How to teach college #18: Morning rounds

Only a few years ago I started doing something that I think most professors in a research-heavy career do routinely, and it gave my teaching such an unexpected burst of potency that I really regret having waited so long to get started. You can do the same thing with probably one focused session of less than an hour, and I predict you, like me, will wonder what took you so long.

First, create a Gmail account that you're not going to use for anything else; then make a list of the journals that publish the research that's straight up the middle of what you teach. After that, create a login and password with the publishers of those journals -- nearly all of mine come from Taylor and Francis, Oxford Academic, SAGE, or ScienceDirect. Once you're logged in, go to the journal's home on the publisher's site and subscribe that Gmail account to updates from that journal -- in particular, new articles and the table of contents for new issues.

From then on, take a few minutes every morning and just glance at article titles. If they sound intriguing, read the abstract. If you can tell from the abstract that it speaks directly to something you teach, try to get the article -- I look it up in Google Scholar, and often it's available full text in one of several ways. If it isn't, I put in an interlibrary loan request for it.

I am then all set up to tell my students, "Just this morning in my inbox there was a study, hot off the presses, that found this." Now, it's important to be careful and remind them that it's a single study, and that the weight of research is what ought to shape their understanding. But those brand new studies have a coolness factor that can fire up their curiosity and spark energetic discussions. It also heads off any complaints that I'm just re-reading dusty lecture notes that are older than the students themselves.

It's also quite easy to look up prolific scholars in your field on Google Scholar, find their profile, and set an alert to email that same Gmail account every time the scholar publishes something new. And while you're on that scholar's profile, if you speed-read down their publication history, you might find they publish in journals you hadn't paid attention to, and it's just a click to add those journals to your morning reading.

If you're already strapped for time, this might seem like one more thing you just can't shoehorn in, but my experience has been that the morning reading goes very quickly and reminds me what I first loved about my field. It reawakens my infatuation with cool discoveries that make sense of things I formerly found confusing and troubling. It's like making the decision to get daily exercise, or eat healthy: feeding myself a little snack of up-to-date research findings every day keeps me intrigued, arms me to motivate students, and is really easy to do.