I keep wondering if investing effort in teaching can actually make us better researchers...What is your opinion?
Thank you for the rich information Karthik. Thanks for the useful link too..
Comparto totalmente con Karthik , enseñando mejor seremos mejoores investigadores, y para enseñar mejor hay sin duda que investigar actualizarnos en nuestros conocimientos de la ciencia que impartimos, de los metodos para enseñar mas novedoosos, de la tecnologia mas moderna y sus impactos.
There is a very close relationship between teaching and research. Most of the lecturers who are more involved in research obtain better results in their teaching evaluations, suggesting the quality of their teaching. The teaching quality of lecturers doing research show large improvement than those in lower levels of research intensity.
Coincido con Abdullah Noori totalmente, seremos mejores profesores en la medida que seamos mejores investigadores.
I think of the opposite which means research effect teaching. Please go to google and search: Research-based learning. Teachers can use research results or research process to teach in passive or active classrooms.
Precedent answers are practically sufficient!
Teaching & Researching are in causal correlation, there is somewhat a duality when it's related to faculty member grade (Lecturer, Assistant, associate or full professor). There is not the same coefficient or percentage, .... Each type has different other and specific responsibilities, etc.
A good researcher, when He teaches, He can give some news or update in the Course specification, etc...
A good teacher, when He do researches, He can, well guide, orientate and supervise young researchers, etc...
You need both, but both need its time
Research improves your skill and gives you more idea
In teaching you give the students these information
Research is done to reveal the truth and teaching is a way to share the truth. Hope, you got the relation between teaching and research.
Thanks
Does teaching affect research?
Both teaching & research are enabler for knowledge sharing. Teaching is imparting gained knowledge whereas research is discovering new knowledge. Research's output can be input to teaching. Some of the outcomes of teaching motivate people to discover new knowledge through research.
Yes. These concepts offers two way traffic. Either you say teaching (practice) informs research, or research informs practice. However, if research is to be relevant, and address real life situation, then practice should inform and direct research.
La investigación sin dudas debe ser el motor impulsor de la práctica docente en las aulas, es de las funciones sustantivas de una Universidad, la que atraviesa transversalmente las restantes, por ejemplo a la Extensión Universitaria.
Research helps one to be a better teacher. Teaching primary objective is to share the knowledge gained in the course of a research. Research results would be void if they were not shared in order to adopt them to solve industrial challenges/problems
Modestus Okwu , it is an interesting question in that more often than not, the debate is about the impact of research on teaching. The thesis that supports this research-teaching nexus is that as teachers when we participate in assessing the existing state of knowledge about a subject matter (the literature review part), and when we generate new knowledge through research, we as a teacher stay abreast of cutting edge knowledge which we can pass on to our students through teaching. Here is an interesting publication tat highlights this nexus:
https://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2017.1395408#.W8UyHHtKjIU
I considered this back in the early 1980's and apart from understanding a little more about brain function the answer is still yes! I was on the first ever MA in Managment learning so one of my purposes was to try and understand the links. It also matters how research affects the learning of particpants of the research. The attached is a fairly succinct summary of my findings.
Hi John Bothams, thank you so much for your insightful comment and the attached document. It is very useful.
Regards,
MO.
It is recommended to link teaching strategies to research activities.
As per my opinion best researcher is best teacher because both are knowledge sharing phenomena.
Teaching and research are the best combination if one wishes to remain updated with the recent happenings in his /her research area.
If I explain something to students, I begin to understand it myself. It is very useful to teach!
Thank you for your comments Ismail Younis Al-Hadeedy, Vadim S. Gorshkov and Dr. Dilip Kumar Pal.
Teaching might affect research if the former is not properly handled. The irony of life is that a great researcher might not ba a good teacher. For one to be a great researcher and good teacher,tge fthe ollowing factors need to be put in places;
1. Teaching should be interactive and research should provide solution to myriad of problem
2. Teaching should complement research
Prof. Osman,
Thank you for your wonderful comment. your. We shall keep in touch and collaborate in the nearest future.
Thank you for your comments prof. Osman, Prof. Samuel and Prof. Mohammed
Hi everybody, I think bout requires a lot of time and some times is difficult to do but not impossible and I think is the best that students have information from people who generate that information and is an oportunity of students to be involved in the labs whre sciences is made
Best regards
Relationships Between Teaching and Research
Stephen Rowland 2006
This paper reports a study conducted amongst heads of department at a British university into their perspectives of teaching and research. It explores the reasons why research is given higher status, even though academics believe that, in principle, both aspects of the lecturer's role are equally valuable and mutually supportive. The links between teaching and research are investigated, and the categories of ‘teaching’ and ‘research’ are found to be somewhat inadequate concepts for distinguishing between different aspects of the academic role. The article concludes that closer relationships between the two can provide the basis for a programme to improve the quality of university teaching. Such an approach is underpinned by the view that students’ understandings should be taken seriously. They can make a significant contribution to the lecturer's research, as well as to student learning.
https://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1356251960010102?journalCode=cthe20#.W_BWvegzZdg
Teaching and Research: New relationships and their implications for inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education
Relationships Between Teaching and Research in Higher Education in England
Although there is a popular conception that research enhances teaching, evidence of such synergistic relationships is inconclusive. Recent research, undertaken as part of the Higher Education Funding Council for England's (HEFCE) fundamental review of research policy and funding, indicated that there are a range of relationships – both positive and negative – between teaching and research. While the ideal relationship might be perceived by many academics to be a positive one, there are a number of factors that shape the ways in which teaching and research can have a negative influence on each other, or even be driven apart. These factors include pressures to compartmentalize teaching and research through accountability and funding mechanisms, management strategies of academic staff time that treat teaching and research separately, and the competition for scarce resources. If teaching and research are to complement each other, new ways of managing the teaching and research relationship need to be considered.
Article Relationships Between Teaching and Research in Higher Educat...
The Relationship Between Teaching and Research
Posted: November 1, 2013 | Author: Nick Feamster | Filed under: creativity, research, teaching |Leave a comment
I remember applying for NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship many years ago and being asked to answer a question describing my experiences “integrating research and education”. At the time, I was baffled by the question, as I hadn’t yet done much teaching. I thought: Aren’t teaching and research orthogonal? I’m told by current students that the question no longer exists in the fellowship application, which I think is unfortunate. That question has stayed with me throughout my career: I regularly re-ask myself questions about integrating research and education.
At least in the United States (and presumably elsewhere, too), university researchers are regularly asked to tie our research back to education: for example, faculty members are regularly asked to describe the “broader impact” of their research, which includes how the results of the research will be incorporated into the curriculum. I’ve learned that this is no accident; to the contrary, I think it is one of the most important (and under-appreciated) things that researchers should be thinking about.
Although researchers are sometimes asked to think about how research can be integrated in the classroom, I’ve also found that efforts in the classroom can also ultimately result in better research. In fact, although many educators are not necessarily researchers, the converse is undeniable: It is no accident that some of the best researchers are also excellent teachers. And, while some strong researchers who are not good teachers do exist, I believe that purposeful teaching effort does in fact result in much better research.
In this post, I’ll describe my views on the relationships between research and teaching, in both directions. I’ll begin with the more “obvious” notions of how our research ultimately affects education and the curriculum and continue to what I think is the less apparent (and more interesting) direction of how our work on education can also make us better researchers. Of course, teaching also helps us develop many “general purpose” skills that are also useful in research, including mentoring and supervisory skills, learning to analyze others’ understanding, learning to give feedback, and so forth. Below, I’ll eschew these practicalities and instead focus on how the relationship between research and education ultimately result in better research ideas.
How Research Affects Teaching
Research results instill fresh material in the classroom. Although some subjects we learn in the classroom are fairly well-established, many areas of computer science (and I would assume certain other fields, too) are rapidly evolving. With the rise of large content and service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook; the proliferation of mobile devices; and the spread of connectivity to developing regions (to name a few developments), computer networking looks almost nothing like twenty years ago, and, while certain principles persist, the constraints of the domain and the applications of the technologies are continually evolving. Students strive for concrete examples and applications of concepts to the world that they know which is, incidentally, different from the world we knew when we were students. New research results represent prevailing theories, the outcome of our cumulative understanding, and the application of concepts to the most relevant problem domains or our time. I find that there is no better way to keep my course material current than to peruse the latest research and update the material so that it reflects current understanding.
Industry tracks research; students should, too. Our understanding continues to evolve as new research results emerge. In many areas, industry aggressively tracks new technologies and research results, and students aim will be more poised to make important contributions in industry if they are well-versed in current technologies. Students periodically thank me for covering a certain topic or concept in the classroom because “someone asked me about it in a job interview”. Certainly, there is a balance between educating our students on the big picture and “timeless” concepts (something I discuss more below), but I find that students are often quite grateful for having some exposure to the concepts and problems that industry is thinking about today. Instilling course material with fresh research results is one important way that instructors can help this process.
How Teaching Affects Research
I think the more surprising notion is that investing effort in teaching well can actually make us better researchers. I sometimes find that certain faculty members are too eager to minimize teaching responsibilities in favor of “leaving more time to get research done”. Now, it is worth acknowledging the source of this angst: many of the administrative aspects of teaching (e.g., grading, responding to student emails, organizational logistics) are incredibly time consuming and do not necessarily offer inherent benefits to research. Nevertheless, I find that the intellectual aspects of teaching are an indispensable aspect of my own efforts to become a better researcher. Below, I’ll explain more abstractly why I think teaching makes us better researchers, and, where appropriate, I’ll describe some of my own concrete experiences in this regard.
To create new knowledge, we must first master the existing body of knowledge. Research is the process of creating new knowledge. Making progress in creating knowledge requires a significant amount of background knowledge, before one can reach the “frontier” of a topic, where the interesting questions are. Herb Simon once attested that it takes about ten years of experience to get to the point of great accomplishment in any one area, simply because it takes a significant amount of time to accumulate knowledge in an area. This necessarily implies that we can’t become great researchers in a subject area merely by taking a class (or even a few classes); we must embed ourselves in that topic area. I find that teaching a subject is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to become embedded in a subject matter, since the process of explaining concepts to students leaves no room for “cutting corners” in my own understanding. The process of building understanding in a particular area allows us to develop a deep understanding the paradigms and theories that currently exist, and how those paradigms and the existing knowledge base might be extended (or amended). Teaching Ph.D. students about a particular subject matter is also a way to bootstrap research, by helping our students get to the frontier of knowledge more quickly than they otherwise would; I sometimes teach seminars on cutting-edge topics (above and beyond my teaching “requirements”) simply because I find the process to be an efficient way of helping students quickly ramp up on a topic where I would like to see more research happening.
On a personal note, I found the process of preparing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Software Defined Networking over the past summer tremendously helpful in solidifying my own knowledge in this budding topic area. This particular sub-field has seen rapid developments over the past five years, and I had found it difficult to take the time to deeply understand many of the latest developments. I found that teaching the course was a wonderful “forcing function” to familiarize myself with new technologies and ways of thinking, and to gain hands-on experience with tools that had been recently developed. My hands-on experience with development tools helped me in two ways: First, I was able to suggest better tools for my students to use in their own research; in several cases, students who had been “stuck” using older technologies quickly familiarized themselves with technologies I learned well enough to appreciate. By investing time to deeply understand how new techniques and technologies might be applied, I was able to make connections between problems we had been trying to solve in the research lab and tools that could be useful for solving them. Second, I was able to make connections between concepts that had recently been developed to help solve some problems that we had been working on that hadn’t yet been solved. In one case, for example, as I taught concepts about composition techniques for network policies, I realized that the techniques could be applied to help some of our own technologies scale to much larger networks, which provided a breakthrough on a problem that we had been thinking about for years.
In the process of explaining an existing phenomenon, you might discover that existing explanations, technologies, or theories don’t actually suffice. According to Thomas Kuhn, research breakthroughs often occur when old paradigms are discarded (or at least amended), thus changing our way of thinking about problems completely. New paradigms begin with the need to explain or treat facts or situations that existing paradigms don’t handle well. As instructors, when we attempt to explain various facts or situations to students, we sometimes find that we can’t explain why things are a certain way—our attempts to explain may reveal instances that are not handled or explained well by current paradigms, thus exposing glaring needs to develop new technologies, theories, and paradigms.
I remember my experiences as a teaching assistant for computer networking, as my advisor and I planned lessons to teach Internet routing. My advisor had long worked on problems where correctness properties and bound were well-defined (e.g., Internet congestion control). When we came to the topic of Internet routing, however (a topic on which I had some mastery as a result of a summer internship), I found him continually asking me how (or whether) Internet routing offered any guarantees of correct behavior. How could we be certain that Internet routing algorithms would actually send traffic where it was supposed to go, for example? We realized in our attempts to codify this in lecture material that no such guarantees existed! Frustrated by our inability to explain Internet routing correctness, we spent the next several years formally defining correctness properties for Internet routing and developing tools that checked Internet routing configuration for correctness. The work eventually resulted in tools that were used by hundreds of network operators and a best paper award at a top networking conference. When I think about that work, I regularly trace its success to my teaching experience with my advisor, and our initial frustrated attempt to explain some seemingly basic concepts about networking to students. If it weren’t for that teaching experience, I think that research probably would never have happened.
Teaching encourages us to think about the long road, the big picture, and what “really matters” about a particular research contribution. I aim to explain why something is the way it is, beyond simply explaining a concept. As I explained above, efforts to explain why something is the way it is might sometimes fail to produce a good explanation, opening new possibilities for research. In other cases, research may offer solutions to a problem du jour, but sometimes research projects or papers are fairly self-contained, and it takes additional thought to really establish why (or whether) a particular result has broader implications that a student might care about. As an instructor, I strive to think about the big picture, and why a student should care about a particular research result, theory, or concept five or ten years down the road, long after they have left our classroom and received their degree. This exercise of thinking about broader implications can make classroom material more palatable to students, most of whom won’t specialize in the particular field you happen to be teaching. But, it also forces us as researchers to step back and think about why the problems we are working on have broad impact and why they matter to society at large. Explaining to a classroom of students why a particular result matters is perhaps one of the most useful exercises for distilling a research contribution to its essence.
Motivated Students + Inspiring Teachers = Great Research
I admired my university professors and wanted to emulate them; they are one of the main reasons I wanted to become a university professor in the first place. Teachers can influence and affect a large number of students in tremendously positive ways. Indeed, giving students the thirst for knowledge to the point that they want to not just consume existing knowledge but make discoveries themselves is a unique opportunity that we have as educators. And, certainly, developing smart young students into the researchers of current and future generations is yet another way that our efforts in the classroom can pay long-term dividends for research.
The relationship between teaching and research in higher education
Analysts who perceive that teaching and research enhance each other argue that active researchers are informed and engaging teachers and that teaching stimulates faculty creativity and enthusiasm for research. Economic theory suggests that teaching and research are complementary. Because they use many of the same resources, facilities, and personnel, producing teaching and research together is more efficient than producing each separately. Similarly, individual faculty may improve their efficiency and productivity if they sometimes engage in activities that accomplish both teaching and research goals at the same time. Arguments for integrating teaching and research are consistent with a view that colleges and universities should respond to increasing environmental and technical complexity by considering faculty as professionals–highly qualified, flexible, and complex workers who are able to relate associated tasks in creative ways and to handle unpredictable problems independently.
Read more: Teaching and the Relationship Between Research - Alternative Perspectives, Research Findings, Conclusion - Faculty, Time, Positive, and Studies - StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2492/Teaching-Research-Relationship-Between.html#ixzz5X8YLiRC5
Yes indeed. Try this article in RG. “Teaching and research in synergy”. Also See
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjQyOGQx9zeAhUBmlkKHe0_DG4QzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fpublication%2F233580062_Investigating_the_Synergy_between_Teaching_and_Research_in_a_Teaching-led_University&psig=AOvVaw04m7COLylQlqq3yHmV1jWK&ust=1542582868895466
Thank you so much Mohamed A. Hammad, the documents you shared are very useful.
Research and teaching are two points in a cycle of generating knowledge and disseminating knowledge.
I would argue that it can work either way, depending on many factors, including what one is teaching and what one is researching. Insofar as the latter is flexible, the teaching-research nexus is more likely to work. But there is a further factor, having to do with specialists vs. generalists - with specialists often being better researchers and generalists better teachers. See our article on this topic.
Article Research-led higher education and 'the bigger picture'
Dear Olusegun,
I think it is simply unequivocal.
Teaching as practice makes perfect in knowledge (gaining deep insight into details and yet unveiled depths plus recognizing interconnections between different areas) and provides basis for brainstorming for lots of new ideas by teaching agile and proactive students.
Kind regards.
András
Yes, experiences from teaching affects and influences research both positively and negatively.
Among the suggested benefits are more opportunities for students to engage with research findings and literature, academics sharing their enthusiasm for research through their teaching, and students collaborating with academics on research projects.
While these benefits are plausible, there are also potential disadvantages. We know that academics tend to prefer research to teaching, and think that research rather than teaching is rewarded in promotion. With only a limited number of hours in the day, it would not be surprising to find that academics favour their research over their teaching.
Teaching and research both can affect each other and If they are for a goal, they can raise each other.
Please follow these useful links on RG:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_academic_research_helps_teaching
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_is_research_essential_to_be_a_good_teacher
Teaching and research go, in the majority of cases, hand in hand or one in addition to the other... so investing effort in teaching can actually make us better researchers and analog... but, there are of course exceptions to this rule...
They complement each other
The researcher should not give up his lecture hours, nor should he spend most of his time in class room
Teaching is important to the researcher because he teaches his research findings
Information and dataset obtained during research can be useful during lectures.
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