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Creating Productive Research-Teaching Interfaces
Originally published in April 2025
One of the most significant challenges associated with professional academic life is achieving a comfortable balance between teaching responsibilities and research commitments in terms of workload, job satisfaction and progress in one’s career. But, faculty, particularly early career faculty, may see research and teaching as a zero-sum game where time devoted to one detracts from the progress that can be made on the other.
Yet research and teaching should be seen as complementary; they can enhance each other as interlocking and mutually fulfilling aspects of an academic career. In this week’s email, we provide three tips to bring your teaching and research into productive alignment and to minimize the contradictory pressures that faculty may feel when trying to both publish and pursue teaching excellence.
Bring Your Research into Your Course Curriculum
Bringing your research knowledge and enthusiasm into the classroom can spark students’ interest while helping to maintain your mental engagement with research activities. Students become increasingly engaged with a course and its material to the degree that a faculty member is engaged and enthused by the subject matter (Marshall, 2001) – which is more likely to be the case when teaching in one’s research area!
Even when not teaching a course directly in your research field, integrating examples from your research approaches, processes, connection to current events, or products can deepen student connection to you and the material. Sharing your research journey, and the challenges you have faced along the way, makes academic research relatable and engaging. Strategies for integrating your research include:
- Add one or more research-content modules: Create stand-alone modules on topics aligned with your research program and the latest developments in your field that can be included in one or more courses. Develop a new module each term to gradually increase the research content in your teaching.
- Integrate your research into student-led projects: Design your assessments so they interface with your research topics, questions or methods (or all three), which not only enriches the learning experience for students, but also allows you to delve deeper into your research interests through the alternative perspectives provided by student work (Russel, 2024).
- Create undergraduate research experiences (UREs): UREs are high-impact teaching practices that help to “connect key concepts and questions with students’ early and active involvement in systematic investigation and research” (AAC & U, n.d.). Directed studies or thesis courses offer existing opportunities for UREs and provide students as novice researchers with a hands-on approach to learning the tools and skills related to academic inquiry through practical application, i.e., asking questions, crafting hypotheses and working with research data, all of which can provide greater contextual meaning to a student’s undergraduate studies (Cargill and Cunningham, 2024).
Integrate Your Teaching into Your Research
There are ways in which your teaching practice and pedagogical ambitions can be brought into your research program, particularly by including teaching and learning activities in grant proposals.
- Consulting the literature on teaching and learning can provide a strong rationale in your proposal including activities or products in the grant program.
- Integrating activities and products that align with your teaching practice and courseload into the “broader impacts” or “expected outcomes” section of a grant proposal, including:
- Designing a new course based on research products from the grant that enhances the achievement of program learning outcomes.
- Creating stand-alone modules either for training purposes (i.e., to support skills-building for UREs, for example) or as substantive course material related to research and analysis.
- Involving graduate student or postdoctoral research as part of the commitment to training, skills and outcomes of highly qualified personnel (HQP).
Develop Your Teaching Practice Through Research
As you experiment with new teaching practices and approaches, you may find yourself putting in place the fundamentals of a pedagogical research project, i.e., detecting course learning outcomes that are not being met; reviewing literature on teaching and learning that can help design a new pedagogical intervention to address the gap; implementing the new approach; and then conducting formative assessment to gauge whether students show enhanced learning.
Enhance your research and teaching synergies by moving pedagogy and practice directly and intentionally into your research program:
- Reflect on your teaching: Utilize formative assessment techniques to collect data. When conducted consistently over successive years, formative assessment techniques can provide raw data for monitoring student learning and tracking the utility of particular teaching strategies. This data can also be used as empirical data for publication purposes.
- Apply for Teaching Excellence and Innovation’s Instructional Grants: Project grants can provide critical financial support to design and carry out a small-scale teaching and learning research project that assesses new approaches in teaching and learning to enhance the student experience and are broadly applicable across disciplines.
- Read and engage with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: There are several journals specializing in scholarship on postsecondary teaching and learning that can provide an outlet for your teaching-inspired research, for example:
- Engage with a Faculty Learning Community or Community of Practice: Centred on teaching challenges or particular pedagogies (e.g., Universal Design for Learning), these communities provide an avenue for networking with other faculty, sharing concerns and knowledge, working together on solutions, and – potentially – engaging in collaborative research. Each year, Teaching Excellence and Innovation runs several FLCs that have led to co-authored publications and conference presentations.