Separate Faculty Tracks for Teaching and Research

For improving teaching & education: create a second faculty track at Tech of 1-3 faculty positions per school that focus only on teaching. These professors would be given 4-4 teaching loads, and would be hired, promoted, and tenured primarily based on their teaching performance. They might have some research and/or grant raising requirements for P&T too...perhaps their research specialties could be in pedagogy. But their main job would be to focus on excellent teaching and training.

Right now, even faculty like me who love teaching are incentivized to minimize our efforts on it. There's incredible pressure to give bland lectures and multiple choice tests, and minimize our contact with the students, so that we can focus on research and grants.

Having a specialized teaching faculty track would create a small cadre of top teachers, with the incentives and rewards to be the best. It would simultaneously relieve some of the teaching burden from those professors who are poor at it, or dislike it (let's face it, some Tech faculty are great researchers but not great teachers). It would also allow the research faculty to focus their teaching and training on their area of specialty.

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Comments (9)

I love the heart of this Submitted by Elliot on Wednesday January 27, at 5:00 pm

I love the heart of this idea. I think it speaks to the basic conundrum of being a research university where it is necessary to provide an educational experience for its students but where faculty clearly see that the most tangible rewards are for their activities outside of the classroom. I agree that a professor does not have to be completely one or the other (teacher or researcher), but I also believe that the incentive to excel at teaching is severely limited for faculty (particularly untenured faculty).

problem Submitted by GT undergrad 3rd year IE on Thursday November 12, at 11:51 am

Georgia Tech doesn't teach its students. Suffering and not learning anything useful that I'll remember actually makes me 10x stronger in the real world. The only thing scarier than tech after you get out is probably marriage. I wouldn't worry too much about this issue. It's a weed-out performance issue.

appropriate workload for such a position Submitted by Ellen Zegura on Tuesday November 10, at 10:10 am

I like thinking about this as a possibility, but I would caution that a 4-4 load almost certainly does not allow someone to be an excellent teacher.

If you do seriously consider Submitted by Jill Fantauzza-Coffin on Tuesday November 3, at 4:28 pm

If you do seriously consider this option, please also consider that there are professors and instructors who enjoy the balance of teaching and research. An option needs to be left open for them as well. A research professor should also be rewarded for teaching activities well done.

This would greatly benefit the students. Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday November 3, at 4:18 pm

I'm not sure if separate tracks is the way to go, or just different incentives, etc, to promote better teaching, and trade-offs that can be made between teaching effectiveness and research. There's no question that many teachers at tech should not be teaching, however great their research may be they do not serve the students well at all. Most successful students at tech succeed because they are intrinsically good and motivated to learn on their own. Great teachers help, of course, but you cannot be successful here unless you can deal with the bad ones. (We always hated hearing how our program ranked very high nationally, knowing very well that it wasn't because the students were benefiting by a great teaching program, and that it was mostly because of the research, something many students here never see.) Perhaps this means that those teachers who shouldn't be teaching are simply replaced by ones whose sole purpose is to teach, and those replaced teachers better make up the difference in research. (I must also say that most of the time the great teachers were also the toughest teachers, and were great researchers. It is definitely not the case that you can only be one or the other.) As far as the issue of ensuring that teachers who only teach are kept up to date...I believe that is a very important issue and therefore no one should strictly teach, but simply be more biased toward it. An issue, as best I understand, is the funding model. It is research that pays, and teaching is a side responsibility. It would seem to me that only those teachers that are good enough at teaching should be, and those that are not must cover more overhead from their research dollars to cover the teachers, but I'm not sure you'll be able to work that model into current funding sources.

While Taylor raises a good Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday November 3, at 2:58 pm

While Taylor raises a good point, I believe it's more applicable to higher-level courses. 1X- and 2X-level undergraduate courses focus on fundamentals, and instruction there isn't substantially improved by cutting edge digressions. Furthermore, the assumption is that research faculty possess a unique knowledge of the field's research. I beg to differ! Their research may give them incredible depth, but breadth is neither required nor assured. For example, take a walk through the physic building. Now try to find a poster suitable for presentation to a P1 or P2 class.

Professors who conduct Submitted by Taylor on Tuesday November 3, at 1:48 pm

Professors who conduct research as well as teach are able to pass along their latest findings and up-to-date research on to students in the classroom. This is one aspect that sets research institutions apart from non-research ones. Although separate tracks will create more time for professors to focus on effective teaching, Georgia Tech will have to ensure that the relevancy of the material does not decrease.

good idea, but Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday November 3, at 11:59 am

I very much agree that faculty are "incentivized to minimize our efforts on [teaching]." I would encourage actions that equalize teaching and research not only in principle, but in practice.

Wow...I love this idea. Submitted by Aswin Natarajan on Friday October 23, at 8:26 pm

Wow...I love this idea.