Dr. Reg Williams, Mae Edna Doyle Teacher of the Year Award Winner, Shares His Teaching Story

A great sense of humor combined with rigorous Navy training make him a compassionate, extremely capable educator.

Dr. Reg Williams lives his life such that he is never bored. He is always seeking to do more — a quality that shows itself in his ability to juggle his research, teaching, and practice. It is this desire to always be doing and learning new things that has made Dr. Williams such a strong teacher, earning him this year’s Mae Edna Doyle Teacher of the Year Award from the School of Nursing.

“I get a lot of fun out of a variety of activities. I’ve never been one to sit around and twiddle my thumbs,” Dr. Williams said.

Dr. Williams got his undergraduate education at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. After serving on active duty in the Navy, he continued his education at the University of Washington in Seattle, obtaining a Masters in Nursing and a PhD. He maintained his affiliation in the Navy Reserves and retired as a Captain. He has previously been recognized for his teaching abilities with the Excellence in Education Award from Sigma Theta Tau’s Rho Chapter.

Dr. Williams’ career as an educator began in the United States Navy during the Vietnam era, wherein he trained corpsmen in nursing techniques and skills. Many of these corpsmen were then deployed to Vietnam.

“I started finding that as I did that training, I was getting a reward teaching corpsmen,” Dr. Williams said. “It was most rewarding.”

And it was also making a visible difference. Dr. Williams described how, in cases of cardiac arrest, there was a problem of panic and overcrowding among the corpsmen and physicians. So he held some practice sessions with “Resusci-Annies” — life-sized dolls designed for the rehearsal of medical scenarios — to train the men to handle these cardiac arrests more effectively.

“We went through this little scenario, but then we would sit there and talk about it. ‘Here’s what you did, but here’s what you didn’t do or could do different,’ ” Dr. Williams described. “One day I come onto the intensive care unit after a couple days off, and the corpsmen come running up to me and saying, ‘Mr. Williams, you won’t believe what happened! … Well, we had a cardiac arrest yesterday, and we knew what we were doing and the physicians didn’t and we took command and we booted people out!’ And I said, ‘Well, did the patient survive?’ ‘Yes!’”

Not only did Dr. Williams render these men capable in the face of a cardiac arrest, but he gave them sureness in themselves that let them take charge.

And to this day, that is what Dr. Williams continues to instill in his students.

He describes his principle goal in the classroom as “trying to build competence and confidence.” By setting the bar high for his students, he says, he not only helps them achieve a level of competency necessary to succeed, but also gives them a sense of accomplishment for having achieved something genuinely challenging.

The breadth of Dr. Williams’s years in the Navy has also made him an invaluable asset to his students.

“You go through every possible area of nursing,” he said of his experience in the military. “The only thing I didn’t do on active duty was deliver babies. That’s it.”

“There’s not an area of nursing I can’t relate to,” he added.

Relating to his students is a vital focus of Dr. Williams. Not only does he put to use his wide range of skills, but he also makes a point of being accessible and understanding students’ stress. He emphasized the importance of follow through, and always being there to hear student questions, never shying away from the deep responsibility that is teaching.

And his ability to relate to the stress of students stems directly back to his dissertation work, in which he examined the stresses of undergraduate nursing students.

“They would get so stressed out that you’d have to almost peel them off the wall,” Dr. Williams described. So while he sets the bar high, he also makes sure that he does not put a truly excessive strain on his students. And this allows the students to reach that bar: “I expect a very decent product out of students’ work. And … whenever I set that bar, they all come to it, so I never regret setting that bar high.”

To help students reach that bar, Dr. Williams has implemented recent technologies in his lessons; developing new methods for helping students grow and absorb the material. Video and online elements have both greatly helped students in his classes.

When he first came to University of Michigan Dr. Williams used video to allow students to literally see how they were doing in a teaching course, and evaluate themselves in addition to his own comments and the comments of their peers.

“I would have them do what’s called a Five-Minute Teach,” Dr. Williams said. “So the student does a teach in front of the class and we videotape it, … then we play it back and critique what they did in terms of teaching: what went well in the teach, and what didn’t go well. It was extraordinarily powerful in terms of helping students learn how to be an effective teacher. … A number of the graduate students went on to teaching positions.”

For online learning tools, Dr. Williams has created programs to help students grasp particularly tough subjects — notably, statistics, which has always presented an obstacle for many students.

“What I’ve always done throughout my years of teaching is look at, ‘What is it that I’m finding I’m having to explain over and over, again and again?,’” he said. “And when that happens, I start thinking about what I can use in technology that can help.” As an example, he developed a computer-aided instruction program on side effects of antipsychotic medications that replaced his having to demonstrate the typical side effects in classes.

Dr. Williams emphasized that in these online learning programs, the key is to give students freedom to use it how they want to. Many programs with similar aims, he explained, force users to proceed through them in a specific way, and don’t allow users to leave and come back. By presenting his students with a program that both teaches effectively and also gives students a degree of freedom in its implementation, Dr. Williams provides his students with a great opportunity to succeed.

In addition to his devotion, high standards, and technological innovation, there is one more tool that renders Dr. Williams such an impressive professor: his sense of humor. While he takes his work very seriously, his ability to not take himself so seriously is refreshing. He credits his Italian and English family with forcing him into having this sense of humor, through their teasing and fun-loving natures.

“You learned to not take life too seriously,” he said. “You learned to just say ‘I can laugh at myself.’ ”

Dr. Williams recounted how, at most family gatherings, there would always be one pivotal moment which transformed the event from a peaceful get-together into a chaotic food fight, with aunts and uncles pouring water on each other and everything. The closeness and joviality of his family allowed Dr. Williams to become the lovable, amusing yet ultimately rigorous professor he is today.

He also credits his family, especially his Italian grandmother, with instilling in him a sense of true compassion. Despite the fact that his grandmother passed when he was very young, Dr. Williams vividly remembers her as being the most affectionate and warm human being. Today, these qualities live on through him.

Throughout his life — from growing up surrounded by his warm, fun-loving family, to serving in the military and being trained in every field of nursing there is, to training corpsmen and Navy nurses, to graduate school, and finally to the front of the classroom teaching the next generation of nurses — Dr. Williams has dedicated himself to excellence, and succeeded. And all in the pursuit of never being bored.