JHU alumni group honors Johns Hopkins Carey Business School lecturer with Excellence in Teaching Award
Since 1992, the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association has annually recognized university faculty who excel in the art of instruction with its Excellence in Teaching Award.
The award allows each academic division of the university to publicly recognize the critical importance of teaching. The nomination and selection processes differ by school, but students must be involved in the selection.
The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School salutes Tom Crain, recipient of the 2009 Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.
Tom Crain well remembers the sagacious advice once bestowed upon him by one of his professors, while Crain was an undergraduate at Williams College. “He said, ‘If you learn to do one thing well while at Williams, it should be to write,’ ” Crain recalls.
Crain took that counsel to heart, and then some. In a teaching career spanning his entire adult life, he views writing as the linchpin of not just academic but cultural and professional success and personal growth. Crain, who started his professional career teaching high school English literature, sees writing as the conduit leading to an intimate and unequalled understanding of his students.
“In teaching writing, you get to know students in ways that no other instructors do,” he observes. “Every class is a new class, even if you teach freshman composition 100 times. You have different students every time you teach it; in a sense you’re learning from your students as well.”
Crain, lecturer and faculty member for the Carey Business School, co-teaches Foundations of Moral Leadership, providing him the chance to tap into his training not only in writing but also in philosophy and ethics. “Students have to put together a moral compass. For some students it’s a very revealing course; it forces them to think about how they make decisions and what their ethical values are,” he observes.
Another course taught by Crain, Managerial Communications, sees his students identifying and addressing a specific challenge at their workplaces, through research, surveys, interviews, and a written report delivered to those in authority who review its recommendations and consider suggested changes. Here, too, issues of ethics and cultural diversity, as well as communication and group dynamics are stressed, all presented in a framework of cogent and persuasive writing.
Crain, who will mark 15 years teaching at the Carey School this fall, once ran several of the school’s undergraduate programs as well as Odyssey, the perennially popular noncredit series of courses and events open to students, alumni, and the greater Hopkins community. Over the years, he has continued to teach writing courses that incorporate issues of philosophy, ethics, and civic and personal responsibility. Two of which he is especially fond are Leadership and the Classics, which he created and designed, and a long-running course on Baltimore history and government, co-taught with city council member and fellow Hopkins instructor Mary Pat Clarke. The latter sees students create and promote an actual proposal to modify a city law of their choosing, with the aid of a sponsor on the city council.
“If you want to understand the distinction between lecturing and teaching, look no further than Tom Crain,” says former student Tyrone Taborn. “He has the uncanny ability to help students cross over to critical thinking. No matter where a student starts, Tom insists that they make a deeper connection to the materials. More importantly, Tom shows that learning is a lifelong journey.”
No matter the course or the venue, “I love seeing people develop,” says Crain, who received a bachelor’s in English Literature from Williams College, a master’s in English Literature from the University of Michigan, and is set to complete a PhD from Hopkins. “I remember a fellow faculty member who said his definition of an “A” was when a student taught him something,” Crain relates. “In the Baltimore course, I really did feel that we were a community of scholars, that I was learning as much as the students were. I’d say that is true for most of the courses that I teach. I’m always learning from the students.”
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