The "eat your own dogfood" school of research instruction

Professors research and they instruct, and they are evaluated on both. But the evidence for evaluating research is different than the evidence for evaluating teaching.

• The evidence of research (a peer-reviewed publication of some sort) is concrete, authoritative (in the humanities, sole authorship is the norm), modular (one publication is understood to be distinct from another), and peer-evaluated by other researchers. 
• The evidence of teaching (some student evaluations of some kind) is immaterial, dialogical (insofar as the students also participate), interstitial (teaching activities overlap from one activity to another), and evaluated by students in the aggregate.

I believe that the evidence of research enables professors to have clearer and better-defined goals for research than teaching. This is why I believe that professors understand teaching as a rival to research.

Ideally, research can strengthen teaching, and teaching can strengthen research. In my experience, some professors approach teaching as a byproduct of expert research. That is, a professor develops expertise in some niche, and can thereby share this expertise with students. In the "byproduct" approach, the professor is the center of the classroom, and the students are a peripheral contingency. In other words: the research comes first, the students come last.

Alternately, the "eat your own dogfood" approach emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between professors and students, teaching and research. The term comes from investors' jargon, but it can also apply to cases auto-critique: such as when where Apple Computers replaced their typewriters with computerized word processors.

In my case, I've got a clear opportunity to "eat my own dogfood." I'm researching a dissertation; I teach research & composition. I think the things  I do and the things I teach are relatively analogous, and I think my students and I can learn from the same things. For example, whenever I run into a research or composition problem in my own dissertation, I write worksheets. These worksheets are typically:

• generalized from my immediate problem to the standard methods of humanities research
• informed by research published in College English, Pedagogy, etc.
• consistent with Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum practices (available through blogs, instructional sites, etc.)
• coherent with past classes, lessons, and worksheets

 Now I find that there are three big advantages to writing these worksheets that allow me to revise my earlier description of teaching output.

1. Old:  The output of teaching is immaterial.
   New: My worksheets provide me with a template for solutions in present and future composition & research problems.
2. Old: The output of teaching is dialogical
   New:My worksheets are open to collaboration with students. That is, unlike the "byproduct" approach, my students don't simply internalize the procedures that I've laid out for them. Rather, I can use my students as peer evaluators for my own principles of research and composition.
3. Old: The output of teaching is interstitial
   New: My worksheets emphasize meta-reflection, which is one of the eight habits of mind endorsed by the CPWA framework for success in postsecondary writing