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Most of us know Jim Lang through his books, including Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It and Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning. His new book, Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, will be released in May.
Since 2023, Jim has been at Notre Dame University as a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence. As part of his portfolio, Jim hosts the Designed for Learning podcast. Recently, Jim interviewed Georgetown University’s Maggie Debelius about our co-edited (along with Eddie Maloney) book, Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience and Adaptability in Higher Education (JHU Press, 2024).
Jim graciously agreed to answer my questions about roles, scholarship and careers.
Q: Tell us about your current role at Notre Dame. What does being a professor of the practice affiliated with a CTL mean?
A: The title of “professor of the practice” at Notre Dame covers different kinds of positions, but typically it refers to folks who might not be actively teaching in the undergraduate classroom but have roles that support Notre Dame students, faculty and staff in some educational capacity. In my case, that means that I join with my colleagues in Kaneb Center in doing all of the work of a teaching center at a major university: early-career teaching orientations, course design institutes, hosting workshops for faculty and graduate students, consulting with departments and individuals, creating resources (like the Designed for Learning podcast), and much more.
Practically speaking, my position entails some regular activities each month, such as co-leading our early-career workshops, as well as conducting interviews for the podcast. But like anyone in a teaching center, I also pitch in wherever I am needed. I take my turn developing and offering workshops for faculty on various topics, serving on teaching and learning committees and pursuing solo projects or those developed with others. My time on campus last month, for example, was my AI week, and I spent a lot of time with my colleague Alex Ambrose, who has been one of our campus leaders on the use of artificial intelligence for teaching and learning.
So we invited him to be a guest at our early-career workshops, and I interviewed him for the podcast. But he and I also worked with our Office of Academic Standards to co-host a standalone workshop on artificial intelligence and academic integrity, and I met with a team who are working to develop an AI chat bot for faculty based on my book Small Teaching. But that was last month; based on a quick glance at my schedule, I can already see that next month will be completely different!
Unfortunately, my schedule of being on campus just one a week per month doesn’t really allow me to teach an undergraduate course during the semester, and I do miss that. But last summer I was finally able to get back into the classroom for a five-week intensive course, which made me very happy.
Q. Congrats on your new book, Write Like You Teach. What was the impetus to write that book? Can you give us a preview?
A: I can point to a general and specific impetus. The general one is simpler: This book allowed me to draw together my two great academic interests, writing and teaching. Although I never published too much scholarship in my home disciplines of literature and writing, I was studying and teaching in those fields for most of my professional career. Even as I have moved more firmly towards focusing on teaching and learning in my career, I still read, think about and even write about literature and writing all the time (as in my Substack column). Having had a flash of insight that enabled me to connect my two great interests together, I couldn’t resist the impulse to turn it into a book.
I also had a more specific impetus for this book, one that came out of my work as an editor or writing coach in various capacities. For the past 10 years, I have been editing or co-editing a book series on teaching and learning in higher education, first for West Virginia University Press and now for Oklahoma University Press. Most of the authors in this series have been scholars who decided that they wanted to try to reach new audiences with their writing, moving from their home disciplines to writing for faculty in all disciplines. Since I had made that transition myself, I felt well positioned to help them. But I definitely noticed that I was saying the same things to many of our authors, addressing common problems that arise when someone used to writing for small audiences or in short-form essays tries to tackle a book project. My book started almost as notes to myself about the most common stumbling blocks that I saw everyone encountering.
As the project grew, my sense of the audience for such a book expanded. In addition to the formal editing I do for the book series, I get messages frequently from aspiring authors asking for advice on publishing or asking me to give them feedback on their work, etc. These requests can become overwhelming, but I do try to respond to all of them, because I sent out some of those cold-call pleas for help when I was trying to get started as a writer and some people I barely knew helped me. The requests I typically get were usually focused on helping writers make the same moves I was recommending to series authors, and my recommendations to them often boil down to what you see encapsulated in the book’s title: Write like you teach.
For example, a teacher has to know their audience to help them learn. We don’t design the same course for first-year students that we teach to senior majors. We recognize that the audiences in those two contexts have different background knowledge and skill levels, and we adjust our course materials accordingly. As a writer moves from disciplinary colleagues to all higher education (and even to readers beyond higher education), she has to make those same adjustments. Likewise, college courses have learning objectives in which we describe how we hope the reader will be changed by the experience; although it might not be a common writing practice, a writer can do the same thing and spell out a book’s learning objectives for the reader—here’s how I hope you will be changed by reading this work.
Fundamentally, these examples and everything in the book, come down to a core principle: Readers come to nonfiction essays and books seeking to learn something. The book’s primary ambition is an enabling one: I want to show writers, especially those who seek wider audiences for their work, that they already have the skills to do this. Helping people learn—they do that all the time. I am just filling in the details for them with specific writing strategies.
Q: Before moving to Notre Dame, you spent over 20 years at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., as an English professor and director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence. Maybe drawing on some thoughts from your move from Assumption to Notre Dame, do you have any advice for mid-/late-career nontraditional academics thinking about career paths and opportunities?
A: A quick bit of background before I give this answer. During my final years in an English department, I was also serving as the founding director of the university’s Center for Teaching Excellence. As you allude to in the introduction above, I was inspired by that work to write books about teaching and learning and a couple of those books were successful enough that I thought I could step away from a full-time academic position and split my time between teaching and writing (and the speaking that supports writing). This plan would probably have worked, except for the fact that five months after I “retired” from teaching, I found myself on life support for a few months and then many months recovering from a life-saving surgery and a stroke that occurred when I was on the operating table.
Once I was back to writing and speaking, I gave a talk in the spring of 2023 about my book Distracted at Notre Dame. That talk was sponsored by the Kaneb Center, as part of their regular work of engaging faculty in teaching and learning conversations on campus. The director, Kristi Rudenga, knew that I was an alumnus at Notre Dame and asked whether I would be willing to return there. My challenge was that I have a wife who has her own teaching career in Massachusetts, and we have five children who live with us or live nearby (happily!), so I couldn’t move to South Bend full-time. Instead, we worked out a half-time, hybrid position as a professor of the practice in the Kaneb Center, which means that I spend the first week of every month on campus and do another week’s worth of work remotely during the other weeks of the month.
Thus, when people ask me the question you posed above (which happens more frequently than you might expect), my internal impulse is just to say, my experience was so quirky that I’m not sure it contains any real lessons for anybody else. At the same time, every story has its quirks, so I am willing to offer two pieces of advice for people who are looking to the future and wondering if a move might be in the cards for them.
Write: Every career-enhancing or even life-enhancing move I have experienced arose because of my writing. Getting my name in front of lots of people through my Chronicle columns, public essays and books got me invitations to speak around the world, job offers or career advancement, editing and publishing opportunities. Especially if folks are in administrative roles or staff positions in places like teaching centers and they are thinking about a potential future move, start writing right now. The more you publish, whether that’s in traditional academic journals or presses or in more public spaces like social media or blogging platforms, the more you are creating more opportunities for good fortune to find you. And if that advice terrifies you, because you don’t feel confident in your writing abilities, don’t worry, I have a book for you …
Be Entrepreneurial: While I have benefited from many privileges and happy turns of fortune’s wheel, I can also point to the places where I spotted or created an opportunity with an entrepreneur’s mind. I first started writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999, when the English department of my Ph.D. program forwarded an email from the Chronicle saying that they were looking for newly minted grads to keep a public diary of their academic job searches. You had to apply to become one of those diarists by drafting a sample essay for them; I was one of the five that were chosen that year. Once that year came to a close (and I had received a tenure-track job), I reached out to my editor at the Chronicle and said, “Listen, I really enjoyed writing for you—would you consider a new series of columns that described a new faculty member’s first year on the tenure track?” That first-year column then turned into a column about the six years from hiring to tenure, which led to my book Life on the Tenure Track and from there a whole career in writing about teaching and learning in higher education.
At several key moments in my career, I made a move just like this—leveraging an initial boon or a current experience into something more. I know nothing about business or how to run one, but the only word I know to describe those moves is entrepreneurial, so that’s what I’m going with. For those who are seeking new paths or opportunities, then, I would just recommend moving beyond the traditional strategies we use in that work—combing job ads, networking, etc. Build on the accomplishments and skills you have to lever open new possibilities. Don’t hesitate to pitch ideas or positions to people. We are in a difficult time for higher education, especially when it comes to job hiring and security, but you never know if adding yourself to a team or project could actually make someone’s life easier or fill a gap that just opened in their department or institution.
