MURFREESBORO, Tenn.— The November edition of Middle Tennessee State University’s “Out of the Blue” television magazine features a trio of professors who were recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to advance research in improving the teaching of the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

Principal investigators Sarah Bleiler-Baxter, mathematical sciences professor, and Gregory Rushton, Tennessee STEM Education Center director and chemistry professor, stopped by the “Out of the Blue” set to discuss the Teaching TRIOS initiative.

Watch the full segment below with host Andrew Oppmann, vice president of the university’s Division of Marketing and Communications.

The aim of the project is to improve faculty peer reviews by having groups of three faculty members observe one another’s classrooms and then debrief afterward to discuss the strengths of each other’s instruction, Bleiler-Baxter said.

Rushton expounded, saying “It would be me walking into Sarah’s classroom just to learn from her — not to coach her, not to mentor her — but just to be a learner as her colleague, trying to recognize all the great things that she does with her students, and trying to ask how she goes about planning those kinds of lessons and getting those kinds of experiences.”

“It’s less coaching, and more just learning — peer mentoring each other — but she’s mentoring me as she teaches in her classroom,” he continued. “I’m learning from her, rather than me going in and trying to evaluate her teaching.”

The Teaching TRIOS project began 10 years ago in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and then later expanded throughout various College of Basic and Applied Sciences departments. During this transition, Bleiler-Baxter and Rushton began working with Grant Gardner, biology professor, who is the third principal investigator for the five-year grant.

Bleiler-Baxter emphasized the importance of building “a culture where teaching becomes something that we are doing in collaboration with our colleagues, much like we do research.”

She later noted the other goals of the initiative, which are to create “an inclusive pedagogy where we are teaching to all of the students in our classroom” and to eliminate a “stagnant teaching culture.”

“Many of us as professors in higher education learn to teach by observing our own professors. We may not have formal training in pedagogy or in teaching practice,” she continued.

This program may start at MTSU, but the grant allows for the initiative to spread nationally and even internationally, through the dissemination of research-based models.

“Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 6:30 p.m. Sundays; and streamed on the MTSU Jazz Network through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month.

It is also available on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings. 

It is also available as a podcast on iTunes and Google Play and as individual interview segments on Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3. 

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue. 

— Maddy Williams (Maddy.Williams@mtsu.edu)