Columns:: Lessons to be learned: Business professor edits book of essays about the ‘essence of excellent teaching’

since 12/15/98

Columns::January 14, 2002

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Fred Stephenson, associate professor of distribution in the Terry College of Business, is editor of the newly published Extraordinary Teachers: The Essence of Excellent Teaching

Lessons to be learned
Business professor edits book of essays about the ‘essence of excellent teaching’

By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Fred Stephenson, associate professor of distribution in the Terry College of Business, is editor of the newly published Extraordinary Teachers: The Essence of Excellent Teaching, a book of essays by 36 winners of UGA’s premier teaching award, the Josiah Meigs Award for Excellence in Teaching. He talked to Columns about the book.

Columns: What led to this project?

Stephenson: I had thought I wanted--sometime--to write a book about teaching. I kept putting it off, but then I had to do a project for the Senior Teaching Fellows program and I proposed the book. And about 24 hours after I made that suggestion, the idea came to me to enlist established teachers to contribute their lessons. I concluded that if the book is to have credibility, it has

to be people with unquestionable credentials, and that’s when I decided on prior Meigs winners.

Columns: That’s a simple way to make the selection.

Stephenson: Right--I don’t have to judge their credentials. They all have the Meigs Award, they’re all tenured faculty members at a research institution--they should be able to write a good paper. Most of them did a very good job--I didn’t have to do a lot of editing.
But I didn’t realize what I was getting into. I thought about 20 people would write a paper--I visualized a small book. And I didn’t really know much about their backgrounds. I was surprised that there were 29 different disciplines represented--and eight colleges. And we have 1,108 years of teaching experience represented.
We started out with a simple goal--to help education in America. Let’s pass on what we know so new teachers won’t have to struggle so much. We started out thinking it would be aimed at college teachers. But when I started reading the papers, I realized many of the writers have taught grades K-12 and the information they were providing was very generic. I was a high school teacher--I could have used a lot of the information in the book to make my life easier. So I asked people in the public school system to review sections and they told me this is really directly applicable to what they do, too. The potential audience just kept getting bigger.

Columns: But you started out thinking the audience was college teachers?

Stephenson: Originally, I thought some college teachers--professors, graduate teaching assistants, instructors--would buy the book individually and use it like a tutorial. I also visualized, from day one, that colleges would give it to new faculty or to young teachers or to struggling teachers.

Columns: What kind of marketing is the publisher planning?

Stephenson: It’s a nationally distributed book, available for sale in bookstores all over the country. The publishers have big plans for this book. In fact, we were targeting national TV programs--of course, a lot of people target them but you don’t always get them--and they were going to send galleys to major publications in education and copies to major newspapers with press releases. Their plans were big, but the truth of the matter is that, because of Sept. 11, the publishing business is on hold.

Columns: This book would be a good way to focus discussion--in a graduate student seminar, for instance.

Stephenson: I thought people might use it as a textbook. If I ever taught that kind of course, we’d talk about what these different people say, because they don’t say the same things. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on it.

Columns: How about other market segments?

Stephenson: I think the book should be in the hands of students in the education school. It should be right up their alley. The authors write and talk the way they teach, and the reason the book is successful is that they know how to do that. They know how to stimulate learning. Some of our authors are from the education school, and they’re enthusiastic about the potential.
President Adams is interested, so Anne Sweaney and I went over to talk to him about the book. I told him the University of Georgia, as fine an institution as it is, catches a lot of grief about teaching. Part of that is because people don’t know what we do. But we have something here to showcase teaching that no other university in the United States has. We really have a chance to tell a story to the nation about a university that has a serious commitment to teaching--and here are the examples. I think the university is in a unique situation because of this book, and I hope it takes advantage of it.
Originally, I hadn’t thought about the gift market. A lot of people are buying this book to give to favorite teachers or to the teachers of their children. It’s very nice--people are giving the book in recognition of teachers who changed their lives or their children’s lives.

Columns: Certainly everybody has a favorite teacher.

Stephenson: I think the teachers that change our lives the most are often elementary school teachers, because in those very early stages we form opinions about whether school is going to be something we enjoy going to. Marjorie Jaswell, my third-grade teacher, was the kindest, most caring teacher I ever had. You could tell she loved her job, she loved teaching, she loved these kids. When I wrote my paper for the book, I wrote about my philosophy of teaching, and I started thinking about my teachers. I thought they’d really appreciate it if I’d talk to them. So I went on a search to find all my teachers. I hadn’t talked to Marjorie in 50 years--I didn’t know if she was alive. I called the school system in Rhode Island to see if anybody knew. I finally got hold of Marjorie on the phone and it was a great. I corresponded with her and then last summer, when we were going to Boston to visit my son, we went to Rhode Island to see her. It was wonderful.
What I thought was: nothing means more to me than a student contacting me and saying you meant something to me. The thing I regret is that I waited so long to try to get in touch. Some of them are deceased. I think when people read the book one of the things they’re going to say is, “I’m not waiting that long.” Maybe we can bring a little joy into the world.

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