The one idea from Connections are Everything that is most actionable from my teaching is that just one professor who cares about a student can have a huge impact on their college experience and their experience many years later.
A national poll of 30,000 college graduates found that alumni who reported having one professor “who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams” were more than twice as likely as their peers to be thriving professionally and personally—even many years after.
I’ve thought about this in the way that I show up to class. This semester I would like to try showing my students at the start of each class something that I’ve been working on or reading about that excites me. For example, one of my colleagues shows a visualization of the day in our intro stat course. That seems to work for her, but I don’t think that I could pull that off with consistent authenticity. It may work for me sometimes, but I am more excited about the idea of showing a range of things: a quote, a piece of media, an idea, a question, a picture, a snippet from one of my own projects.
That last one (a snippet from one of my own projects) is one I’m particularly excited about because it would give me a chance and an ongoing reason to be in alignment between my teaching and my scholarship. If I can use my projects to show up as excited in the classroom and get students interested, what a win!
I hope that this personal way of showing up to class has the potential to make my students excited about learning statistics and data science, to encourage them to explore their own interests, and shows them enough of who I am to make them comfortable showing me who they are.