the most obvious thing in the world. You’ve spent the past few years becoming an expert not simply in a particular academic field but in a particular skill: the skill of learning. More specifically, learning by reading. So start reading. Read books on teaching, journal articles on teaching, blogs on teaching. Listen to audiobooks on teaching and podcasts on teaching. Go to conference sessions on teaching. Be as much of a researcher in your new vocation as you were in your old one.

Every communicative act has a what and a how—what you’re going to communicate, and how you’re going to communicate it. In graduate school we spend the vast majority of our time on the what. Is the argument solid? Is the logic defensible? Is the claim resonant with the data? We ought, in fact, to spend much more of that time on the how—did you know that there are people in your institution who are experts in written communication?2 But that’s a conversation for another day. Right now, the point is that we cannot carry our obsession with the what into the classroom. Graduate supervisors are (sometimes) willing to endure mediocre writing if it is accompanied by brilliant insight. Undergraduate students, not so much. The quality of your what has always been a function of the quality of your research. Now it’s time to raise your how to the same standard.

Here’s something that should encourage you: literature on teaching is generally more well written than literature in your academic discipline. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since, you know, it’s written by professional communicators. You know those brilliant scholars who just can’t seem to get their thoughts well enough in order so that someone who isn’t quite so brilliant can understand them? Those people don’t write books on teaching. This doesn’t mean all the literature on teaching is good. It means you won’t generally feel like pulling your hair out as you try to understand what they’re saying in the first place.

If you’ve got a graduate degree, or are well on your way toward earning one, I don’t need to tell you how to research—how to collect sources, analyze arguments, engage dialogue partners, etc. But I will tell you a couple of ways in which you may find pedagogical research to be different than the research you’ve been doing so far.

First, emphasize depth over breadth. That doesn’t mean picking one book and devoting ourselves to its insights at the exclusion of all other possibilities. But it does mean we release any expectations about reading everything ever written on anything the way we did in graduate school. No more footnote-stacking, no more spending weeks tracking down that one unpublished German dissertation from the 1930s, no more shelves and shelves of printed journal articles that we’ll only read once. Always be on the lookout for new ideas and new ways to implement old ideas, but above all have a set of resources that you return to again and again.3

Second, evaluate your sources via implementation. You’re accustomed to evaluating arguments as you read them. Occasionally a scholarly claim is striking or complex enough that you need some additional time to process it, compare it to some other arguments, etc. Even that can usually be done in a relatively short period of time. But the success of a pedagogical claim is only verifiable via implementation. You have to go try it. If one of your sources says, “Here’s something that really works,” the only way to validate or invalidate that claim is to go do it in class. Don’t just mentally process the claim, don’t just make a note in the margin next to the claim. Make a plan to try it in class—and be specific! Decide when and where you are going to try it, actually do that, and then come back to the source and make a note that says, “4.12.18—SysTheo 1—good idea but . . .” or whatever the appropriate comment may be. If it was a good idea but it just needed some tweaking for your context, or simply some more practice, or whatever, implement it again and put another note in the margin: “10.6.19—Hermeneutics—good but slow down.” And make sure once you’ve found the proper space and timing and nuance of the technique that your note includes those details so you can do it again that way the next time.

I can hear the protest from all the competent teachers out there: “You can’t just create a formula that’s going to work the same way every time! It depends on the students, it depends on the material, it depends on the setting. . . .” Of course. I’m not talking about implementing a technique in every session of every class in every semester. The evaluation process includes determining the proper context for implementation; often enough, though, your source will have already addressed that issue. You’ll find an idea in a chapter on interactive learning techniques for keeping everyone engaged in a large lecture hall—that idea is only going to be useful to you if you teach a course in a large lecture hall. Another source will suggest a system for evaluating group projects—obviously, you only need that system if you assign any group projects. There are books out there specific to teaching foreign languages, specific to teaching writing, specific to teaching the Bible. If you don’t teach those subjects, those books are less likely to be of any use to you. And so on. The point is that you only know if an idea is any good if you try it, and part of trying it is determining when and where and how often to try it.

Third, read intermittently rather than in big chunks. My academic research process typically involves (when I am fortunate enough to have it) a large portion of time when all I do is read. Collect sources, scan and print those sources, three-hole punch those sources, and then read those sources. For me, at least, this is the only way to do profitable research in my discipline. The biggest mistake (which I make regularly!) is to start writing too soon. Invariably I get stuck because I simply haven’t done enough research.

This isn’t entirely misguided when it comes to pedagogical research. Read or listen to a whole bunch of resources on flipped classroom methods, if that’s your thing, and think through the relative usefulness of those sources before you implement any of them. For sure, read more than one thing about what a syllabus is and isn’t prior to writing any of them. There are a couple of problems though. The first is related to what I said earlier—you evaluate sources via implementation. You really can’t know if a source is any good without doing something with it in the classroom. Doing all the reading and then deciding which sources are superior before you’ve tried any of them in real time just isn’t going to work.

The second problem is that our classes won’t sit on hold until we’re ready for them. In graduate school, you could recognize—or be told—that your work was weak in a specific area. And once you identified that weakness, you hit the pause button on your project and sat in that area for as long as it took. When chapter three of my dissertation stunk, I stayed with chapter three until it didn’t stink. I didn’t go on to chapter four. But in teaching, you don’t have that option. In teaching, there is no “pause” button. The next class happens in thirty minutes. Or two hours. Three days max. The point is, the bulldog mentality of the graduate researcher just doesn’t work here. You need to make a change now. So if I have thirty minutes available to me today for pedagogical research, I’m going to spend five minutes triaging—figuring out what really needs to be taken care of right now—and twenty-five minutes going to work on that one problem, reading a blog on that one problem, staying focused in my reading on that one problem. And when my time is up, my time is up. Yes, this is the tyranny of the urgent. Welcome to the classroom. It won’t always be this way.

GET A MENTOR (GET SEVERAL OF THEM, ACTUALLY)

Get pedagogical mentors. Your graduate advisor might be a great teacher, but they probably haven’t taught the courses you’re teaching, to the kinds of students you’re teaching, in a long time.

The people who supervise doctoral dissertations are (presumably) scholars of the highest caliber. They’ve made major contributions to their field and are widely respected voices in the academy around the world. Hopefully, they’ve been a valuable mentor to you during your graduate studies. But even in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Gary M. Burge
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 : What Teachers Must Do
• Part 2 : What Teachers Must Know
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Using Your Dissertation in the Classroom
• Appendix B: A Plea to Graduate Schools
• Appendix C: Great Teaching Resources
• Notes
• Praise for From Research to Teaching
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright