S4xE11: Pivoting to Teaching Faculty
Episode Summary
In this episode, Dr. Lindsay Jamieson, Teaching Professor and Associate Dean of Teaching Faculty for Northeastern’s Khoury College, shares her journey from a small liberal arts college to being Associate Dean of Teaching Faculty. We discuss what teaching-focused careers entail, how to assess positions, and what support and growth look like in these roles. Lindsay offers advice for making career shifts and reminds us that it’s always okay to change course if your current job doesn’t fit.
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Episode Notes
Transcript
[00:03] Kristin: Hello and welcome to the CSEd podcast, a podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, an Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Dr. Lindsay Jamieson, Teaching Professor and Associate Dean of Teaching Faculty for Khoury College at Northeastern. Lindsay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[00:25] Lindsay: Thank you for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.
[00:28] Kristin: So, Lindsay, first, I’d like to ask you, how did you get to where you are today? Cause I have heard it is not a typical path, but it is a perfect segue into what we are going to talk about today.
[00:38] Lindsay: So, yes, it’s been a kind of winding road. I like to start in high school, which is kind of a weird place to start for a lot of folks. I actually went to a high school that had computer science as one of the electives. And given my age and the time period in the, as a Gen Xer, I can tell you that’s not a normal thing and that, having a computer science course that I could take in high school, was, is, is not normal. So I took high school computer science in my sophomore year because my dad was like, hey, you have this extra spot, I think you’d be good at it. And so I took it, and there was just the one computer science course. But we had enough people that were interested in doing it. The teacher was able to talk his way into having a 2nd year, CS course, and then in my 3rd year, I did an independent study for AP computer science.
[01:35] Lindsay: So, I got into computer science pretty relatively early. When I went to undergrad, I was looking for computer science programs. I ended up at a small liberal arts college, DePauw University. And there I majored in computer science and math, and small liberal arts college means that you aren’t stuck in a STEM field, that that’s the only thing you do. So I also minored in music. Take all of those sorts of interests, put them together. After I graduated, I went to work for a small database company, thanks to the dotcom bust in the early 2000s, that company no longer exists.
[02:15] Kristin: Oh, (chuckle).
[02:17] Lindsay: So, but while I was working there, I was chatting with a friend from undergrad, and he was like, you know. Our female professor, Dr. Gloria Townsend, I think that you are a lot like her. And I think you would be really good as a professor. And I wasn’t really enjoying what I was doing. I mean, programming is fine. I, I like to program. I, I do it occasionally when I can, but it wasn’t something that was super fulfilling for me. It was definitely a job, not a passion. So, as I was seeing the writing on the wall that the company was not going to be successful, I’d applied to grad schools, saying I could be a professor. So that was always my goal. It was never about research or anything like that. It was the teaching aspects that I was going for. So I ended up at Clemson University and had a wonderful experience there. My PhD was in theoretical computer science, specifically algorithm development and NP-completeness proofs. So, I did this theoretical computer science. I knew that my goal was not a tenure-track job at an R1. I was not after grants. That was not what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was teach. It was why I had gone to grad school, because if you want to be a professor of any kind, you need a PhD. Especially at that point, there wasn’t a path for I have a master’s, so I’m going to teach, in that time period, so I needed the PhD, and that was always a step along the road. So, I, as I was finishing up my PhD, I found a position at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, which is a small public liberal arts college, near where the Potomac meets the Chesapeake.
[04:08] Lindsay: As many of you listening may know, coming out of a PhD program, you may or may not have had a lot of experience teaching. Because I knew what my goal was during my PhD, I had pushed to be able to teach, to be beyond being a TA for a recitation or a lab, but to actually be the the instructor of record for a lecture session so that I had experience teaching, I had experience to know that I really I didn’t like 75 person classes at 8 a.m. Like that is not my time. It is not my class size. So, I was at a small liberal arts college, which I thought was my goal anyway. Class size is around 30, on a, you know, for a full class, and I went through all of the problems that you have as a new professor with little experience teaching. My projects were too hard, my classes were short, because I could see on their faces when their eyes glazed over, cause I’d shoved too much information in. They weren’t interactive enough, all of those things.
[05:16] Lindsay: But I had started at the same time, and this is one of the benefits for a small liberal arts college, as an educational studies professor. So, she was coming out of the K-12 classroom into the college space having finished her PhD. And one of the things I could do because I’d gotten to know her during orientation was say, hey, something is wrong, this is not working, and have her come sit in my class. Even though her expertise was not computer science, I’m pretty sure that the words that were coming out of my mouth could have been a complete foreign language, but she understood teaching.
[05:50] Kristin: Yes.
[05:51] Lindsay: And she could come into my classroom and watch and say, you missed an opportunity there. They asked you a question, you answered it, but you didn’t probe. You didn’t, you just gave them the answer. You didn’t have them try to figure it out themselves. You could have done an activity here, you could have done this. And by working with her and getting through that semester, I was able to figure out how to be a teacher. And that was great. I also, not that semester, the first semester of teaching is always sort of like we threw you into the deep end of the pool. Good luck. We’ll, we’ll check your swimming abilities at the end.
[06:30] Kristin: Yeah, yeah. Yep. Everything’s on fire or feels like it’s on fire.
[06:31] Lindsay: But the next year, I had this really interesting situation where I had two sections of intro, CS1. One class, and they they were about the same size. They had about the same, gender distribution in the class. And one section, all of the female-identifying students sat together. They were friends. They got along, they worked together on projects, inside the class, outside the class, they worked on things together that you could see that they were forming a cohort. In the second section, all of the female-identifying students sat in the various corners of the room with a couple up front, but not next to each other. They didn’t communicate with each other. Like that was not happening. I actually saw a couple of the students from that section working with the women from the first section, where they all worked together, like they were friends. And when I looked at CS2 enrollment the next semester, the women that had worked together that had formed a cohort had a 95% continuation rate.
[07:41] Kristin: Wow, OK.
[07:42] Lindsay: At that point, I went, this is weird. And why, why am I only, like, what’s going on? How can I replicate what I’m seeing in that section where they were, they became friends, they formed a cohort. They actually stayed as a cohort of female students through their whole time and a lot of them ended up as either CS minors or CS majors, despite coming in with no, written, you know, requirements that they were going to be or ideas that they were going to be. We’d set it up so that, computer science counted as a math. And it didn’t have that scary calculus word in it.
[08:24] Lindsay: I got connected with a program in the mathematics area, called the Emerging Scholars program, which is about creating this cohort feel amongst underrepresented groups. And so what we did was we copied that into our, CS1 course, and we had this, this thing, and it, it worked really well, and we actually found that we were increasing the retention, not just of our underrepresented groups, but all of our groups in the course were being retained at a higher rate after we started that program. And even though we were mostly, I, I had started it because I wanted to have more female students in the class, it was also working with all of the underrepresented groups. So this was wonderful.
[09:16] Lindsay: This helped to get me through that tenure track, you know, the tenure process. This was a big change in what my research was, so I’ve left a lot of that theoretical computer science stuff, not necessarily behind, but it’s been to the side, and I’ve been focusing on broadening participation in terms of my research. And so I got through the 3rd year review, had my first child, which I, I love being a mom. It’s a great part of what I do. Got through tenure and promotion, so I was a tenured associate professor at the small liberal arts college. But at about that same time, I realized that there wasn’t an up from where I was. I was about to go up for full professor. And I was gonna stay a full professor at the small liberal arts college for the rest of my career, which I was looking at probably 20 years. There wasn’t a lot of change or movement that was gonna happen. Right before COVID, I had gone to a CRA-WP workshop on mid-career mentoring. Highly recommend this as something to do. If you get to the mid-career point, you’re like, what’s next?
[10:30] Kristin: Yes, I did this too. It was so useful.
[10:33] Lindsay: And I realized that there wasn’t a next really at my current job. And so, my husband and I started looking. He is also a computer scientist. Also a professor. We decided to make it super hard on ourselves. We had the same PhD advisor. See, he was also in the same position where he, he, there wasn’t an obvious next for him either. So we started looking around and one of the things that we saw was that Northeastern University was hiring a teaching for teaching track professors in Portland, Maine. It was a brand new campus, which is an exciting thing. For us, the looking at a brand new campus with an exciting program, the Aligned Program at Northeastern, takes folks that have finished a bachelor’s degree in something. Doesn’t have to be anything at all STEM-related, and gets them in a year ready to do a master’s in computer science.
[11:32] Kristin: OK, so it’s a, what’s, what are they called? Post-bacc’s?
[11:34] Lindsay: It’s a bridge program,
[11:36] Kristin: Bridge program, OK.
[11:38] Lindsay: But sort of a post-bacc, that’s like 1-year intensive time to get you into the 2-years of the master’s program. And I realized that this teaching position was very similar to my tenured position. They, there were contracts that were not a single year. There was an opportunity for promotion. There was some job security from that, having a multi-year contract. And this really exciting opportunity to basically start and be part of the start of a, of a college location. Which is not something you have to do very often.
[12:19]Kristin: Nope.
[12:20] Lindsay: So we applied, we were accepted, we were offered jobs again, COVID. So, we actually accepted the jobs, having never visited the location.
[12:33] Kristin: OK. (chuckle) Location, how, how much of is it a factor?
[12:37] Lindsay: Little things, right? I had been, so we moved to the state of Maine from Maryland. I had been to the state before, but it had been 20 or 30 years since then. My husband has, had never lived above the Mason-Dixon line.
[12:56]Kristin: Oh.
[12:57] Lindsay: Right, and Maine has a little bit of the white stuff that falls from the sky.
[13:03]Kristin: Yeah.
[13:04] Lindsay: The kids were sort of, the kindergartner was like, hey, how’s this gonna be different than, I, I mean, I haven’t seen people in school anyway. The older one was a little bit upset because she would be leaving all of her friends behind, and all of that, so moving is hard anyway. But we came for a visit. About the time that vaccines were available, just sort of an idea of how things were going, we left the location, we got to meet the folks in person. It was very nice, and we’ve been very happy with this move. And so, we were, there were 2 faculty when we started, we were part of 5 that were brought in, so it was immediately a group of 7 people locally that we could talk with. But Northeastern in general has, Khory College specifically has 100 teaching faculty, which meant that I want. From an institution where there were 4 computer science teaching faculty, tenured track folks. To 100 people that I could pick the brains of and ask questions of and make plans with, and get materials from, and all of those things. And it’s been wonderful because everyone wants to share and learn from each other, and it’s been great.
[14:20] Kristin: So just to make sure that I’m understanding, so the, the, the college is, is way bigger, even though it was a new college?
[14:29] Lindsay: No, the college already existed. The location didn’t.
[14:49] Kristin: Oh, OK.
[14:34] Lindsay: It was a brand new campus. So, if you think of it from like a state institution standpoint, you’re in North Carolina, so you have UNC in Raleigh-Durham. But you also have UNC Charlotte.
[14:49] Kristin: Yeah. OK.
[14:50] Lindsay: That’s a different campus. So I am at the Portland Maine campus for Northeastern.
[14:56] Kristin: OK. I, I guess like the thing that hiccuped in my brain is that you had 100 new colleagues, but like they’re not all local, I would assume.
[15:03] Lindsay: No.
[15:04] Kristin: OK, there we go. That’s where I was like, wait a minute.
[15:05] Lindsay: But it was covid times. So we were all doing, you know, Zoom meetings anyway.
[15:10] Kristin: Distance didn’t matter in those times.
[15:12] Lindsay: Distance didn’t stop mattering quite as much. Yes. And then this, starting about Thanksgiving time last year, I had the opportunity to start thinking about becoming the Associate Dean of teaching faculty for Khory College. And started that opportunity in January. That’s where I am.
[15:33] Kristin: What does it mean to be associate dean of teaching faculty? And then what kind of teaching faculty are you, are you deaning of?
[15:43] Lindsay: So what it means to be associate dean of teaching faculty is that I am in charge of the hiring, promotion, and yearly evaluation of all of the teaching faculty, the teaching-focused faculty at in Khory College.
[16:02] Kristin: OK. And how many people is that?
[16:04] Lindsay: About 100.
[16:06] Kristin: OK. And it’s across all the departments, right?
[16:08] Lindsay: Khory College only has one group. We haven’t broken up into separate departments. So they could teach computer science, data science, AI, robotics, game development, all of those folks are in the same bucket.
[16:22] Kristin: Oh. OK.
[16:23] Lindsay: The Khory College of Computing Sciences.
[16:25] Kristin: Oh, I see. Definitely my, I was not, did not fully understand how things were situated. So, Khory College is only a computing college in essence.
[16:33] Lindsay: Correct.
[16:34] Kristin: And there are only teaching faculty there or there are tenure track research faculty too?
[16:39] Lindsay: There are tenure-tracking research faculty there. The, yeah, it, it has all of them. I am only in charge of the teaching faculty portion.
[16:49] Kristin: OK, so it’s actually like, so your college is much, you’re a very large college if you’re thinking of in terms of departments of computer science normally. And you’re in charge of the like 100 or so teaching faculty that just focus on computer science. Wow, that’s so cool.
[17:05] Lindsay: Yes. The easier way to think of this in terms of how Northeastern works is that we have campuses at 9 different locations… Sorry, I had to go through them all. And so if you think about it, those 9 different campuses were sort of not really, but a lot like a department in that you have someone that’s in charge at that location who’s, taking care of the faculty that are there. But I am in charge of like the promotion process and yearly evaluation for all of those faculty or those that, local people are doing the day-to-day management.
[17:45] Kristin:. I guess to get a better sense of, of size, how many students are at Khory College since this kind of Khory College is like a computing college in essence, and how big are the classes that these, the faculty are teaching.
[17:57] Lindsay: So it depends.
[18:00] Kristin: Yeah, of course it does.
[18:01] Lindsay: So, in Boston at our primary campus, we have this typical R1 class sizes where you have intro courses of several 100, going up through master’s courses where again the introductory the entry point master’s courses could have 200 or 300 folks in them. At our other campuses, so the Portland main campus, the fire marshal gets really angry if we put more than 32 people in the classrooms.
[18:30] Kristin: Oh, OK. But Khory College is, is where?
[18:34] Lindsay: So Khory College, so the way that Northeastern works is that there’s the primary campus in Boston. And then we have satellite campuses around the world.
[18:47] Kristin: Yeah.
[18:47] Lindsay: Portland, Maine, Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington, Silicon Valley, California, Oakland, California, Arlington, Virginia, and Miami are where Khory College is.
[18:59] Kristin: OK. So you’re in Portland, Maine on the main campus, but you’re in charge of people all across the world.
[19:04] Lindsay: Correct. It makes timing things really exciting.
[19:07] Kristin: So, what kind of teaching faculty, given that you’re, we’re talking about a bunch of different locations, is there a large spread of different kinds of teaching faculty?
[19:16] Lindsay: So for the most part, the way that Northeastern works, the way that Khory College works, we have ranks of teaching faculty, assistant teaching faculty, associate teaching professor, and teaching professor, based on years of experience, there’s a promotion process. The expectation is that our teaching faculty will have teaching as their primary time commitment and their job. But they are also expected to stay current in computer science as well, whether that’s reviewing papers, writing papers, doing research, or doing other things that impact computer science or their community.
[20:00] Kristin: So some kind of scholarly work.
[20:01] Lindsay: Some kind of scholarly work, but it doesn’t always have to be I have written a paper. It can be things like I have run a summer camp for kids that are learning computer science things, or I’ve helped with the Girls Who Code club in my area. It could be all sorts of things.
[20:25] Kristin: So outreach counts as scholarly work?
[20:29] Lindsay: Because you’re having an impact, we call it impact, not scholarly work.
[20:32] Kristin: Got it. OK. And what, what’s the teaching load for for these faculty?
[20:37] Lindsay: The teaching load is 6 courses over the academic year.
[20:41] Kristin: And are you on quarter or semester?
[20:42] Lindsay: Semesters.
[20:43] Kristin: So, 3 - 3.
[20:45] Lindsay: But they do have the opportunity to get releases, and that’s another thing under my purview, deciding who would get a course release. It can be for research activity, it can be for one of those impact activities, those sorts of things.
[21:01] Kristin: Yeah. Alright, so I guess now I’m having a moment of like nitty gritty details time because anyone who’s thinking of applying to a teaching faculty position, I feel like all of those jobs are slightly different in weird, nuanced ways that will heavily impact your experience.
[21:18] Lindsay: Yes.
[21:19] Kristin: And so you say 6 courses, but there’s a difference between courses, the number of students in that course, and whether or not we’re talking about having separate preps, which is like how many courses you’re actually preparing to teach versus the number of courses or in essence sections of courses that you’re teaching. So, how does all of that interact with each other?
[21:44] Lindsay: So it is really hard when we talk about the yearly evaluation process. The amount of, like, how do you compare a 300-person class versus a 32-person class?
[21:54] Kristin: Yep.
[21:55] Lindsay: Like, they’re vastly different. They both actually have similar pulls on your time. Yes, there’s more grading, but usually you have more TA’s to help with that. With the 32-person class, there’s an expectation on the part of the students that you are going to be more interactive. They’re going to know you better. They would expect to know someone, the professor of their 300-person class. And so there it’s different pulls on your time, and I don’t know about better or worse or any sort of comparisons, but it’s something that we’ve struggled with. And I’m not convinced we’ve come up with a process whereby the people teaching at the network campuses with no hope of going over 30 people in their classes are not penalized for that. But also the people teaching in Boston with a 300-person class are not penalized for anything related to that 300-person class either. But it’s, it’s a balance.
[22:56] Kristin: Yeah, I think for me, like, a larger class in some ways is easier to teach but also harder to teach because the, the more if we say 3% of students in your course are going to have a bad semester.
[23:11] Lindsay: Yeah.
[23:12] Kristin: And you’re going to have to kid glove your way with that those students. 3 to 5% of a 30-student class is very different than 3 to 5% of 300 students.
[23:23] Lindsay: Yes.
[23:24] Kristin: Especially when each of those students that fall in that 3 to 5% requires unique handling that does not scale.
[23:35] Lindsay: Correct.
[23:36] Kristin: And so, some things are easier because 300 students forces you to scale everything you possibly can. But when you’re having 300 students and then 5% are having a dumpster fire semester, that means you’re dealing with 15 students that you are in essence teaching basically a, a small 15-student class where every single one of them is unique.
[23:59] Lindsay: And what we’ve seen is that or what we’ve put into place is that our in Boston there are a lot more of the academic support staff that can help with those 300-person classes where on the network campuses you have a smaller, not, it still exists there is still an academic support staff on each of those campuses, but the the size of it is smaller as appropriate for the size of the student population.
[24:26] Kristin: Got it. So, given that you’re dean of, of teaching faculty.
[24:30] Lindasy: Associate.
[24:31] Kristin: Like what other kinds of, like, I’m sure then you, you must talk to other equivalent deans of teaching, are there such things as other deans of teaching faculty in other schools?
[23:41] Lindsay: There are. And I would encourage, listeners who want to find out more about these folks, there’s usually a panel at SIGCSE. Talking about being a teaching professor, and that’s a really good place to go get that sort of information if you’re trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. I’m, I’m still figuring that out. So.
[25:03] Kristin: We all, we’re all still figuring it out. It never ends.
[25:06] Lindsay: But that’s a good place to go as well. Yeah, and there are folks like me at other other institutions. I know, off the top of my head, UCSD has one. I wanna say, UIUC has one as well.
[25:23] Kristin: Have you all gotten together ever and compared notes of like how you handle your teaching faculty?
[25:28] Lindsay: So, I haven’t because I’ve only been in the job for a little bit now.
[25:32] Kristin: Oh, right.
[25:33] Lindsay: But, my predecessor had. So this is, this is a resource that I’m planning to take full advantage of as I get further into my job.
[25:43] Kristin: Got it. So, let’s roll back into your history a little bit and talk about like what was the decision process like as you were like you had tenure, you were sitting at a small liberal arts college.
[25:52] Lindsay: I did.
[25:53] Kristin: Dealing with a small number of students, and then you decided to completely uproot yourself and go somewhere else and change jobs that technically you no longer had tenure unless teaching faculty there are treated differently than most that I’ve seen. What was your decision process like? What, what was important to you that made you decide this?
[26:16] Lindsay: So part of it was, there were a bunch of things that went into it. As I mentioned earlier, I, there was a, a boredom factor. I, there wasn’t a, a forward motion on that particular path. And which is fine. If you get into a position where you’re like, this is comfortable and I’m OK with that, and I’m gonna continue doing this job for the next 20 years. Great, that works for you. It didn’t work for me. And one of the things that I found was that the position that I was in as a tenured associate professor was on a renewing six-year contract. I was a small public liberal arts college, which meant that I, my budget restrictions every year were dependent on the budget of the state. And I found that it was very much a stagnant position for me.
[27:11] Lindsay: And so, a part of it was looking to see what else was out there. Did I want to move to another small liberal arts college? Did I want to move to a private instead of a public? And then what I got moving to Northeastern is that I was able to negotiate my promotion to full, so I’m a full teaching professor. And I was able to do what they give their full teaching professors is a five-year contract. And so I was based, that’s renewable. With no sort of limit and so I’ve moved from a six-year contract as a tenured professor to a 5-year contract. And Northeastern is also a private institution, not a public institution. And so there was a bit of a pay difference.
[27:58] Lindsay: And, the support levels I was seeing from the colleagues I was interacting with in the interview process, meant that I knew that I could count on if I’m asked to teach you mentioned having a bunch of different preps. If I’m asked to teach a course that I’ve never taught before here, I can find someone else who has taught it and get their materials and start not from nothing, but from like 10% or 50% of a course and turn it into what I want. And our new faculty that are coming in directly from postdocs or directly from their PhD program are getting that same support. Where they don’t have to start from, all right, here’s the name of the class and maybe a short description. Wonder what it wants to be when it grows up. And that can help get these folks started on a path to being good teachers faster. Then starting from, I’m, I took this class in undergrad, so I guess I’ll make a duplicate here while I’m teaching. And that’s one of the things that I really liked.
[29:08] Kristin: I see. So, if you were talking to someone who just kind of is learning that teaching track jobs are a thing. What would you tell them to help them think through is this something that they want to apply to?
[29:25] Lindsay: Part of it, a big part of it is what do you want your day to look like? What do you want your focus of your week to be? With a lot of the tenured and tenure-track positions at research-focused universities, your time is going to be spent not on the teaching portion, the in-classroom teaching, but rather on your research. Whether it’s helping students that are working in your lab do their research, writing papers, writing grant proposals, and then reviewing papers and grant proposals so that you know that you’ll get reviews later, and because people will be participating in that. If you want the majority of your time to be spent on the research-focused stuff. And that’s what you want to do, either a tenure-track job or a research position. That that’s what you’re going to be doing.
[30:18] Lindsay: If you want your focus to be on interacting with a larger group of students and helping them see what computer science is. And working through that, then you should be considering teaching track or teaching at a smaller at a teaching-focused institution. But yeah, there are some things I would watch for as you’re looking at that.
[30:42] Kristin: Yes, what should they watch for?
[30:44] Lindsay: So I would look at what is the position called. Because there are usually, there are a lot of places now, in the last 5 or so years, that have recognized that teaching is a big portion of what an institution, an educational institution, is expected to do. And that valuing the people that do the teaching is a good thing. So we have more places where the teaching track has a promotion path. Where you can start off as an assistant, whatever they call a teaching professor, and work your way up to a full whatever they call a teaching professor there. Having that promotion path. Having that laid out ahead of time, even better if they can show we’ve been able to get people through that promotion process. If they can give you an idea of what it looks like, how secure you are in getting a renewed contract. Those sorts of questions would be the things that I would be looking for.
[31:45] Lindsay: One of the things that’s hard to tell in your path as you’re trying to figure out your job because, you haven’t necessarily gone through this kind of hiring process before and there aren’t necessarily a lot of guides out there on what to do or how to think about these things.
[32:02] Kristin: Yup.
[32:03] Lindsay: Look at what they’re asking you for. Usually, for our teaching positions, we’re asking you for a teaching statement, we’re asking you for a research statement, a little bit, and then the big thing is, for us, a belonging statement.
[32:17] Kristin: Oh, OK.
[32:18] Lindsay: How do you include people in your classroom that may not feel like they belong? What do you, what steps do you take? And crafting your, your course to make sure that everyone has an opportunity. Those sorts of things and that, that’s what we’re looking for. We’re really looking at that. We’re looking at your teaching statement to say, do you have an idea of what teaching looks like other than I’ve been in a classroom, so obviously I do.
[32:47] Kristin: Yeah, what is that called? The Apprenticeship by observation or something like that, where someone believes they’re a master because they watched it. And I’m like, if that’s true, then someone who watches basketball is a good basketball player.
[33:00] Kristin: So. I think another thing to think about, so like, let’s say you decide to go apply. The, I think, the useful questions to ask would be things like teaching load and how that load is counted versus the other things you have to do. So, for example, you’re mentioning a 6 courses across an academic year when the it’s a semester system, so generally that would be 3-3. And there’s expectations of, you didn’t call it scholarly work, you called it impact, impact, and then I’m assuming services on top of that. Yeah, like, how is all of that counted? Like, do you all have an easy way to articulate that because I feel that my school does not, or my department doesn’t.
[33:51] Lindsay: So the way that we look at it is teaching is primary. You’re a teaching professor, teaching is primary. Service is actually second, and service is expected at all ranks. Impact is not. Our assistant teaching professors are not expected to be doing research or impact. We’d like them to stay active in the scholarship thing, so that just means reviewing papers or attending conferences. It’s not the super-involved version of ‘I am doing research.’ So that’s how we do it. We also ask that people do some professional development, which is looking at some sort of pedagogical thing, thinking about how you teach in some way, and thinking about your discipline. Whether that’s attending a conference or reviewing papers, that is an easy way to do that, and it counts for a couple of different buckets at the same time. We don’t explicitly state a particular amount of time set at this. We’re more likely to go in and say, you spent too much time on service, you should scale it back, but it’s usually not, you should focus more on your teaching. It’s a, you’ve been doing 120%, and we need you to scale it back so you don’t burn out.
[35:05] Kristin: At least you’re that you’re noticing those things. Though, part of me wonders how you, how, how will you notice those kinds of things?
[35:12] Lindsay: So the way that we notice it is that we have a yearly review of every teaching faculty. Northeastern does it on a calendar year basis, so that’s what we go with. We have a form that we have folks fill out, it’s basically a 10-page, retrospective on what their, calendar year looked like going through each of the courses that they taught, giving us some details about it, some reflection on what worked and what didn’t, what they would change for the future. And then we do the same thing for service. So, you look out, these are the committees I was on. Here’s what I did, here’s what I liked, didn’t like. Here are the students that I worked with. Here are the papers I reviewed, and then impact, which if they’re, if they don’t do it as an assistant professor, that’s fine, no big deal. Everybody else will write about what impact, activities they did over the last academic year. That’s where writing papers, writing grants. It’s whatever you do to have an impact in the discipline, in your community, in the college, that’s gonna show up there.
[36:21] Kristin: So you look at that entire report, and how do you suss out the you’re working too hard?
[36:26] Lindsay: So we actually have a committee look at all of the reports. January and February are really rough. Because we’re looking at these, they tend to be about 10 pages long, for 100 people. Yeah. So think of it as reading papers. But what we do is we look at If you look at someone who’s in the assistant role, and they’ve listed 4 committees, and they’ve helped 100 students, and they’ve reviewed all of these papers for these different conferences, you’re looking at that going, when did you sleep? And as you’re looking at this, you’re like, I don’t know when you slept. That’s when you can say, I think you might be doing too much. Or if you see that the teaching isn’t quite where we want it to be, but the the service is super full. You can say, hey, I need you to scale back on the service. You’re doing a great job, but we need you to make sure that your focus is on teaching. Those are the sorts of things that we look at.
[37:20] Kristin: Got it. OK. Well, that’s, it’s nice to hear that someone in leadership is actually looking at that and going, hey, you might want to tone that down. So, I wanna be careful of time, cause we are definitely almost running out. So that means it’s time for too long didn’t listen, TLDL. What would you say is the most important thing you want our listeners to get out of our conversation?
[37:39] Lindsay: So, I think for me the most important thing to get out of this conversation is that you, as a professor or as a PhD student, don’t need to feel fenced in by the choices you make directly out of grad school. There’s more than one way to be a professor. There’s a lot of things that you can do. And if you get into your first job and you find out that it’s not exactly what you thought it was going to be, and it doesn’t really fit where you want to be long term, you can make a move. And there are ways to change where, where you’re aiming for that are going to hopefully help you find fulfillment as a professor.
[38:21] Kristin: That sounds nice. I like to think of it as you’re only really making 5-year decisions.
[38:28] Lindsay: Yes. That is definitely what we have moved to.
[38:32] Kristin: And when about 5 years are up, you’re gonna ask yourself, was that a good decision? Do I want to change something?
[38:38] Lindsay: Right. Is there something different that I could or should be doing with my experiences?
[38:46] Kristin: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Lindsay.
[38:48] Lindsay: It’s been a pleasure to be here, Kristin.
[38:51] Kristin: Thank you for listening! If you know a colleague who’d enjoy this episode, please share it or post it on social media. It really helps us reach more listeners. Want to support the podcast? Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast. Our patrons help us keep the podcast ad-free and support production. This episode’s special shout-out goes to patrons Owen Astrachan and Susan Rodger. Thank you so much for your support! To listen to our past episodes, as well as transcripts and helpful links, visit csedpodcast.org and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! And with that, this was the CS-Ed Podcast hosted by me, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and produced by Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.