TEACHING THOUSANDS

THESE CHEMISTRY PROFESSORS ARE THE FACE OF THEIR DISCIPLINE TO THOUSANDS OF STUDENTS AT THE U.

AT THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY, EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATION CONVERGE IN AN EXTRAORDINARY EDUCATIONAL ENDEAVOR: MOVING OVER 2,000 STUDENTS EACH SEMESTER THROUGH FOUNDATIONAL CHEMISTRY CLASSES.

This remarkable feat is achieved through a cutting-edge curriculum delivered by six passionate educators known as the "teachers of thousands": Jeff Statler, Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Ryan DeLuca, Kaci Kuntz, Holly Sebahar, and Greg Owens. These instructors, three of whom are featured here, possess a rare skill set that allows them to present fundamental chemistry with competence, patience, and an uncanny ability to inspire. In their classrooms and labs, aspiring chemists and future medical professionals alike find themselves immersed in an unparalleled learning environment. These six are supported by many other faculty dedicated to curriculum development and fostering a robust space for scientific curiosity.

Talking Course Strategy

On a Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, Jeff Statler opens a jam-packed classroom with careful, deliberative class procedures. He is aware of how big his subject is and how distracting some lines of inquiry can become. “Don’t worry about chapter two until this weekend,” he says. “There’s a lot of physics and a lot of quantum mechanics, mostly enrichment stuff, not part of the learning objectives.”

Statler talks strategy, as if he’s enrolled himself. “I won’t test you on that,” he says, answering a question about prioritizing. The way he scans the bank of students above him in class is intimate, improbably giving eye contact, it seems, to everyone. Clearly, Statler is skilled at reassuring students that there’s a sequence of things. “I’m big not on memorization but on patterns. We’re almost antimemorization,” around here.

The Inverted Classroom

With a team of learning assistants (LAs) and teaching assistants (TAs) Statler is always poised to break up what could be the monotony, for some, of a lecture. “Mingle, chat, ask your neighbor what they think,” he says in a class of over 300. Suddenly, his TAs are trailing up the stairs, scanning the clusters of chatting students, listening in on the conversations, making themselves available for questions, making comments . . . being present.

This interactive, “inverted classroom” approach meets a diverse group of students where they are—literally in their seats. “Teaching and learning are always so individual in many ways,” admits Statler. “Students always inspire and motivate me and keep me ‘thinking young’ with their fresh questions, perspectives, and unique needs and backgrounds.”

Like Statler, Holly Sebahar—recipient of the W.W. Epstein Outstanding Educator Award—has her own teaching strategies, largely animated by her determination to be totally inclusive. “We try to offer a wide variety of office hours and review sessions, a diverse set of communication styles, lots of chances to talk about chemistry and ask questions . . . and learn from their mistakes.”

“I try to constantly ask myself ‘who will be left out if I design my course this way?’” says Sebahar of the diversity she finds in her classes. “I strive to create a highly structured class with clear expectations, several lines of communication, and as much flexibility as possible to try to reach the many learning styles and accommodate the busy schedules inherent in a class of 300 students.”

A Cumulative Subject

When Ryan DeLuca, also an Epstein award winner, is faced with diverse classes, not just in demographics but in class sizes from 25 students to 350, he ensures success by utilizing peer-directed learning and providing strong support from teaching assistants. DeLuca, who earned his PhD under the tutelage of Matt Sigman, has taught 29 chemistry courses over the past seven years, reaching a total of approximately 3,600 students. He believes in teaching through problem-solving in real time. “Chemistry is a cumulative subject where each concept builds on the previous one.”

Honoring the cumulative and recursive nature of a subject is embedded in learning chemistry for all instructors of large classes. As Sebahar puts it, in her classes “mistakes are embraced and utilized instead of feared.” She maintains a six-to-one ratio between students and TAs and is keenly aware when a student is going through a difficult time.

Signals Of Student Distress

To countervail attrition in student enrollment and graduation, instructors and their assistants watch for varied signals of student distress. It’s a high-touch line of action for Sebahar who, over the past 22 years—700 students per year— has taught over 15,000 students. Her mantras? “Don’t focus on the negatives. Take time to get to know your students and enjoy their energy, enthusiasm and unique gifts and talents. Keep learning so your passion for the subject doesn’t fizzle.”

It is love of the subject, according to DeLuca, who through the Allen Foundation has had a scholarship named in his honor, that clearly propels him as an instructor. Available resources are present not only in class but in those micro- even atomic-sized interactions with the good professor out of class, with TAs, and, critically, with one another. Ever the chemical bonder, DeLuca engineers each semester as a dynamic, molecular structure where student "atoms" move, interact, vibrate, rotate and translate with success within differing materials and environments. The result: hungry college-aged minds get fed.

Chemistry In Action

Back in the lecture hall with Statler, the theater of demos are key to student engagement in what is his herculean record of teaching 12,000 students over a 35-year career. They seem to make tangible for him all the rewards as a teacher he could hope for. It is an embodied wonder as he conducts experiments, his face down close and awash in light, the detail of what’s happening, in turn, projected above.

It is chemistry in action (and reaction) … expert pedagogy in the flesh.

You can read profiles of all six chemistry professors at science.utah.edu/faculty/teaching-thousands. Faculty interviews by Julia McNulty.