Navigating a Teaching Quadrilemma

By: Matt J. Schumann

Some years ago, near the beginning of my career at Eastern Michigan, I received a question from student in the College of Education — a credit to their deep thinking about teacher training:

Do you find it more important to know your stuff, or know your students?

Zoom out a little bit, and this student was asking a question that we all have probably confronted at one time or another as university instructors: assuming it’s a choice, do we place more emphasis on our subject matter expertise, or on reaching our particular cohort of students where they’re at?

Since that time, my journey as an instructor has taken me deeper into the worlds of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Instructional Design. In light of that additional training, what had already been a challenging dilemma grew two more horns! I’ll reframe it here as I posed it at the recent CONNECT conference:

Assuming it’s a choice, is it most important to your teaching to know…

• Your Stuff — the material that makes you a subject matter expert

• Your Students — the people you teach and whose tuition funds the university

• Your Structure — the flow of lessons and assessments that make up your course

• Your Self — the person, or persona, that you bring to the front of the class

It’s a false choice, of course. All of these categories overlap; and at some level, in the middle of our teaching, we operate without being fully cognizant of any of them — let alone all. Yet when we do think about our teaching, one or more of these categories almost inevitably defines our thinking.

If we’re really thoughtful about our teaching, we might have sought out some of the helpful resources, supportive community, and refreshing space in the Faculty Development Center. Typically, the FDC and its counterparts across many U.S. universities have proven pretty good for reasoning on three of the four horns of our “quadrilemma”:

• If you want to know more of your “stuff”, it’s easy enough to revisit your research field, collect more material, and digest the latest literature.

• If you want to know more about student learning, you can go into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and turn your research instincts toward your classroom.

• If you want to know more about effective course structures, you can plunge into Instructional Design, and follow your research instincts there as well.

• And if you want to know more about your self… with only a few notable exceptions, that academic biography hasn’t been written yet. Uh-oh!

In a way, this post acts to affirm the FDC’s efforts to enrich our faculty as people, such as the current programs on Restorative Practices and Thriving in Academia. In another, it serves as a gentle nudge to develop more such programming, and to prompt us to think more deeply, ourselves, about what we do — and do not — bring to the teaching table. Nor should we stop there: this post also parallels an ongoing research project about re-centering instructors, in their irreducible humanity, as an essential piece of the educational puzzle.

Some ideas for the present:

• Take a personality test, or two, or five, and ponder how to apply the results to your teaching persona / classroom.

• Use mindfulness techniques to discover what features of your teaching bring you the most joy, the most annoyance, or simply what’s most constantly on your mind.

• Make it a more social exploration: When you talk about teaching problems with colleagues, or things that are going well, what do you talk about?

• If you’re considering adopting a new teaching technique — anything from an updated textbook to a complete overhaul of your approach to a given class — don’t just stop at identifying your preferences, but take some time to consider why.

• Revisit Carole Fink’s Dream Exercise (2003): imagine your ideal student who soaks in every nugget of wisdom you can give them, and where you would like to see that person in 5-10 years. What are you doing, now, to help them to get there?

Some insights, as a rather bookish introvert on the autism spectrum, as a self-confessed gamer, and relatively recently in my life and career, as a husband and dad:

• I really appreciate the teaching styles that say, ”do as I say, because it’s what I do.” So in my own course designs, I do try to get students to mimic the self-motivated research and presentation that bring me most joy as a scholar.

• As a gamer, I really like the “choose your own adventure” genre. Scenario-Based Learning in the style of Rise 360 is really amazing, but for the free version, Twine is a good friend to me, and to some of my fellow-gamer students. 

• Being an introvert on the spectrum, I like asynchronous online classes where my course designs really shine, and my interaction with students is less in quantity but higher in quality. 

• One of my favorite “family teaching” memories was Zooming during the pandemic and having my then-toddler daughter crawling around in my background. On the other hand, I get at least as much life and enjoyment from my wife and kids, far removed from the teaching arena, as I do from my students and colleagues.

So much for some fragments of my instructional autobiography. While this blog post doesn’t offer much opportunity to reply directly, I’ll close with an invitation to ponder how you would continue the dialogue:

What is your “teaching self”? How do you express it? What does that mean for your teaching — and for your stuff, your structure, and your students?