Hakan Saraoglu

Given my undergraduate education in industrial engineering with a system theory concentration, I am always fascinated to observe and build conceptual models of phenomena that fit the criteria of a dynamic system. To answer one of the commonly asked questions in academia, I will rely on one of these models. The question is "how can an academic combine effective teaching with productive research?"

I see the activities of an academic as feedback processes in a dynamic system. If the structure of this system is carefully crafted, research and teaching can become part of a positive feedback loop, with each activity enhancing the scope and effectiveness of each other. Resources allocated to activities that build a research-oriented focus enhance research productivity. Research focus, which I believe is a necessary condition for success in teaching, enhances teaching effectiveness. Application of a research approach to teaching and insights gained through effective teaching in turn reinforce the research focus, which enhances research productivity further. Given that the positive feedback between research and teaching is a desired outcome, the challenge is to structure efficient processes to achieve it.

Research focus, which is the most critical element of the feedback loop, involves adopting a continual process of generating research ideas, conducting empirical analyses, and producing manuscripts. Given that time is a scarce resource whose depletion cannot be controlled, an academic must make an investment in building an efficient structure for this process by breaking it up into small periodic tasks. For example, the process of generating research ideas may be structured as a series of activities that involve following the developments in the literature and forming interest groups meeting regularly to discuss research questions. Following the literature requires tasks such as reading papers in a select list of journals and subscribing to mailing lists that provide working paper abstracts. The strength of these formal processes comes from their self-reinforcing nature that helps establish the research focus as a habit. Apart from emphasizing structure in the acquisition of research focus, the academic must also nurture a multidisciplinary perspective. Theories and methods that are used in a discipline may often prove to be applicable to another, and a multidisciplinary perspective is likely to help in the generation of new research ideas.

Research focus enables the academic to structure teaching as a continually evolving research process. An effective teacher must always be building hypotheses about the cause and effect relationships among methods, content, and learning outcomes. He or she must be aware of the empirical nature of the observations that take place during the routine conduct of teaching, and must be ready and willing to use these observations to refute or support his or her hypotheses. This leads to a dynamic approach to teaching, which involves continual adaptation and optimization of methods and content. Adaptation of methods and content can only be achieved by active research involvement in the subject matter being taught as well as in other disciplines that are in the realm of teaching. In order to keep the subject matter at the cutting edge, the teacher might choose to rely solely on the contributions of other researchers in the field, or decide to actively participate in the process of "pushing the boundaries of the field" by productive research. The choice of the latter ensures the integrity of the positive feedback structure involving research and teaching, while the former may turn productive research and effective teaching into mutually exclusive outcomes. A multidisciplinary perspective is also essential for success in teaching. Research in disciplines such as cognitive psychology, epistemology, logic, and artificial intelligence offers many clues for the academic to develop effective teaching methods. Utilizing a research approach to teaching allows the research focus to develop further, completing the positive feedback loop. In addition, documenting specific aspects of this ongoing adaptation of methods and content can result in publications in pedagogy, which should be treated as a natural by-product of achieving teaching effectiveness.

To summarize, an academic that takes on the challenge of combining effective teaching with productive research must step back and form the structure of his or her scholarly activities before being immersed in them. This enables us to allocate time, the scarcest resource, more efficiently into each activity, and to make use of the positive feedback that the carefully structured activities will generate. The message is that a successful academic must acquire and cultivate a research focus. Providing students with valuable advice in a wide spectrum of subjects, conducting engaging lectures, selecting highly relevant and timely course content, and designing valid evaluation methods, which are among the abilities of an effective teacher, can only be possible if supported by a research focus with a multidisciplinary perspective.