Furthermore, the more faculty are involved in departmental decisions about teaching assignments, the better they can integrate the two activities by developing courses about their current research topics or by incorporating information about their recent research into existing required courses. All were nominated by their chairs as being excellent at either teaching, research, or both. The study logged 1,030 hours of professional activity. The faculty observed by Colbeck integrated teaching and research an average 19 percent of the time. To do this, faculty can learn from what their colleagues do in other disciplines.
Physicists tend to integrate teaching and research by involving students in their research.
English professors, on the other hand, are more likely than physicists to teach about their current research in the classroom. For instance, English and other humanities faculty can bring a new emphasis to an old concept, apprenticeship. This could help them juggle the demands of classroom teaching, training research students and producing publications. Faculty who work in disciplines such as English, where researchers typically work alone, could explore interpretations of texts or cultural analysis with their student apprentices, thereby training them to conduct research while simultaneously making progress on their own research. Faculty in the hard sciences should be encouraged to invigorate their classroom presentation of elementary principles from their own current research.