The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) have named Marlise Riffel of Lake Superior College the 2009 Minnesota Professor of the Year.
The U.S. Professors of the Year program, created in 1981, is the only national initiative specifically designed to recognize excellence in undergraduate teaching and mentoring. Riffel was selected from more than 300 top professors in the United States. This year, there are 38 state winners. Riffel was selected from faculty members nominated by colleges and universities throughout the country.
Following 10 years of work in the human services field, Riffel began her teaching career in Rochester, Minnesota in 1983. Initially, she taught traditional classes, but eventually taught the evening and weekend community-focused classes for the sociology department in order to work with nontraditional students. “I absolutely love sociology and there is nothing I’d rather do than teach. My job is to create a desire to know and then to facilitate the development of students’ skills in finding out,” said Riffel.
As a result of her community teaching, the local newspaper editor asked Riffel to write a weekly column, and her sociology-women’s studies column ran for five years in the Rochester Post-Bulletin. In 1991, she was honored by her colleagues at Rochester Community College with the Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year Award. That same year, Riffel and her family moved north.
Riffel started teaching at Duluth Community College in 1991 (now Lake Superior College) where she pioneered the use of computers in the sociology classroom to teach students research skills. “If I can make the sociological perspective contagious, students can catch it. Once they’ve caught it, they’ll want the tools — critical analysis, verifying, and using sociological research — that put them in charge of their own continued learning. The way I teach tools is to use them with students — this transforms sociology from an abstract theory to a strategy for tackling life’s puzzles and provides a new perspective on students’ everyday experiences.”
During her 26 years of teaching, she has taught 16 different undergraduate courses, connecting with 160 students each semester. “As a student of Marlise’s, the wonderful thing is that I know if I truly need help with something she is just the right teacher to go to. She is smart in more subjects that just sociology and never places herself up on a pedestal like some college professors might do,” said former student Hannah Packer. “I can’t even count how many times she had students share their personal experiences in class because she was so truly fascinated by them. I have not known one student who didn’t appreciate Marlise’s straightforward but truthful approach to teaching.”
Riffel and her LSC colleagues eventually designed a “soc lab” with moveable tables and chairs for group work surrounded by computers for each student along the classroom walls. “This team-based learning is incredible,” said current student Debra Burmeister. “The classroom itself is perfectly set up. With my other classes, it’s impossible to get the intimate feel sitting behind rows of computers. I wish more classrooms were set up this way.”
“A good teacher is in love with her subject,” commented Riffel. “She models for students how to wonder, how to struggle with conflicting data or polarized attitudes, how to settle for more questions than answers. To ask the questions of ‘how’ and ‘why,’ because students can always look up what, where, who, and when, but they are invited to think and process with questions of how and why. A good teacher finds exciting news or research results from his discipline and shares them with students. A good teacher changes techniques and resources and assessments each term based on feedback from the previous term’s students. A good teacher is still learning, and changing, and learning more.”
Riffel uses a variety of formats, from face-to-face teaching in the classroom to online learning to a hybrid/blended course. “I’m personally aware of her dedication to her students and their learning,” said faculty member Kent Richards. “Marlise ‘gets it’ that assessment of student learning is really about improving what we do in the classroom. When the majority of our colleagues still had little idea what academic assessment was all about, Marlise already had all of her course activities and assessment measures aligned with her course outcomes.”
In 2007, Lake Superior College nominated her for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities’ Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching. “Marlise not only inspires her students but her creative teaching methods also inspire her colleagues to experience teaching in new, innovative ways,” explained Hanna Erpestad, LSC dean of liberal arts and sciences.
