Biology Professor Gwilym S. Jones has won the Excellence in Teaching Award three times, in 1987, 1992, and 1994. Dr. Jones has taught at Northeastern for 25 years, and he is currently the director of the Center for Vertebrate Studies. Among other items, the research collection contains 453 species and 40,000 specimens of mammals.

The CEUT talked with Professor Jones to see if we could learn about his philosophy and style of teaching. After settling down at a long table laden with shoeboxes filled with seal skeletons, the interview with Dr. Jones began with him talking about why he loves what he does.

GJ: I am one of those fortunate people who really likes what I do for a living. You were asking about teaching. When I was finishing my doctorate, my prof came in one day and said, "You know, you might make a good teacher. I think you ought to try it." I was focused on research. I wasn't going to teach. I had no interest in teaching. But he said that and I'm very fortunate he did. I might have pursued it anyway but I'm very fortunate that I ended up in this profession.

CEUT: Great. Well, actually, you brought up teaching, and since you have won the Excellence in Teaching Award three times, what's your secret?

GJ: I just enjoy it. I'm very curious and I've been accused of being a workaholic. It... my research and my teaching are really not work. I don't have an answer to your question, "what's your secret?"

CEUT: What is your philosophy of teaching then? Or of research, when you're working with students?

GJ: To involve the students. And that includes [in the] classroom as well as in my lab.

CEUT: How do you structure your classes and what elements do you use in your classroom? In other words, what types of involving the students do you do?

GJ: It has been called the Socratic method, which means you present material, you pose a question - it sounds like a paper chase - and then you request response. And even if it gets into a fairly lengthy discussion I feel the students gain more than if I tried to cover all the material on the subject in the given amount of time. I'd rather know that the students know in depth than in shallow breadth... I teach instinctively but that doesn't mean I've always got the right instincts. I respond to people and I suppose that's a very important aspect of my classroom experience... getting to know the class. That means what kind of personalities they have and what their interests are. I react to those. In other words, when I teach mammalogy there are differences in my approach and response to a particular class of students. I don't simply go in and present a standard lecture. As I said, I try to involve the class and I have been successful virtually always in involving them. I try neither to be a formal nor informal lecturer. I try to hit some sort of medium ground where I am making the subject personal to the students. This is easy in the course I was teaching this past fall, Wildlife Biology, because that's applied ecology and it is about 60% biology and 40% sociology. Wildlife management -- and we read about it in the paper all the time - involves interactions between people and wildlife. For instance, something traumatic such as a car hitting a moose or a bear, what do we do about that? Or deer, which is very common in metro Boston right now. How do we deal with that? How do we deal with the booming populations? And I make an effort in virtually all cases to not give my actual opinion. I let them [the students] derive their opinions and if I feel I need to, or I should, I challenge them with facts. If somebody has an opinion and I know it's not quite there I will challenge it with some facts and let them develop it further. That's my intent, to try to help them develop their philosophies.

CEUT: How has teaching changed in the 25 years that you have been at Northeastern?

GJ: I twice received recognition from the students in our department. I was voted the toughest professor in the department, and the favorite. The latter was redemption for the level of difficulty which I try to bring to the classroom. I want to draw the students beyond what they think they can do. This is terribly important. If we don't do that, then we are violating our charge. Our charge is to teach and to draw them beyond what they believe are their limits. The goal is to make them better than we are. We have a marvelous department with excellent teachers. I've heard students say that to me repeatedly over the years, that biology profs are always there to help. They will drop what they're doing to help a student. The result of these efforts will be that we (Northeastern) will have a higher ranking. It's the students that are our mission. And I'm passionate about that, if you can't tell.
     So, how have I seen things change? Part of it is [laughs] I don't put my notes on the Internet. And the reason I won't - and there has been a change there for most people - because I want the students to be in class, I want the students to take notes, I want them to ask questions, I want them to be involved with the subject.... I'm not being a stick-in-the-mud. I depend on the computer as much as anybody depends on it. I'm not old-fashioned that way. But I do want the students to be involved. I don't want them to have an excuse, however innocent that excuse is, to miss that opportunity. It is in the classroom that the deeper learning occurs.
     Something that hasn't changed is students. Not all students, but a number of students, are more focused on grades than they are on content. And that's something I'm fighting all the time.

CEUT: How do you fight that?

GJ: If you ask any student who's ever taken one of my courses about what I expect them to know, it's a one-word answer: "Everything." And, so, when I... make up an exam I cover the material equally. So if I've gone through 10 subjects and I have 10 questions, there's a question on each subject. I don't focus on fewer areas or fewer topics. This causes them... to learn the material. As in math, it is true in biology that learning is cumulative. And that is an absolutely critical fact. It's something I strive to teach them. I teach freshman zoology. I hope they leave that class with an accumulation of knowledge that will allow them to go in whatever direction they're pursuing in biology. If you asked about that class, you would hear that there's an awful lot of memorization. And a paradigm in education now is don't memorize, [but instead] apply, and reason. But the fact is you have to know facts before you can reason about them. Before you philosophize you need to know facts. If you go in and philosophize about nothing, you've got nothing. But what I try to do, and try very hard, is to make the material interesting, and connected, so that it's like learning a story.

CEUT: What are some ways you do that?

GJ: In ornithology, which is birds, I have averaged just about 50 field trips per quarter. The students can't go on all of them because of working, because of classes, and so on, but I do. I expect them to go on one field trip in the Boston area during the week. Every other weekend, we take a long field trip. It's necessary in order to learn the subject. Is it tiring? Yes, [laughs] physically. In mammalogy the primary field effort is a weekend-long field trip. We usually go to a Boy Scout camp and we... immerse the students. Field trips are very important in my area of biology. We had 18 students from Northeastern, of which about a dozen were freshmen, drive to the Cape and work. It was during the winter quarter and I said it's dirty work but if you'd like to come bring your old clothes and come on down. They drove down to the Cape and we worked on a full-blown [great] whale for the weekend. We try to make that available to the students - that's part of the involvement, that's part of the commitment, that's part of them demonstrating their interest. This fall I had a total of 16 people in my lab - directed study and honors students, also several volunteers. They'll spend a few hours a week just coming in and doing some work on the museum or some project in the center.

CEUT: What tips for new teachers do you have? Not, well, here's the way you can win the award, but how do you work with students?

GJ: Oh, no, no, no. No one should ever strive to win an award. That's not what it's about. But as far as tips for teaching... commitment and students... to be oriented toward students... It goes back to my philosophy that students are our mission, our primary mission in a university. Otherwise, there is no university. If a young professor comes in and is committed to the students, committed to his or her subject, they've got a good start. My father was a doctor, and long after people quit doing house calls, he continued. He was meant to be a doctor. He had a magnificent obsession. And so whether or not I'm a good teacher, I love it. I will have to add that I'm never satisfied with my performance. And that's not fabricated, I never am. I try to do better.

Thank you, Dr. Gwilym Jones, for sharing your ideas and classroom experiences with us. Read the next issue of Teaching Matters for an interview with another three-time Excellence in Teaching Award Winner - chemistry Professor Geoffrey Davies!