Ward Lyles

Engagement

All my teaching and mentoring extends from a desire to engage students. I structure my courses to engage each student with academic content, with their peers, with the experienced world beyond campus, with me as instructor, and with their own personality, values and approach to learning and action. My students learn through active learning in a safe, respectful environment with professional work expectations that challenges everyone to engage socially and emotionally, as well as intellectually. Recognition of my excellence in teaching includes having been nominated for KU's Ned Fleming Teaching Award (2016, 2017).

Classroom Teaching

All my courses employ active learning approaches to engage students with core concepts and practical skills needed to be effective, compassionate professionals and citizens. I emphasize concept application and evaluation, structured interactions that simulate professional settings, and student and instructor accountability. I teach one course (Quantitative Methods) strictly available to graduate students, mostly in Urban Planning, one course (Planning the Sustainable City) strictly available to undergraduates, and two courses (Sustainable Land Use Planning and Environmental Planning Techniques) available to graduates and undergraduates. I have also taught an online course (Planning for Climate Change and Disasters).

Team-Based Learning Pedagogy

I follow the principles of Team-Based Learning (TBL), a theoretically grounded and empirically tested approach. TBL is highly consistent with the promotion of active learning by the National Academies, the AAU and learning experts. Research indicates that active learning approaches like TBL enhance learning for all students, but especially for traditionally marginalized populations. The TBL approach to collaborative learning motivates students to hold themselves and each other accountable and involves strategically ordered individual work and teamwork with immediate feedback. TBL shifts the focus of classroom time from the instructor conveying course concepts to the application of course concepts by student learning teams. Students in my classes have responded positively to TBL. Graduate and undergraduate students alike appreciate the very hands-on and applied experiences that allow them to engage with the actual practice of planning. Students also appreciate having teammates – teammates who each bring their own deep well of experiences and knowledge – with whom to work and learn. I am convinced that a key reason that the TBL approach works so well is that the students recognize that we are all in a learning partnership together.

Additionally, students are provided two structured, but anonymous, opportunities to provide feedback to me on what I can do to improve the course. Through discussion, we arrive at consensus on changes, which are implemented beginning in the earliest relevant class period or time.

Fostering Inclusive Class Climates

I have focused special attention on complementing my application of innovative pedagogy with deliberate efforts to foster a course climate that induces even greater engagement and inclusion. These efforts at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) involve a wide spectrum of techniques to create a climate of understanding, trust and psychological safety. These approaches range from using course meetings early in the semester to collectively explore and reflect on own our learning styles, personalities, social identities and life experiences to overtly focusing course materials, exercises and discussion around topics of social equity and justice. My participation in the inaugural group of Diversity Scholars (DS) through KU's Center of Teaching Excellence (CTE) have informed and enhanced these efforts. I increasingly see these climate-building efforts as foundational for my active-learning pedagogy and the content I deliver because every individual in the classroom can and should be an active contributor to our collective learning.

Professional Development, Innovation and Leadership

Since I arrived at KU I have actively sought out and participated in numerous opportunities provided by the CTE to learn about and experiment with leading-edge innovations. Opportunities I have participated in include: a Peer Teaching Triad, the Best Practices Institute, Diversity Scholars (DS), attending every annual teaching summit and many one-off sessions. I have drawn on these opportunities to innovate in the classroom and beyond. My Quantitative Methods course has been nominated for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's Curriculum Innovation Award (2018). With the assistance of a graduate student, I drew on the experience in DS and existing resources to develop a user-friendly Syllabus Audit Tool that instructors at KU and beyond can use to self-assess and improve upon who they engage DEI issues in their courses. Evidence of my leadership in teaching innovation at KU includes leading sessions at CTEs annual teaching summits, conducting graduate and undergraduate training sessions, providing teaching workshops, serving as the mentor for a peer teaching triad of other faculty, participating in discussions/panels on diversity and teaching, and securing multiple internal grants for Urban Planning and SPAA to engage faculty in improving instruction.

Undergraduate Advising

Our program does not offer an undergraduate major or minor. Still, I frequently interact with undergraduates, discussing their interests in planning or other career trajectories and other issues. I have served as a reference for internships, jobs and/or graduate programs for more than two dozen undergraduate students and helped students in crisis obtain mental health services.

Graduate Advising and Mentoring

I aim to help students advance along their desired career path by being highly accessible for individual and small-group interaction and by recognizing each student as a unique individual. Dozens of masters' students have consulted me repeatedly for advice on school, work and life. I have served on more than 10 doctoral and master's thesis committees. I chaired two masters' committees and both students continuing in doctoral programs; one at the University of Utah studying environmental policy and one was my first doctoral advisee in SPAA. For multiple students for whom I did not serve as chair, I have served a 'fixer' role when relationships between the student and their chair ceased to function as needed. Additionally, I have employed numerous students on projects through which they refine their practical and research skills.