What’s your idea of fun on a Monday morning?

How about ... get to work at least 90 minutes early, squeeze into a small room with your peers and talk?  

For the 10 faculty members teaching "Pursuit of Knowledge" -- a seminar course all first-year Honors College students are required to take in the fall of their first semester -- that’s how weeks have started for the past three-plus months, a tradition that began in 2004, when the Honors College opened and the team-taught first-year seminar debuted.

The meetings -- at 8:15 a.m. sharp in the Davis Center -- give faculty a chance to coordinate teaching approaches for the roughly 20 students in each of their sections, who share the same reading and have similar assignments and tests, and swap insights about what's working, and what's not, in their classrooms.

For their troubles, they get a free cup of coffee and a muffin and a chance to engage in dialogue on subjects they’re passionate about -- like the difference between a sloppy rough draft and a carefully written first draft. Students in the seminar are graded on first drafts, as well as the final paper, and need to know the difference. 

“I talk about it in terms of our own process,” David Jenemann, professor of film and television studies, told his fellow faculty at a recent meeting. “When we submit something for publication, the fantasy is that the editors will say, ‘Great, thanks, it's coming out tomorrow.’ And the reality is, you get a lot of comments. It’s like, look, I want you to feel like you're done, but just understand somebody’s going to come back and say you're not.”

Faculty’s near perfect attendance on Monday mornings is testimony to UVM’s academic culture, which places unusual emphasis for a research university on undergraduate teaching.

The weekly meetings also directly benefit students, says Alec Ewald, political science professor and interim associate dean, who facilitates the group discussion.

“There are some direct pedagogical benefits: cool documents, cool in-class exercises, cool discussion questions, using Blackboard a certain way,” he says. “Then there’s this overall understanding that this is a group of adults that’s really committed to (students). I bring things from the class to my colleagues here, and from my colleagues to the class. What the students are experiencing is that their work matters outside the classroom. Adult scholars at the university are discussing things that happen in the classroom among ourselves. We care enough about their work that we talk about it outside of class, and other professors know their names.”  

Group members include (left to right from top) Jenemann, Martha Lance, Honors College adviser; Charlie Briggs, History; Eric Zencey, Political Science, Gund Institute; Holly-Lynn Busier, Education; Ewald; Joseph Acquisto, French; Ian Grimmer, History; Helga Schreckenberger, German; and Lisa Schnell, English, Honors College interim dean. English professor Nancy Welch is also a member of the group.