Lillian Tong is the Undergraduate Education Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Biology Education and was one of the developers of CIRTL's Instructional Materials Development course.

How did you get involved with CIRTL?

I have a strong research background and have been interested in bringing teaching and research together.  I work with the Center for Biology Education, which is dedicated to improving biology education on many levels.  I work with faculty to improve their courses by getting faculty members together to discuss what they are doing.  We discuss teaching-as-research (TAR) and the scholarship of learning as means of improving biology education.  This work extends to all of the STEM courses because science is so interdisciplinary.  My interest in improving teaching through research led me to CIRTL.  I was involved with the initial grant writing, so I’ve been in from the beginning!  The CIRTL project is one route to change the teaching culture by bringing together enthusiastic graduate students, faculty, and researchers dedicated to improving STEM education. 

What have you been most involved with while working at CIRTL?

I have been most involved with developing the instructional materials development (IMD) course and writing the IMD guidebook.  I believe that IMD takes teaching-as-learning one step further—from a teaching technique to a teaching practice.  The IMD course is designed for teams of 2 to 3 individuals of faculty/staff and graduate/postdoctoral students to develop instructional materials for existing STEM undergraduate courses.  Faculty and graduate students work together to think about a teaching and learning problem like they would think about any science research problem.  Bringing together faculty and students allows wisdom to meet creativity in new and exciting ways.  The materials that the faculty/student groups develop are created to be used in the classroom because you can’t create instructional materials in a vacuum.  The groups must have goals and plans to implement their materials.  Thinking about how the materials will actually be used by students is a major portion of the development. 

What is the Guidebook?

The guidebook is the product of two years of hard work!  Bob Jeanne, my IMD co-instructor,  and I taught the course for two years and kept careful documentation on the course.  The course was essentially developed from scratch, so we needed to use TAR methods to see what was working and what wasn’t.  Through evaluations and assessment we learned what worked best for the course.  For example, we learned that by week 7 the groups must have a narrowly-defined research question.  This timeline gives the groups enough time to do a thorough literature review, receive feedback from other groups, and work out initial problems while still having a significant amount to time to develop the materials and run beta-tests.  The course is a work in progress, and we will continue to use TAR to improve the learning experience.

CIRTL
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
ph.: 608.263.0630
fax: 608.265.0538