U N I V E R S I T Y  O F  P I T T S B U R G H

Tina and David Bellet CAS Teaching Excellence Award

2002

The annual David and Tina Bellet College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Teaching Excellence Awards celebrate distinction in undergraduate teaching in the arts and sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.  The Bellet Award specifically honors outstanding teaching professors in CAS--the University's largest undergraduate unit (with over 10,000 students and 500 tenure-track faculty).  Alumnus David Bellet and his wife, Tina, made the award possible with an original gift of $200,000 in 1998.  Selected by a committee of faculty and students, the winners receive a $7,000 stipend and a $3,000 teaching grant.  The Award is reserved for exceptional faculty members whose work demonstrates    superb skills and inspiration, devotion to students, and a willingness to explore new teaching ideas such as active learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning.  The highlight of the awards celebration is a dinner to commemorate teaching excellence, which is attended by selection committee members, past and present winners, administrators, and faculty.

2002 Bellet Address

At the Bellet Award ceremony on April 13, 2002, Edward M. Stricker, University Professor and founding chair in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Neuroscience, gave the keynote address.   He is the recipient of the 2001 Bellet Award and the 1992 Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award.

It seems appropriate to begin by mentioning something about my upbringing.  My grandparents all were immigrants, as was my father.  My parents wanted to become good citizens of this country, and they believed that having a good education was necessary for success.  They also wanted to help others to succeed as well, and, in part for that reason, my mother became a high school math teacher while my father taught 4^th grade English to immigrants in evening classes.  (During the day, he worked for the New York State Labor Department, managing an office that helped unemployed people to find work.)  My parents enjoyed their jobs, and they often talked in very positive terms about teaching.  I was proud that they were teachers, and when I was young I knew that I wanted to become a teacher, too.  Although I had settled that important issue relatively early in my life, I realized as I was growing up that I still had to determine what subject I wanted to teach, and at what level.

I went to college, in part, to find answers to those questions. In fact, I did not actually find that information in college, although I did discover something else of relevance: I learned that some people had professional careers in basic scientific research.  That was news to me.  I grew up in the Bronx, in the first housing project built in New York City.  The tenants in those low-income apartments were civil servants -- cops and firemen and bus-drivers and teachers -- and for the most part they were from immigrant families.  Certainly no scientists lived there, and no one knew any scientists much less why scientists wanted to do whatever it was they did.  I never read any books about scientists as I was growing up, nor did I see any credible movies about them.  Thus, it came as a surprise to me when I learned that scientists did experiments in order to understand more fully the things that most interested them, and that scientific information, such as the material that I was being taught in school, was derived from those investigations.  I also learned in college that science was not just an accumulation of facts but a systematic process of solving problems by analysis and deductive reasoning, followed by a synthesis of new findings with available information.  In some ways science seemed like the work that detectives did in the popular books and movies of the 40's and 50's.  In other ways, doing science seemed like trying to solve several new jig-saw puzzles simultaneously, with all the pieces mixed together, without having pictures of the puzzles to guide you and without knowing whether you had all the pieces of the puzzles or whether the pieces you did have belonged to the puzzles that you were trying to solve.  My point here is that science was clearly much more difficult and much more interesting than I had thought.  The more I learned about it, the more attractive it became to me, and soon I knew that it was something I wanted to do in addition to teaching. 

I also learned in college that there were postgraduate programs at which you could receive training for a career in academic science that would combine research and teaching.  That sounded good to me, so I went to graduate school.  I first obtained a Master's degree in Chemistry, which had been my undergraduate major, but it was not until I had completed three years of doctoral training in Psychology that I stumbled upon an issue that fully captured my attention: the brain's control of the integrated physiological and behavioral processes that together promote stability inside animals, including human animals.  The phenomenon of homeostasis still captivates me today, almost 40 years later, and the process of figuring things out, of understanding the things I want most to understand, is still as stimulating and satisfying to me as it was when I was a graduate student.

For many years I was very happy simply teaching and doing research, but 16 years ago I expanded my academic activities when I became chair of the new Department of Neuroscience (actually "Behavioral Neuroscience", as the department was first called).  Like everyone else, I had heard many cynical comments about faculty who became department chairs, the most caustic of which was that they were the faculty who could not teach well nor do research.  However, I knew these statements to be untrue because I had known department chairs who were truly inspiring and visionary leaders in addition to being exemplary teachers and scholars, and I had accepted them as role models.  Moreover, through interactions with them I was aware of some of the administrative issues they dealt with, so I was not at all surprised to find that being a department chair was a very interesting and reasonably challenging position. Interesting because you often have to solve problems, which I had been trained to do and found to be relatively easy, and challenging because the problems often required that I deal effectively with people -- with faculty and students and staff and administrators -- which I had not been trained to do and never found to be easy.  In retrospect, I can say that I am very grateful for the opportunity to develop those administrative skills, which I am still working on, and to have such a stimulating and satisfying activity to complement my teaching and research. It also gave me a platform from which I could export my ideas about teaching and research to the larger communities of my department and my university, and that influence is, to me, one of the most attractive features of the chair's job.

So what does all this have to do with teaching excellence?  As mentioned, I have developed different perspectives on teaching through my experience as a teacher, as a scientist, and as an administrator, and I now want to make plain those three perspectives and how they influence what I think and what I do.

First, as a teacher I have learned some things about teaching that are so clearly important in promoting teaching excellence that I believe they must be obvious to everyone.  These include [a] the need for instructors to know the course material very well, [b] the need for instructors to present the material in an organized and interesting way, and at a level that students can understand, [c] the need for instructors to be considerate and respectful in dealing with students, and readily accessible to them, [d] the need for instructors to make clear the organization and goals of the course, not only at the beginning of the term but, by example, throughout the term, and [e] the need for instructors to set high standards for their students, and to base their assessment of them on rigorous and fair examinations.  I don't think that anyone would dispute this list of necessary ingredients for excellent teaching.  Thus, what I want to do now is to put this list aside, and instead focus my comments on a few less obvious issues that I believe also promote excellent teaching.

I will illustrate my first point by telling you a story.  One of the many things that impressed me about my two children when they were very young was their interest in making sense of the fascinating world in which they lived.  I remember one time I asked my son, who was close to 3 years old at the time, whether he wanted to take a walk with me so I could mail a letter to my mother-in-law.  He was happy to accompany me, so I held his little hand and we walked down the street.  When we got to the mailbox, I opened the lid and put the letter in.  After a moment's pause, he surprised me by asking, "Is Bubbe in the mailbox?"  I should not have been so surprised that he had not yet learned how the postal system worked, because he actually had not yet learned how most things worked.  But he clearly had the goal to understand, and already he was observing what was happening around him, asking for explanations, and using those observations and explanations to develop concepts about how things worked; then, he evaluated those hypotheses by seeing if they generalized to new situations.  I suppose that all kids proceed in the same way, more or less.  First they learn the answers to the "What? questions", and then they learn the answers to the "Why? questions", to obtain understanding.  For example, they have to learn to flick a switch on the wall to make remote lights go on, and then they have to learn the basis of this causal connection.  They have to learn why ice melts on a warm day and ultimately vanishes, and why sugar added to hot tea quickly disappears. And they have to learn why it appears that the sky is blue and the sun is yellow, whereas astronauts above earth's atmosphere see outer space as black and the sun as white.  I assume that most kids, like mine, learned such things in physics and chemistry classes in grade school and in high school.  However, I have been surprised to notice that nowadays many students, before they get to college, do not seem to understand some comparably familiar phenomena in biology.  For example, the students I teach as freshmen and sophomores had not yet learned why, when light is dim, they can no longer read a printed page or see in color.  They did not yet know why heart rate and blood pressure increase during stress, or what is wrong, biologically, with people who have diabetes or schizophrenia or Parkinson's disease.  And they did not yet know why they get hungry, or why alcohol increases urine flow, or why ground hogs come out of hibernation periodically during the winter.  (The students from western Pennsylvania often have the same weird idea about the last issue.)   In fact, the answers to these and many related questions about brain function are known, and I discuss them in my introductory course on the science of the nervous system.

To be frank with you, I really do not think that many of these facts about the nervous system are very important, however interesting they may be.  After all, if they were truly important, then such courses as mine would be required of all students, and they're not.  Nor should they be.  After all, there are 6 billion people in the world, and relatively few of them know anything about neuroscience, yet I presume that most of them live perfectly cheerful lives.  I conclude that if I merely taught students scientific facts, then I am not likely to teach them something that will help them to become more successful adults.  Yet as a teacher that is the goal I want to accomplish, so long ago I decided that I would try to teach my students something that I believe will be of real value to them.  More specifically, I decided that what I would teach them, and what I wanted them to learn, was not the product of science but the process of science. That is, I want them to know how to think clearly and logically about relevant information, and I want them to recognize when they do not have enough information to draw conclusions, and I want them to go and get whatever additional information they need in order to achieve understanding.  Put another way, I do not want them to be satisfied in my course simply because they have compiled a complete set of notes that they have color-coded and committed to memory, and I do not want them to be satisfied simply because they can say back to me what I once said to them.  I want much more from them than that.  I want them to ask questions when something is not clear, and I want them to keep asking questions until the answers become part of their understanding of how the brain works.  In other words, I want them to be students, not stenographers.

So how do I go about teaching what I call "the process of science"?  Well, I begin each class with a curious phenomenon, like the ones they wondered about when they were younger.  For example, early in the term I began a class by describing the fire-bombing of London during the second world war.  There were many wooden houses in London at the time, which is why incendiary bombs were used, and some houses were set on fire by the bombs.  Among those houses was a nursing home in which chronic care was given to patients who could not take care of themselves because they could not move.  Some of those patients had spinal damage and were paralyzed, and when the building caught fire they could not flee and so, not surprisingly, they perished.  But what was surprising, and the point of my story, was what happened to the patients who had advanced Parkinson's disease and who, like the paralyzed patients, had not moved in years; when the building caught fire, these patients suddenly got out of bed and ran from the building to safety.  And furthermore, to make the story more mysterious, once the Parkinsonian patients were safe, they became akinetic again (i.e., they stopped moving). 

"What's up with that?", the students ask.  To clarify these phenomena I could simply tell them about how spinal damage prevents the control of movement by interrupting the neural pathways from the brain to the limbs, and how Parkinson's disease, which is a neurodegenerative disease in the brain, affects behavioral arousal systems rather than peripheral motor systems, so that the patients cannot voluntarily initiate movement unless there is a strong signal to behave that comes from outside them (rather than a signal that comes from within).  In fact, I do provide this information, but I could have provided it without telling the story in the first place.  I told them the story because I wanted to get their attention, as I hope I have gotten your attention, and I wanted them to be curious about the control of movement.  So my first point is that it's not just little kids who are curious; everyone can be curious if you make the story interesting enough.  Once you have gotten their attention, then you can teach them something that they want to know. 

My second point is this:  I believe that if I want the students to learn the scientific process, then I have to show them how scientists think.  Having tried to capture the mystery that drove scientists to devote so many of their life's hours to their investigations, I then try to recreate the thinking that led to the design and interpretation of experiments that the scientists performed.  When I succeed, I can recreate in the students the excitement and satisfaction that the scientists had when they finally learned enough to get the understanding they had sought.  I teach the material in this way so that the students can develop skills in analysis and deductive reasoning and thereby use them outside of class, to solve the problems that they are interested in.  In order to aid their learning, I give them homework questions so they can practice using information from class to understand related observations that I had not presented in class.  And then periodically I find out how good they are at this task by giving them similar but different questions on exams.  As you might imagine, my exams are not a test of recall.  I presume the students can remember what I once told them, and if they cannot then they can look it up because I give open-notebook tests.  Of course, the answers are not in their notebooks; the answers are in their heads.  That is, a full understanding of the issues allows the students to be able to answer any question I might ask them on an exam.  As a hidden agenda, I also want them to master the material so they can learn what it is like to master material.  I believe that once they have reached that level of understanding, they will never settle for anything less.

Increasingly during the term, the students ask me questions about the material.  Most of the questions nowadays are not asked either in class or in person, but electronically via e-mail.  To allow everyone to see what I have been asked and what answers I have given, I post most of these exchanges on the course web page.  But my goal here is more important than the clarification of specific issues; I want the students to be actively engaged in the course even when they are not in class, which is my third point.  I find the course web page to be especially valuable in this regard.   The students certainly spend a lot of time looking at what I have posted there: my lecture notes, the homework questions and answers, and the other questions and answers that come up outside of class. Last term there were over 70,000 visits to the course web page, from a class of about 100 students.  That's a good many more contacts that I had with students during the term than I had had in any of the courses I taught for the 30 years before three years ago, when I first started using a course web page. It seems clear to me that students in my course now learn more than former students did before I had a course web page; more students now are involved in the course, more students now do extremely well, and overall class performance now is better than it had been.  It seems plausible that students learn more and do better when they spend more time on a course and understand the material better, and so I strongly recommend the use of a course web page as a means to that end.

A separate point is that occasionally students ask me questions that I cannot answer.  Sometimes I do not know the answers but I know someone who does, so I can learn the answers from them and then report back to the students. However, sometimes I do not know the answers to their questions and I know that no one else does either.  What can we do as instructors when there is no one whom students can ask, and nothing they can read, to satisfactorily illuminate certain issues?  Under these circumstances, I suggest that the students take the great intellectual energy that is their curiosity and put it to use in a research laboratory by doing experiments that will provide the information that they seek.  I believe that a research laboratory is a very good place to find new information and understanding.  I also believe that a good research laboratory can be much more stimulating than the best classroom experience the students will have.  After all, what research scientists try to do is to solve a problem that has never been solved before in the history of the world. They have to figure out what the problem is, how to study it, how to analyze their findings, how to integrate the data with what is already known about the subject, and how to evaluate their new ideas. They may have to spend years on a research problem with no guarantee that they will ever solve it.  All this is quite a challenge and of course it does not appeal to everyone, but for some students it is a very attractive proposition indeed. 

I do not have to tell my faculty colleagues what a wonderful educational experience it can be to work in a research lab.  However, in encouraging them to provide undergraduate students with suitable research opportunities, I sometimes have to convince them that the students will be able to deal appropriately with the challenges they will encounter.  When I was an undergraduate student in college 40 years ago, we usually were not welcome in faculty labs, and the reasons given actually seemed sensible.   Specifically, we were told that as undergraduate students we did not know very much, and that as teenagers we were well known to be immature and irresponsible.  In other words, because we could not be counted on to understand and appreciate the serious work that goes on in research labs, it was reasonable that scientists did not want to risk letting such inexperienced and unreliable young people be in a position to ruin their experiments.  I was not happy with that argument, however, because I felt that I was an exception if that was a rule, and so I persisted and managed to get associated with a research lab.  But my duties were largely restricted to running errands and washing glassware, which was not exactly a rich educational experience.  In retrospect, I believe that many undergraduate students then could have handled more responsibilities than they were given. I know based on subsequent experience that many undergraduate students now handle such responsibilities very well and thrive in the lab, just like many graduate students do.  I think it is terrific that the University of Pittsburgh encourages undergraduate students to get involved in faculty research, and encourages faculty to welcome such student involvement.  It is one of the many ways that teaching and research activities are combined here, to everyone's benefit.

One of my tasks as department chair is to oversee the education of our students, and it is plain that I believe a laboratory research experience can be a great component of that education.  Another one of my tasks is to promote high-quality teaching throughout the department.  I believe there are three obvious ways in which department chairs can accomplish that goal: [a] have faculty teach the courses they want to teach within an established curriculum, [b] foster a culture in which good teaching is valued, respected, and rewarded, and [c] have inexperienced teachers get mentoring and peer evaluation from more experienced teachers.  In turn, chairs must receive clear support from the dean on these issues, and I am very pleased that this support has been present in FAS during my 16 years as department chair.  In addition to these obvious points, I believe that one of the most effective ways in which a chair can help create a department whose faculty are good teachers is by hiring scientists and scholars who include in their personal goals the wish to become an excellent teacher.  Of course, wanting is not enough.  So, once we have hired new faculty, we then have to mentor them and encourage them to become good teachers, and then, perhaps most importantly, we have to make sure that we do not recommend for tenure someone who is not a good teacher and, in fact, has little interest in ever becoming one.  I believe that the fewer exceptions you make to this general policy, the better your departmental teaching is going to be and the clearer your department's priorities will be to everyone. o what have I said about my attempts to achieve teaching excellence?  Four things.  First, I said that I try to capture the interest of my students and then provide explanations of things they have become curious about.  Second, I try to get my students to learn how to understand things by teaching them how things have become understood.  Third, I try to get my students to ask questions until the answers to all their questions have been incorporated into a coherent understanding of how the brain works, and I want them to use their new understanding to solve problems so they know they have attained mastery of the material.  And, finally, I try to hire faculty who have the personal goal of providing very high quality education to our students, both in the classroom and in the laboratory, in addition to having the personal goal of becoming a world-class scientist and scholar.

I will stop here.  I hope you have found some of these general ideas to be relevant and worth considering. 

In closing, I want to thank Associate Dean Beeson again for the opportunity to state my views in this essay, and I want to thank Tina and David Bellet again for sponsoring the annual celebration of teaching excellence at the University of Pittsburgh.

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