The Dalhousie Alumni Association Faculty Award of Excellence in Teaching recognizes instructors for their outstanding teaching and educational leadership. It’s one of many university-wide teaching awards that recognizes commitment to equity in education, graduate supervision, course development, collaborative teaching, and student teaching. First awarded in 1997, the award has had 28 recipients over the years. The inaugural recipient, Dr. Sampali (Srini) Srinivas was commended for his genuine interest in students, a quality that prevails among recipients today.
Four of the recent winners of the award come from very different disciplines: Dr. Sachin Seth, the 2023 winner, is in the Faculty of Dentistry; Dr. Jennifer Stamp, who won in 2020, teaches in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience; Dr. Matthew Schnurr of the Department of International Development Studies won in 2019; and Dr. Marion Brown from the School of Social Work took 2024’s award.
But despite their different areas of interest and backgrounds, they all share qualities that make a difference in the lives of their students. Here, they share in their own words how they approach teaching and the themes that emerge to create a roadmap that any new or seasoned instructor can incorporate into their classroom.
Instructors are typically teaching something that they’ve spent years studying and researching themselves. Students are attuned to the keen interest their instructors possess for their field of study, but also to the passion they have for sharing it with others.
Dr. Marion Brown (Social Work): There’s something energizing for me in being with students and going into the classroom. I can feel it rise up in me. I get excited. That has stayed consistent. I never have to question if I am going to be engaged or be interested or bring that life to the classroom.
Dr. Jennifer Stamp (Psychology and Neuroscience): I don't teach anything that's boring. If it's boring, then I don't understand it. Or if it’s important and boring, I need to find a way to make it interesting.
But interest and passion alone don’t necessarily mean that someone will excel in teaching. To stand out, an instructor has to understand their own teaching philosophy, to reflect and intentionally connect what is being taught with how it’s being taught.
Dr. Sachin Seth (Dentistry): The philosophy that I’ve always used is to create a safe and welcoming environment for my students. It’s not possible to learn where you just don't feel comfortable asking questions. I also believe that a big part of any curriculum is the role modeling that we do. I want my students to see how I interact with not only them, but with other colleagues and start to emulate that. I recognize that my students are going to be my colleagues in the profession of dentistry one day, so there’s no time like the present to start teaching them like that.
Dr. Stamp: It’s about the three Cs—curiosity, connection and collaboration. If I can make a student curious, then I’ve done at least part of the job. And if they’re curious, there’s a possibility for connection, even in a big class. And then everything that I’ve done of value since I started teaching has been done in collaboration with students.
Dr. Brown: I always start with what I call community commitments or what some people call group guidelines. Some people might say we all need to speak freely. Well, what do we mean by that? Yes, we want free but how are we going to handle it when we hear something that’s a different version of free? I help flesh that out and get more and more people talking, sharing their perspectives. Every class, I’m looking for everyone to speak because the less we speak, the easier it is to not speak again.
Philosophies evolve over time. And along with them, both expectations and realities. More often than not, new perspectives have to be changed and embraced over time.
Dr. Seth: I think something that a lot of new educators struggle with is wanting to be liked. When I first started teaching, I thought the way to be a good educator was to be liked. While I still believe that’s very important, my priority has shifted now from being liked to being respected.
Dr. Brown: One of the things that has transitioned is my comfort in not having all the ‘answers.’ In social work, we are teaching critical thinking and how to question authority, status quo, and assumptions. So it’s fair when students ask me about my assumptions and my status quo, and challenge me on the hierarchy that exists in the classroom. In the early years, that shook me. Now, it’s a lesser version of a shake, a tweak, and I bring the parallel—between hierarchies in society and in the classroom—right into the course.
Dr. Matthew Schnurr (International Development Studies): I started off with the idea that simulation-based exercises—which are popular in professions like medicine and management—were only suited for professional degrees. Through experimentation, I came to learn that such immersive exercises can also enhance interest and help students hone skills in large undergraduate classes.
Once the philosophical stage is set in the classroom, students can be invited onto it. The concept of flipping the classroom names a teaching style that each recipient practices.
Dr. Stamp: In a traditional classroom, you listen to somebody monologue and then you go home and work on problems on your own. It makes much more sense to flip that and work on problems with the person who can do them the best, which is your professor.
Dr. Seth: I use elements of the flipped classroom to engage students in different ways versus just lecturing at them. I am very lucky that I have a hands-on course, so it does make for a very easy flipped classroom, in which I can have demonstrations and videos and show students different things outside of standing there.
Dr. Schnurr: A lot of the classes that I was teaching would end with student agreeing on lofty goals—we need more participation, inclusion, sustainability. These buzzwords are so attractive because everyone can agree on them in principle, but they often mean very different things depending on the politics of the person championing them. I tried to get creative about how we can try to prompt students to think more critically about how to translate these aspirations into what those types of buzzwords mean in practice.
Dr. Brown: Because I teach a practice class, students engage in simulations, some of which are recorded. Students watch themselves back and they can see when they use their hands more, they can see when they lean forward, when they sit back or when their lower lip wobbles a little bit because something comes close to home for them. Then I ask them to reflect on what they observe in themselves, and it’s wonderful learning.
For students to participate, they require access and inclusion. On one hand, universal design principles create environments where students have equal opportunities to learn and engage. On the other, accommodations remove barriers that might exist to participating in these opportunities.
Dr. Stamp: You can’t accommodate one student with anxiety, another who is blind, and then another who is deaf. But you can design a program that’s accessible and barrier free. In the beginning, the Faculty of Science asked us to record all first-year science lectures. I thought, ‘I'll try it, but no one is going to come to class, marks are going to drop, and I’m going to have to rescue them before the exam.’ That didn’t happen. They all came to class. They watched the videos again. The EAL students slowed me down. The busy students sped me up. The single parents listened to me while cooking supper.
Dr. Seth: When it comes to teaching psychomotor skills, there's a theoretical aspect of it and then there's the skill of picking up a handpiece and actually drilling something. A principle that I have adopted is that not everyone learns at the same pace and everyone develops at different times. In my course, I allow the opportunity for students, if they had failed any of the assessments, to show me at the end of the year that they can do it.
Dr. Schnurr: In our research on the effectiveness of simulation-based learning, we found that the inclusion of digital tools provided an alternative forum where students could participate even if they did not feel comfortable speaking in the large-group. Students told us that these online forums also created opportunities for collaboration and facilitated knowledge building.
The importance of trust in any learning environment cannot be understated. Trust requires openness, vulnerability, and humility.
Dr. Schnurr: I am more honest now than I used to be about sharing my own struggles and vulnerabilities. I also think a lot more about teaching attitudes. I try to emphasize to students the value of humility and compassion and that these attitudes can be cultivated and honed. I try to share the lessons I have learned about navigating scholarly spaces. Many of us feel intimidated in university settings. I think that humility can be a strength as it can provoke self-reflection that can generate new insights about our place in the classroom and in the world.
Dr. Brown: It is a huge privilege to be invited into people’s lives. That the primary tool that we have [in social work] is ourselves: we don’t have technical stuff; we don’t have machinery. We take in information; we analyze it and then we try to be a resource to people. Never take yourself out of it: know yourself, know what you believe, know your limitations: know your skills, know your strengths. Bring all of who you are to the class of social work. Also bring humility because you’re not going to know it all, you’re not going to be able to ‘solve.’ It’s about coming with confidence and competence, and also humility.
Dr. Stamp: I talk about the big three—depression, anxiety and substance use. I've been doing this for years and I always use the term “they” when I’d talk about people who have these disorders. At one point, I stopped and said “I.” People were surprised that I told them. I’m sure somebody had confided me that day and that's probably what prompted it. I don't hide stuff if it's relevant, right?
Through their own studies, instructors have experience posing research questions, collecting data, drawing conclusions and making recommendations in their field. This approach lends itself well to the classroom where the question is now about the learning process—how do students learn best? Framing the educational experience as a research question itself is a mindset these recipients have benefited from.
Dr. Schnurr: As a PhD student, I received excellent training in the skills of research. But I learned little about how to become an effective teacher. As I sought out those with expertise in teaching and learning, I realized that I could use the skills I had as a researcher to experiment with and assess the learning impacts of different approaches. This exposure to the scholarship of teaching and learning has made me a better educator. I am always searching out new opportunities to combine these realms. I think my research makes me a better teacher and my teaching makes me a better researcher.
Dr. Stamp: If we can take an evidence-based approach to our research as scientists, we should also be making evidence-based decisions about how we teach. I go to the literature and to colleagues, and resources like the Centre for Learning and Teaching.
Instructors have dozens to hundreds of students in their classrooms every year. But the relationship doesn’t end after the final class or assessment. Instructors care about students long after they leave the classroom and are thankful for opportunities to reconnect.
Dr. Schnurr: It’s a real privilege to be able to engage with university students because you get to encounter people at a unique time in their lives, when they've broadening their horizons and are open to all these different ideas. It’s always gratifying to connect with students later on and see where their learning has taken them.
Dr. Stamp: I just wonder what they do and what they’ve done with what they learned. I hope they’re doing the same thing I am.
Dr. Seth: I have the opportunity regularly to go into a room filled with faculty and alumni. It’s always so nice to see people who are happy with what they’re doing. It’s the best thing you could ask for, right? [What I say to them is] First and foremost, I hope life has been good to you. I hope the education that we provided you has at least given you foundation for what will be your rest of your life professionally, because at the end of the day, that's all we do in universities: provide our students with a foundation of learning. Lifelong learning is part of the game here. I hope we’ve given students that ability to learn, also instilled a passion for the profession.
This story appeared in the DAL Magazine Fall 2024 issue. Flip through the rest of the issue using the links below.