Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning

Bob Hawley had no early aspirations for an academic career; it took him four years of working dead-end jobs to even entertain the idea of college, a path he'd once sworn off. Then, having spent several seasons researching glaciers at remote outposts in Antarctica and Greenland during and after his bachelor’s degree studies, he found himself drawn more to the rugged extremes of polar field operations. 

When his former professor invited him to Antarctica for another expedition, he went—and because the paperwork would be simpler if he were enrolled as a student, he agreed to enter graduate school. 

That reluctant, almost incidental step launched him to a career of academic leadership: as a Dartmouth scholar-educator, a National Science Foundation program officer, and now as the new director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.

While his academic success may have been unexpected given his early reluctance, pedagogy was always part of his life: His parents, Robert and Isabel, researched and published widely on student-centered learning, and he grew up around kitchen-table discussions of educational innovation. So when Hawley began teaching at Dartmouth in 2008, he naturally set about making his courses as engaging as possible. And though he could have trained his attention primarily on students who shared his interests in glaciology, he found a profound sense of purpose in the introductory Environmental Change course. The class fulfilled a distributive requirement and reached a vibrant mix of students, including many bound for careers outside the sciences.   

“I came to feel that my best impact on the world was through teaching this introductory class to students who would go on to become leaders in government and industry—the decision makers and policymakers,” Hawley says. “If they could make these decisions with a grounding in fundamental Earth science, I could have a far-reaching impact."

Within a few terms, the course’s enrollment jumped from about 50 to nearly 300, a surge that led the course to be capped and split into two sections. Hawley went to DCAL for help adapting his methods to these highly enrolled sections, and he found a partner in Erin DeSilva, whom he likens to a personal trainer: suggesting new practices, supporting his experiments, and keeping him accountable through the hard parts of implementation. Backed by a grant from Dartmouth’s Gateway Initiative—a strategic effort to scale active learning across high-enrollment introductory courses—Hawley fundamentally restructured his classroom. 

“Adding active learning to a classroom can be a little intimidating at first,” he says. “You don't know how things are going to go. But when you see how the students are engaged, talking to each other, teaching each other, it's electrifying. They are asking questions they might not have had during a lecture. They are coming up with outside-the-box and off-the-wall ideas. It looks a little chaotic to a visitor but it is not only effective but also fun! It's made my teaching much more satisfying."

To sustain this dynamic environment even as the course’s popularity continued to soar, Hawley brought on board undergraduate Learning Fellows. Trained through a partnership between course instructors, DCAL staff, and learning designers, Learning Fellows are embedded peer leaders who help students work through challenges in small groups, helping maintain an active and collaborative learning process. Their involvement allowed Hawley more opportunities for real dialogue—with individual students, small clusters of students, and with the class as a whole.

Hawley brings his sense of joy in collaboration and learning exchange as he steps into his new role. We sat down with him to discuss his vision for DCAL and why he wants to scale up campus-wide conversations about teaching.

What is a major focus for you as an educator right now?

“It's all about motivation. An enormous strength of Dartmouth is its scholar-educator model and focus on experiential learning. I think this is key in increasing the intrinsic motivation of our students. Learning isn't something that just happens to you if you go to a class and listen to a lecture. Learning takes work, sometimes hard, messy, and confusing work. Short-circuiting that work by leaning on technology is more likely if the motivation comes from outside, from wanting to please someone else or project a certain image.”

What are some of your key priorities for the Center’s work?

“Teaching can be strangely isolated. We show our research to the world and invite critique, but the classroom tends to stay closed off, with many faculty feeling like they have to figure it out on their own. I think that leaves everyone far more alone than they need to be. And the ground is shifting under all of us right now. What worked in a classroom five years ago doesn’t necessarily work now. DCAL has always been a place on campus where you could close the door, breathe out, talk about what wasn't working without fear of judgment, and try something new. I've leaned on that a lot over the years myself. I'd love to see that spirit spread across the whole campus.”

 

Curious about the fieldwork that started it all? You can find 20 years of Hawley's polar dispatches on his blog.

Learn more about the Stretch, the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences' term-long field program and one of Dartmouth's most storied off-campus offerings. You can also read a first-hand account from Martin Skacel ’27, who describes traversing Banff and exploring glaciology with Hawley during a recent Stretch.