The Wisconsin Experience: Delta Program makes big impact on UW teaching culture

Teachers teach, students learn and researchers study. But the Delta Program in Research, Teaching and Learning turns teachers into students, students into teachers and both into researchers.

The Delta Program is the exemplar of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL), which strives to train graduate students, postdoctoral students, faculty and staff in the sciences, engineering and mathematics to be excellent researchers.

In its first five years on campus, Delta has made a profound impact on UW–Madison’s teaching and learning culture. A fall 2008 review found that more than 400 faculty and instructional staff enhanced their teaching practices in some way as a direct result of Delta workshops.

As Delta grows, it continues to receive recognition for its efforts. On Monday, Feb. 9, Delta will be presented with the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education’s Award for Leveraging Excellence.

Delta members are encouraged to take Delta courses and small-group-facilitated programs, attend roundtable dinners and seminars, and participate in the Delta internship program to learn how to implement Delta’s three pillars — teaching-as-research, learning community and learning-through-diversity — into the classroom.

“Fundamentally, the future faculty of the nation lies in the graduate students,” says Robert Mathieu, Delta co-faculty director and astronomy professor. “If we can change the way graduate education happens, we can change the nation.”

Mathieu points out that UW-Madison is renowned for its research, which he hopes Delta members will apply to teaching as well as to their disciplines.

The teaching-as-research pillar was born of this concept.

“The idea of teaching-as-research is that to enhance student learning, which is our ultimate goal, you have to really understand what the students are learning,” Mathieu says. “[Teaching] is a dynamic, interactive, constantly improving process. In order to do that improvement, we need to understand what the students are learning, and that’s fundamentally a research question.”

Mathieu says that by applying concepts such as finding out what students know before classes are taught, exploring the literature, conducting experiments in the classroom, and gathering and analyzing data, Delta members are “constantly and dynamically improving their teaching through what they find.”

The second pillar, learning community, emphasizes the importance of collaboration to accomplish shared learning goals and to form new ideas. Through formal once-a-month roundtable dinners, seminars and informal meetings between friends, Mathieu says Delta has evolved into a vital community that consistently generates new ideas for Delta and new concepts to bring to the classroom.

Learning-through-diversity, Delta’s final pillar, strives to make use of the variety of races, ethnicities, backgrounds and experiences that all students bring to the classroom.

“One aspect of a successful class is that the class is welcoming for all,” Mathieu says. “What learning-through-diversity does is try to raise the bar higher. We seek to create a national faculty who can use the diversity of the students and indeed of the faculty member to enhance the learning of all.”

A grant from the National Science Foundation, with partial matching funding from the Graduate School, launched CIRTL in January 2003, which in turn created Delta in September of the same year. The provost has provided funding for the last two years.

Delta members are encouraged to be as involved as their schedules allow.

This semester, the Delta learning community has 100 members formally enrolled in semester-long courses and programs, while more than 300 people show up to the occasional seminar or roundtable dinner. They have had more than 1,700 participants since its inception.

While Delta graduate students and postdoctoral students can earn a Delta certificate, faculty members also enroll in Delta courses to solve specific teaching challenges.

In fact, Delta courses often use Delta principles when teaching Delta students. “When we’re thinking about what we want the graduate students and postdocs to learn, we’re thinking about what kind of learning objectives do we have for them in the Delta courses? How best can we get them to learn those concepts? And how can they put them into practice?” says Chris Pfund, Delta associate director, who often teaches Delta courses.

Delta courses have inspired Delta members to do the same in their own classroom environment. Jeff Klukas, a physics graduate student, has taken three Delta courses, including the Instructional Materials Development course. In that course he created a teaching-assistant training workshop that focuses on how to facilitate group work activities in a discussion section.

Klukas, who hopes to be part of the faculty at a smaller college after he graduates, says he still facilitates the workshop every semester.

“The feedback I get from participants each time has allowed me to better tailor the workshop to appeal to a variety of learning styles and to become more focused about which activities best serve the participants,” he says.

Delta graduate students and postdoctoral students can also apply for Delta internships where they work alongside a faculty or instructional staff member to solve a specific teaching and learning problem.

“Focusing only on developing our research skills overlooks a very important part of the faculty role within the university,” says Erica Siegl, a sociology graduate student and former Delta intern. “Delta courses ask participants to consider what it means to learn, and what understanding looks like.”

Samira Azarin, a chemical and biological engineering graduate student, says the Delta program largely influenced her decision to continue her graduate studies at UW-Madison.

“The existence of a program such as this one demonstrated the university’s commitment to education, and I wanted to pursue my graduate work at an institution that truly valued teaching,” she says.

Azarin adds that Delta has greatly impacted her teaching style.

“I now see the classroom as somewhat of a laboratory — a place to try out new teaching techniques and assess student learning,” she says. “I am continually trying to implement new learning styles while gauging student understanding.”

Robert Jeanne, an entomology professor, says Delta has inspired him to use new techniques in the classroom, such as clickers and peer instruction, as well as developing software to allow better communication between professors of large lectures and their students.

But it’s not just UW-Madison that benefits from Delta’s efforts. The CIRTL network, established in 2006, carries the principles of the three pillars to five other major research universities and encourages them to implement them in ways appropriate for each school.

During the next five to 10 years, Mathieu says he will step down from co-faculty director of Delta to allow new leaders a chance to guide Delta in their own directions.

“The mark of a really successful program, a successful community, is that it continues on, no matter who is guiding it,” he says. “A vital community will be able to just recreate itself in exciting new ways. That’s what I would like to see with Delta.”