The Relationship Between Teaching and ResearchI 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 ResearchI 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 ResearchI 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.
Source:
https://greatresearch.org/2013/11/01/the-relationship-between-teaching-and-research/
