Michael Kibbe - From Research to Teaching: A Guide to Beginning Your Classroom Career

S ome years back I was in the Navy. We completed a lot of training, learning how to escape a flooding ship, how to put out a fire, and even how to get out of a crashed and sinking helicopter that flipped upside down in fifty feet of water. In the helo, we learned how to use all of the onboard gear, from radio headsets to the five-point safety harness. I could even kick out a window safely if the whole thing went down.

One summer I found myself in a training routine shimmying down a large rope under a helicopter while it hovered over the ocean. I was onboard with about a half dozen young Marines. But as I watched this unfold expertly, it dawned on me. Did anybody ask these guys if they could swim? It was all well and good to pass sea survival courses on sea dye, rafts, and smoke flares, but what if the water itself absolutely panicked you?

There are things they dont teach you in your advanced trainingand they may be the most essential to your success (or survival).

Mike Kibbe knows this. His first outstanding book, From Topic to Thesis: A Guide to Theological Research (2016) helped countless students figure out how to develop a targeted research project and bring it to completion. The rules there were basic, but few explain them to us, and it is left to a coach like Kibbe to make them obvious. His efforts, however, had a wide value as well. For each of us the question is the same: How do you do effective research and survive without getting stalled by panic?

The book is light, fun, and deeply serious. Mike drew from his own successful experiences, and he shared them generously with us so that others could learn from his own wins and losses. The insights gained there could not only help with any research but could serve a lifetime of scholarship.

In the present work, Mike has done it again. He is now a young professor with enough years under his belt that he knows what it means to have three preps in a semester. He knows the pitfalls of too much preparation and not enough. He knows something about faculty life and faculty despair. And he has weathered these many storms successfully. Mikes simple outline tells you all you need to know before you step into your first class at a college, university, or seminary. First, what do teachers do? What is required as we (a) prepare for class, (b) teach a class, and (c) reflect on the experience afterwards? Here is an avalanche of wisdom that is written in a fun, provocative, challenging way that will guide you through the forest and out the other side. Dont be deceived by his writing style: Mike is writing as if he were with you at Starbucks and telling you secrets. These are the sorts of secrets youd find yourself writing down. On almost every page youll say, Ah! Thats me! because his truths are that universal.

The second half of his treatment is about flourishing. It isnt about how to survive under a helicopter over the Atlantic. It is about swimming smoothly to the raft. About knowing what your community can and cannot do for you. What tools will help you succeed. And what the overall aims of our professional endeavors are. It is fine that we become expert teachers in a classroom. But the reality is we are team members in a faculty. Our mission is less about a well-done semester; it is about the mission of the school we serve and knowing our role, potential, liabilities, and possibilities.

Each of us who serve as deans want more than teachers who can teach well. We want to see our faculty flourish, find joy, feel supported, and advance the larger mission. We are not a group of work for hire adjuncts; we are men and women rowing the same boat in the same direction. Mike here explains what it means to do well on that boat, what we can expect, and what we need to do to supplement our lives so that this boat is not our only reality.

This is a great book that should be in the hands of every new faculty member. Even experienced faculty will benefit. It will teach you not simply to figure out your helo headset but teach you to swim and swim like a pro.

T his book truly began when, during my freshman year of college, my father urged me to take education courses. I ignored him, of course, but fifteen years later I finally enrolled in a philosophy of education course with Dr. Mark Jonas at Wheaton College. I was a visiting assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton that year, my first as a full-time teacher, and I will forever look back at that year as the most formative experience of my professional life. Dr. Jonas (education) and Dr. Gary Burge (New Testament), to whom this book is dedicated, deserve first mention. But it took a village to raise this child, and I would remiss if I did not name at least a few other members of that village: Jeff Bingham (biblical and theological studies), Jill Baumgartner (humanities and theology), Gene Green and Amy Peeler and Lynn Cohick (New Testament), Andy Abernethy (Old Testament), Paul Egeland (education), and Dan Treier (theology). I am indebted to all these and others from the faculty of Wheaton College who mentored me that year, and I can only hope that a little bit of their pedagogical wisdom and Christian virtue has rubbed off on me so that I might go and do likewise.

Being a publisher, I imagine, is a bit like being a student and a mentornot only are you on the receiving end of the initial pedagogical act but you are also committed to strengthening and refining and nurturing and honing the project into something suitable for subsequent performance. Thanks are therefore due to Anna Gissing and the editorial staff of IVP Academic for their work to bring this book to completion.