Conduct research on what you are teaching and teach what you have found in research.

Conduct research on what you are teaching and teach what you have found in research.

Thanks Romer for your suggestion. Every institution has a different pattern of allocating faculty workload, sometimes a professor teaches one course to multiple sections while in some cases a professor teaches multiple courses. In the first case your point is applicable and a balance between teaching & research can be achieved while maintaining a balance between two in the latter case is quite difficult!

Teaching into classrooms has a fixed time table. To create balance between research and academic, we have to devote a little time every day to research which does not intervene with academics.

I like Romer's answer and have practiced it. Suhail, you will need to assess the expectations of your institution. Mine was a small liberal arts college that held effective teaching to be very important. There are large universities where a major concern is to bring in matching funds for research. Obviously, a successful performance would differ for each institution. Good luck!

Thanks Douglas, it depends a lot on the expectations of an institution from the faculty members. The institution should carve our an ecosystem sustaining the faculty members to perform and achieve the expectations of their host institution.

The answer is simple. Action Research. This is research based on your teaching practice. You change your method of delivery and look for changes, both qualitative and quantitative. Examples may include Activity Based Learning/Action Learning, Gamification, Case-Based Learning, use of the Flipped Classroom approach, to name just a few. Of course this depends on your subject matter but there is always scope and opportunity to experiment.

I agree with Romer Castillo, but it is important to modify that:

Conduct research on what the present and future societies require and teach what you find in research.

I think, one of the best ways to accomplish it is to arrange a work order rather than the time one, which might help you earn more time.

It's not so much maintaining a balance as though teaching and research were two opposing forces. It's more a matter of ensuring that one's teaching emerges from one's own research as well as the collective pool of research in the faculty. Obviously research needs to be shared in open access in the electronic repository. Dave

A competitive academic environment, in a developed country, will provide the means & the mechanisms to strike the correct balance between the teaching duties & research.

In many occasions, I saw my dear teachers in Great Britain wearing their laboratory coats & carrying out research either alone or with few students. The time management was superb since each one of them was assigned 6 hours of teaching per week + one hour/week for tutorship of students in their offices.

As for 3rd world countries, there are universities in which the instructors nearly "worship" overtime work "for its extra money" in teaching. I know two nearby universities in which the overall load of each chemistry instructor is 20 teaching hours/week or more "the normal load is 12/week". In such places, any research papers " that are published" are certainly suspicious.

Thanks Nizar for your answer, yes the balance can be achieved in case of developed countries' institutions where there is a clear demarcation between the teaching load and research , however which is mostly lacks in the developing or transition economies where the focus is more on teaching and the balance is not clearly defined!

thanks for the question. it is quite hard to balance teaching and research because of them are time consuming. but action research might help.i.e conduct research about your teaching and then use the findings in your teaching.

Well it all depends what the subject is. Most teaching will inevitably revolve around established knowledge especially in the early part of a course but at Masters level for example there is almost always a research project at the end. Here the student tries to take knowledge forward using established knowledge as a platform. More recent knowledge moves the student forward towards his/her own research project. All knowledge is based on what has gone before but what has gone before also includes the research projects by current and past academics in the faculty. This is still knowledge even though it is not old enough to have become embedded in more general culture. Most really good universities are research universities and not just transmitters of old established knowledge. Dave

I think this is a challenge for everyone (even where specific research hours are allocated), other things get in the way, like course development and meetings. I think there is some value in action research if it is relevant to your subject specialism but that isn't the case for everyone. Working in collaboration might also be a consideration this has the benefit of sharing out the workload and means that you have to stick to deadlines. I would also like to say that careful diary management helps but ... I am probably better at saying that than doing it .... So that might appear incongruent!

Hi all, One has to be disciplined. It is not the actual teaching per se which is time consuming but the marking and administration which goes with it.

We also cope with this challenge..Our solution is researching in a team of 3-4 lecturers and sharing ideas, dilemmas and writing articles between us

Research should be need based and it should be conducted little by little, inch by inch everyday prioritising the needs of both the teacher and students.And that way, I think a balance can be created to some extent, but, of course obstacles and challenges will also be there.

Another way forward is to have faculty based research programmes where academics join research groups centred around their teaching areas. That way all research papers and books feed directly into the teaching. This of course impacts on recruitment, making sure that successful candidates' research interests match those of the faculty. Dave

Get written agreement that your work ratio _is_ 80:20 Teaching:Research.

Align your research as much as is possible with some part of your teaching. Socialise at lunch time with colleagues who can potentially help your work.

Make Friday your research day. Fiercely protect its holiness! Post your teaching days on your door. On Fridays, do not park in your designated parking bay, but park in the student parking area so that students think you are off-campus! Unplug your phone and turn off all messaging! Have the departmental secretary screen all calls so that you can be informed if there is a fire at home! Be prepared to work late on Fridays and even on Saturdays and Sundays if necessary, and repay yourself by goofing off occasionally...

For your undergrads, set papers that are easy to mark.

Use your masters students to develop your syllabus. and find content. Reward them with marks! Have fortnightly meetings with all of them at once so that they can help each other.

Use your PhD students to develop your knowledge base. Reward them with co-authored papers! Meet them only when they need you, but at least monthly.

Manage yourself using what you teach.

I came across this today ... it seems to link to your question but is based on early career researchers, so may or may not be useful.

https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/early-career-researchers-20-tips-for-career-development

In presenting conference papers, choose conferences that publish their proceedings or continue to publish your conference paper as a journal article as you already have some of the work done with feedback from the conference participants for improvements.

Best regards,

Debra

I love to teach and research. Its interesting how the two important academic activitied create a wonderful mixture. I integrate the two each time. I teach about my research and research on what I teach.

One of the most difficult situations to reconcile. On the one hand the regular obligations to be a worker in education and to fulfill the regular tasks. On the other hand, the challenge and the scientific curiosity in discovering new frontiers to contribute with a state of the art of some scientific area. The important thing is to be able to balance the assignments without, however, leaving any of them in the background. In either situation, enthusiasm, commitment and motivation will make a difference in this educational trajectory.

I think that Francisco has hit on something here when he refers to the regular obligations and tasks of the teacher. The problem is that ,although the research outcomes can feed into one's own teaching and the department's teaching, the processes are very different.The practice teaching can be very short term in its regularity with its demands of weekly planning and assessment. Research however calls more upon a continuous stream of consciousness which is not a stop/go operation like the practicalities of teaching. You can't just do a morning's research in the same way that you can do a morning's teaching.

So yes research does feed into teaching content but you need a much longer continuous span of time to undertake the research in the long term.

University academics need to join a research centre for part of the year-ie a term or a 6 week period or longer every couple of years. This might be a good argument for every university to have a separate but associated research institute where for a certain time academics are contractually shielded from the rigours of lectures, seminars, tutorials, admin.etc.

Having said this I think it would be a mistake to have research only contracts for academics because knowledge should be in constant flow from teachers to students so in this way knowledge is produced but no one has exclusive ownership of it since knowledge belongs to the world. Dave

In a higher learning setup, research leads to teaching. Unlike lecturing in a class room setup, it evolves into a flipped type; sharing and deliberating as a process tools.

Dear Dr.Suhail Mohammad Ghouse,

Through teaching, you contact students and evaluate the qualifications of your students and select qualified students for your research. Research results will be the source for teaching materials.