The Art of Teaching: Distinguished Professors Balance Publications and Pedagogy

By Mary FitzSimons

Every first and third day of the week, Allan Winkler enters 100 Laws Hall. He arranges the few notes he brings from his office and organizes his thoughts as nearly 360 students pour into the lecture hall. At 10 a.m. he steps forward, welcomes his class with a smile and begins his 50 minutes in the spotlight. Some days he dons a costume or serenades students with Great Depression ballads or civil rights folk songs. But with or without his guitar, twice a week Winkler brings to his spring semester survey class HST 112 a lifetime of research and enthusiasm in Twentieth Century America.

Each fall, Andrew Cayton brings a similar passion for history and teaching to his HST 111 students. The results: an overwhelming number of students from both history surveys each year respond quite positively.

“The overall response to the large surveys taught by Drew Cayton and Allan Winkler has been extremely positive,” said Charlotte Newman Goldy, chair of the history department. “Students follow them to upper-division classes, recommend them for teaching awards citing the survey classes, remember them on alumni questionnaires and name the class as the most important factor in their choosing history as a major.”

When considering the magnitude of survey class enrollment, such results are all the more impressive and reflect the success of Winkler and Cayton, both distinguished professors, to conquer the challenges of teaching to such a large audience.

Survey classes like HST 111 and 112 typically consist of 360 students, one-third of whom are first-years. In addition to weekly lectures by Cayton or Winkler, graduate teaching assistants (TAs) lead smaller groups that discuss assigned readings in a more intimate setting.

While the breakdown groups encourage more student interaction with the teaching assistants, Cayton and Winkler admit that the class size limits their ability to get to know each student as well as they can in their smaller, upperclass courses.

“I get to know a lot of students actually, but even if I get to know the names of 100 students, there are still 260 names I don’t know,” Cayton said. Nevertheless, Cayton tries to arrive to his lectures early to chat with students. While he visits each discussion section to evaluate TAs, he also makes a point to walk around during group discussions, join groups and take the opportunity to hear students’ thoughts and reactions to subject materials.

In addition to a lack of student-teacher interaction, survey class professors face a larger challenge: keeping lecture after lecture interesting and engaging. Jim Ambuske, a teaching assistant for Winkler’s current HST 112 class and a former teaching assistant for Cayton’s HST 111 agreed.

“The majority of the students who take the large survey are more than likely there to fulfill a component of the Miami Plan,” Ambuske said. “The trick is to present the material in such a way that enables the students to learn about history and allow them to begin to form their own distinct perceptions of the past.”

But both Cayton and Winkler recognize the need for different teaching styles to engage students and encourage them to begin developing their own inquiries of the past.

“There’s no better challenge than trying to keep the interest of 360 students who don’t want to be there in the first place,” Cayton admitted. “We approach it as a different form of teaching, a different genre of teaching, which requires different techniques.”

“It really is a lecture. It really is a performance,” Winkler added.

Ambuske agreed.

“In many ways, lecturing to such a huge audience is very much like a performance and both professors have their own style,” Ambuske said. “Dr. Cayton, for example, will change the tone of his voice when he really wants to emphasize a point.”

On occasion, Cayton even performs a brief re-enactment of an event such as George Washington laying his sword on the desk of the Continental Congress upon hearing the news of peace with Great Britain.

Once a semester, Winkler dresses like a Russian immigrant and encourages students to ask questions about his immigration to the United States in the early Twentieth Century.

Several classes each semester Winkler also plays guitar for his students, singing songs of the time the class is currently studying – songs like “Dust Bowl Ballad” by Woody Guthrie or “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan. And in February of this year he paired with economics professor Dennis Sullivan and invited his students to their evening performance, Folk Songs from the ‘60s, at Miami’s Hamilton campus.

When he’s not singing or acting, Winkler shows students photographs from the past or he finds alternative ways to diversify the 50-minute lecture.

“From what I have learned or read, people learn better if they can shift gear every 15 or 20 minutes to pick up where they left off,” he explained.

Winkler taught HST 112 on and off for several years before teaching consistently each semester since 1995. Cayton has taught HST 111 every fall except one since he began teaching at Miami in 1990. Both know that if professors seem bored with subject material, they will bore their students, and despite their long streaks of teaching the same courses year after year, both have maintained the excitement and interest that turns lecturing into successful pedagogy.

The trick: enjoying the challenge.

“I usually lecture without notes. That means I need to keep on my toes,” Cayton said. “Traditionally a lot of people tend to see teaching an introductory course as a burden, but I like the challenge.”

"They are excited about and creative in looking for ways to engage students whether in a class of 15 or 360,” Goldy said.

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Outside the Classroom