Improving with age

ASEE Prism, Nov 2001 by Creighton, Linda

TEACHING TOOLBOX

University administrators are figuring out how to balance the benefits of experience provided by older faculty members with the occasional need to help them remain innovative in the classroom.

As the leaves turn to autumn colors across the nation's engineering school campuses this year, look carefully and you should notice a lot of gray as well. Nearly one third of the nation's full-time faculty members are now age 55 or older-up from barely 25 percent a decade ago.

And since no one's getting any younger, it's a phenomenon that will only grow in coming years, as colleges and universities reap the benefits and bear the burdens of a surge in faculty hiring in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the first wave of the Baby Boom generation.

When Congress amended the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1986 to eliminate forced retirement at age 65 for most jobs, it allowed academic institutions to extend mandatory retirement for tenured faculty members until the age of 70. That exemption ended in 1994, and now colleges and universities are beginning to feel the effects-confronting the opportunity and obligation of virtual lifetime employment.

University administrators are finding ways to balance the benefits of experience, knowledge, and wisdom provided by older faculty members with the occasional need to help faculty remain innovative, creative, and exciting in their classrooms-- particularly in undergraduate teaching. With many universit ties and colleges instituting post-tenure reiew, tying merit pay rasies and awards to periodical evaluations of teaching performance, it is becoming even more important for senior faculty to keep theri teaching skills sharp. Administrators say cxpcrienced faculty are often the first to identify the problems,

"Most older faculty members are so set in their ways they're not interested in changing anything," observes George Pearsall, who retired in June after 34 years as a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University.

The workload of senior faculty can often be more demanding than that of younger colleagues, with the never-ending duties of teaching, faculty committee work, and student advisory responsibilities. Add to that the time and intellectual energy of maintaining research, and the candle is burning at both ends. "You just don't have the same energy at 75 that you do at 35," says J.E. Stine, now retired from the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Stine says universities can help by emphasizing good teaching from the beginning of one's career. "Nobody is overtly taught to teach and I always found that bizarre," says Stine."What many engineering professors saw when they were in school was a person lecturing and so that's what they did when they started teaching."

Along with Karron Lewis, of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Texas in Austin, Stine organized and directed teaching seminars for new faculty at the University of Texas in Austin-and developed a course for experienced faculty as well when over 200 of them expressed interest. Now in its 16th year, the two-day seminars attract about 120 experienced faculty-about 20 of them from the engineering school-discussing topics such as teaching problem solving, philosophies of grading, leading discussions, and lecturing more effectively.

Particularly in a research university, the motivation and reward structure may not be focused on teaching. "If all the money comes from research, why spend time on teaching?" observes Lewis. She says her center gets four or five calls a week from institutions interested in starting programs such as the one she codirects.

Still, a teaching seminar is only a start in confronting the demands of time and energy. Pearsall of Duke says that experienced faculty members sometimes permit themselves to "be in a rut and get comfortable in that rut," adding: "I think it's a natural human phenomenon. Teaching is an easy place to dig a hole for yourself."

Age, however, seems to be less of a common denominator in those pitfalls than does attitude and action. Pearsall, honored at the age of 68 with the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award at Duke, says there are specific rules a professor can personally set to stay sharp and productive as a teacher. First and foremost is to think of teaching as an engineering challenge. "For me, treating teaching as an engineering design problem has ensured that I never finish trying to improve the design, just as any good design engineer continues to tweak his creation," Pearsall says.

When Pearsall found that younger faulty members were approaching him to ask, "What do you do that's different?" Pearsall helped his department chairman, Hadley Cocks, develop an informal seminar that enlisted some of the best and brightest faculty at Duke to share some of their ideas on how to teach.

Pearsall says that the same approach that makes a good engineer makes a good teacher. "Avoid tunnel vision-designing or teaching the first thing that comes into your mind" he advises. "Once you realize what it is you're trying to get across, come up with at least three different ways of doing it. Not everybody learns the same way."