Best teachers

What Makes a Good Teacher?

You may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as your favorite teacher — the key is to try

By Rob Jenkins

Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle

 

 

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a column on "The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers," and named "personality" as one of those qualities. While recognizing that everyone is different, and that personality isn’t necessarily something we can control, I was attempting to identify key characteristics that most of my best teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, had in common.

When I say "best teachers," I’m not just talking about the ones I liked best. I mean the teachers who had the greatest influence on me — the ones whose names I still remember to this day, even though in some cases it’s been more than 40 years since I sat in their classrooms. They are people I’ve tried to emulate in my own teaching.

What made them good teachers? I can’t offer any empirical answers to that question, but I do know that personality was a key factor in all of them. Perhaps we can measure effectiveness in the classroom, to some extent, but how do we really determine quality? It seems to me that we’ve been trying for years, through various evaluation metrics, without a whole lot of success. I’ve known some bad teachers who were able to manipulate the metrics, and some good ones whose excellence wasn’t immediately apparent on paper.

 

We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise.

 

In any case, the following observations are based entirely on my own experiences as a student, professor, and former midlevel administrator who has seen many good teachers (and a few bad ones) practice their craft. My hope is that, even if this list is somewhat subjective — not to mention incomplete — it won’t seem entirely unfamiliar. 

 
They are good-natured. The best teachers tend to be approachable, as opposed to sour and forbidding. Grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic curmudgeons can sometimes make effective teachers, too, if for no other reason than that they prepare us for grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic bosses. I had some grouchy teachers myself, especially in graduate school, and learning to cope with them was a valuable experience I would not wish to deny anyone. But most of my very best teachers were pretty easy to get along with — as long as I paid attention in class and did my work.

They are professional without being aloof. Most academics tend to keep students at arm’s length — the obvious message being, "I’m your teacher, not your friend." Clearly, professionalism requires a certain amount of boundary-setting, which can be difficult, especially when dealing with older students, where the age gap is often not all that wide and, under different circumstances, they might actually be your friends. My best teachers always seemed to effortlessly walk that very fine line between being an authority figure and being someone I felt I could talk to. I didn’t even understand what they were doing — or how difficult it was — until I had to do it myself years later.

They have a good sense of humor. They may or may not be ready for the Improv, but they don’t take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. Few things are more off-putting than faculty members who think they’re much smarter than anyone else in the room (or any room) — unless it’s those who think their subject is the most important of all and expect students to feel the same way, other classes be damned. My best teachers not only understood that their course was just one of several we were taking, but also had a great, self-deprecating wit, often making jokes at their own expense and even sometimes making light of their subject. Funny how an ounce of humor can sometimes help students grasp the material better than a pound of gravitas. 

 
They seem to enjoy what they do. Some faculty members don’t really like students. They are the academics who constantly whine about their workload and complain about how rude or unprepared their students are. I’ve often wondered: Why are such people even in this profession? What did they expect? The teachers I remember as the very best were those who clearly loved teaching and got a kick out of associating with students every day. After all, no one wants to feel like a nuisance, which is exactly how some teachers make their students feel.

They are demanding without being unkind. Some academics take great pride in being disliked, wearing their unpopularity like a badge of honor. They naturally assume it’s because they’re so "tough" and "rigorous," reasoning that lazy students dislike rigor and transfer their dislike to the people who demand it. In my experience, however, most students want to be challenged; they don’t mind if a lot is expected of them. They just don’t want their professors to be jerks or insufferable know-it-alls. My best teachers were demanding without being mean-spirited.

They seem comfortable in their own skin. Perhaps one reason students tend to like these faculty is that they like themselves, without being in love with the sound of their own voices. This is related to not taking themselves too seriously, but it goes beyond that. The root cause of bad teaching is a fundamental lack of self-confidence, leading teachers to overcompensate by being unreasonably demanding, aloof, or condescending to students. Paradoxically, professors who appear arrogant and narcissistic are often trying to cover up what they perceive as profound deficiencies in their own personalities and abilities. The best teachers are confident without being arrogant, authoritative without being condescending.

They are tremendously creative. They are always willing to entertain new ideas or try new things — sometimes even on the fly. "Innovation" is a buzzword nowadays, but the term seems applied almost exclusively to the use of technology. My best teachers, though, were truly innovative, coming up with creative ways — sometimes on the spur of the moment — to help us understand, internalize, and remember what they were trying to teach. What made those teachers innovative was not tools or technology but their minds.

They make teaching look easy. We all know it isn’t. Ultimately, great teachers are like great athletes, dancers, or musicians. We may know, cognitively, that what they do isn’t easy, but they seem to do it so effortlessly that we’re lulled into thinking it’s no big deal — until we try it ourselves. Then we learn quickly just how difficult it is to play a sport or an instrument — or teach — at a very high level. I didn’t fully appreciate that until I became a teacher myself and discovered how easy it is to fall short in the classroom.

Most of these things I’ve mentioned here are personality facets. We can’t control whether or not we have them or to what degree. No doubt, there is some truth to the idea that certain people are just born teachers because they happen to be blessed with these traits in abundance.

At the same time, even if we are not "born teachers," we can work to develop the qualities of those teachers in ourselves. We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, by acknowledging that we don’t possess them to the degree we would like, and by committing ourselves to working on those areas, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise. It’s the journey of self-improvement that makes the difference.

* Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University and author of Building a Career in America’s Community Colleges. He writes monthly for our community-college column and blogs for Vitae. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his employer. You can follow Rob on Twitter @HigherEdSpeak.

Hard to teach

The Hardest Students to Teach

Maryellen Weimer, PhD

The Student Who’s Cruising – The one who is just going through the motions, doing coursework with the least amount of effort. Often these students are polite, sometimes even apologetic, but they’re fundamentally uninterested in learning what’s being taught in the course, and one strongly suspects they’re not interested in any of their courses. Can personal attention make a difference? Can showing you care inspire even a modicum of motivation? What about choice? “Is there a way you could do this assignment that would make it more interesting?” What about challenge? “Study hard for one exam—put your brain to the test so you know what it can accomplish.” What about confrontation, constructively framed, but still in the student’s face? “Why isn’t coursework part of your agenda in college?”

Some students are more challenging to teach than others. They require pedagogical skills of a different and higher order. Sometimes it’s easier to sigh and just turn away. And that’s legitimate in the sense that students (indeed, people of all sorts) have to figure things out for themselves. But many of us were such “works in progress” when we were in college, and a teacher (or several of them) ended up being instrumental in moving us in more productive directions. It’s for that reason I’d like us to consider some of these challenging students, each one a unique individual, but many displaying the same counterproductive attitudes and actions. Descriptions of these students come much more easily than solutions to what’s holding them back. Said more directly, my goal here is to start this conversation and ask for your wisdom, insights, and experiences with students who are tough to teach.

The Entitled Student – The one with the consumer orientation to education. The credential is all this student wants—that ticket to the good job, that’s what matters. Courses outside the major or program are a waste of time and should be treated as such. These students shop for the “easy” courses, and if the prof doesn’t deliver what’s needed, course evaluations are used to get even. What about a focus on the skills needed in every profession—listening, teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving—that can be in learned in any college course?  What does paying for college entitle students to? Anything beyond the opportunity to learn?

The Student Who Can’t Do It – The one who can’t write, can’t do math, can’t sing, just doesn’t have the ability and believes that without the “gift” there’s not much point in trying. These are students with detailed stories of defeat, a litany of experiences all adding to the “can’t do it” conclusion. Does providing these students with a different narrative work? Does having a teacher who believes in you can make a difference? Can assignments be designed so that students discover what they can do? Will demonstrations of progress help convince them?

The Student Who Cheats – Lots of students cheat, so even if you aren’t sure about the actions of any given student, you can be sure there are those in your course who do. They feel grade pressure and the need to please parents. They justify their actions with the “everybody does it” argument. They don’t think cheating hurts them, particularly if they’ve decided the course content is irrelevant. But cheating stunts the growth of personal integrity, and it’s that conversation we should be having with students.

The Student Who Only Cares About the Grade – These are the students you can get to do anything for a point or two. They frequently struggle to separate themselves from how they scored on a test, so any grade implicates their worth as a human being. And they happily accept a good grade whether or not there’s any learning associated with it. Could we be talking more about learning and less about grades? Are there ways to show that learning matters more than grades?

Two points in summary: Maybe the best we can offer these challenging students is our vision of their potential, unclouded by their behaviors. And we may never know that we made a difference. Writer T. C. Boyle had three college teachers who were instrumental in his discovery that he could write. Of one of them, he observes, “He saw something in me—in my writing and my intelligence—and he tried to promote and encourage it.” Boyle says of this teacher who became his mentor, “I hurt him. I didn’t attend classes. I hung with the losers.” But that teacher’s vision caused Boyle to move in a new direction. He started to read books.

What students do you find difficult to teach, and how can we better reach them?

Plagiarism

Three Keys to Stopping Plagiarism

By: Dennis Pierce

Although there are software-based services that can help instructors check the originality of student writing and discourage students from deliberately copying the work of others, many instances of plagiarism stem not from a willful disregard of the rules but from simple ignorance of them.

Elizabeth Kleinfeld, an English instructor and director of the writing center at Metropolitan State University of Denver, has studied plagiarism and students’ use of sources for the last seven years, mostly among students in first-year writing courses. She has found that many students don’t understand the differences between paraphrasing, summarizing, and plagiarism.

In an interview, Kleinfeld revealed three key lessons from her research that can help instructors curb student plagiarism.

1. Students need explicit instruction in the proper use of sources.

Plagiarism detection services can be useful tools for enforcing academic integrity. But students also must be taught how to use sources properly, just as they would learn any other aspect of writing, Kleinfeld said.

“Telling students ‘don’t plagiarize’ is not a teaching strategy. It is a warning,” she said. “To my mind, it’s like saying to students, ‘I’ll fail you if you don’t give a thesis statement,’ and then not giving any instruction on that.”

Kleinfeld recommends that faculty have conversations with their students about how to use sources correctly. Show them examples of summarizing, paraphrasing, and directly quoting a source. Talk about when it might make sense for students to use each of these techniques in their writing: How does each affect the reader? How does it frame the way the source is being used?

2. When discussing the sourcing of material, explain that context matters.

Making the issue more confusing for students is that the rules regarding proper citation depend on the context in which the writing occurs.

“We don’t talk to students enough about how much context matters. Students might do something that is considered plagiarism in an academic paper, but it wouldn’t be considered plagiarism in another composing situation,” Kleinfeld explained. “And we expect students to understand the nuances of these different composing situations naturally, without giving them explicit instruction.”

For instance, using boilerplate copy without attribution is a commonly accepted practice in many instances—and this happens frequently in the syllabi that instructors hand out to students at the beginning of a course.

“When students see that, and they’re told not to plagiarize, they might not consciously recognize there’s a contradiction there,” Kleinfeld said. “But on some level, they might realize there is some ambiguity in the rules regarding academic integrity—and that seeps into their writing.”

3. Make the connection between students’ use of sources and their credibility.

When discussing the issue of academic integrity with students, it’s important to explain how their use of sources reflects on their ethos, or the sense of credibility and authority they project as writers, Kleinfeld noted.

“Students are really interested in the why,” she explained. “If you just tell them, ‘Don’t plagiarize,’ that’s not very helpful. But if you tell them why using sources a certain way is a strong way or a weak way, and then connect it to how they come across to their reader, I think that’s much more compelling to them than just saying: “Don’t plagiarize because it’s wrong.’”

Geração Y

Desafio e oportunidade no ensino da geração Y 

Kodi E. Kojima

 

 

Andragogy vs. Pedagogy

 Selected Moments of the 20th Century

A work in progress edited by Daniel Schugurensky Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counselling Psychology, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT)

 Malcolm Knowles publishes The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy vs. Pedagogy

Although the term andragogy has been in use since 1833, it was Malcolm S. Knowles, who in his 1970 book, The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy vs. Pedagogy, first popularized the term in North America and organized the concepts into a comprehensive theory. Knowles devised a set of four assumptions that differentiated adults from children as learners. Knowles' four assumptions necessitated an entirely new approach to teaching adults and were hailed as groundbreaking in the field of adult education at the time. The four assumptions are self-concept, experience, readiness to learn and orientation to learning (Knowles, 1970, p.39). This essay will examine how different or new Knowles' theory of andragogy was compared to the progressive education theorists such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori and Alexander Neill. The progressive education theorists were influential in the early part of the twentieth century, long before Knowles, but their ideas centered on children rather than adults. Comparing and contrasting Knowles' four main andragogical assumptions with the ideas of Dewey, Montessori and Neill reveals the extent to which andragogy contributed new approaches to the field of adult education. An in-depth comparison of Knowles' andragogy with the progressive education theorists also reveals the extent to which Knowles' theory is specific to adults. In the end, Knowles' ideas did not offer anything new to the field of adult education nor did they contribute useful information as to how adults learn differently than children. Knowles is often closely associated with andragogy, but in fact, it originated much earlier. Alexander Kapp, a German grammar school teacher, first introduced the term andragogy in Germany in 1833, but it referred broadly to adults as learners rather than to any specific style of learning (Draper, 1998). Pedagogy was the common term used for teaching at the time. Pedagogy means "the science or art of teaching" and a direct translation of the term from the Greek root of "peda" means a "boy" or "child"(Selman et. al, 1998, p.19). Andragogy, as a term, was developed in reaction to pedagogy in order to move away from its close association with children. Andragogy means "the science or art of teaching adults" because the Greek root of "andra" means adults (p.19). Knowles, however, was the first to develop the ideas of andragogy into a detailed strategy for teaching adults and to popularize the term in North America (Draper, 1998). Knowles felt that pedagogy was "based on a now obsolete premise - that is, the idea that the purpose of education is to transmit culture" (Draper, 1998, p.14).

Knowles believed that an andragogical approach to teaching adults was vitally important in order to take the adult's learning needs into account and to "teach adults how to learn" (Knowles, 1970, p.39). The transmissional modes of pedagogy were not considered as sufficient in enabling adults to deal with the rapid change going on in our society. The result of the "timespan of major cultural change" changing more than once in one's lifetime called for a new and more successful approach to adult learning (p.39). Knowles' felt this development necessitated a new approach to learning based on a more accurate set of assumptions of adults as learners. The four assumptions Knowles uses to distinguish adults from children as learners produced a split between andragogy and pedagogy. The self-concept principle reflects the self-directing character of the adult learner rather than dependent nature of the child. The principle of experience simply acknowledges the need to draw on the adult's rich source of experience. In contrast, the pedagogical framework perceives the child as not possessing sufficient life experience to effectively incorporate into the learning environment. Readiness to learn indicates that adults differ from children in their developmental stage and as a result have special learning needs. The assumption implies that adult learning needs tend to focus more towards their social roles. On the other hand, pedagogy claims that the learning needs of children are geared towards physiological and mental development stages. Orientation to learning assumes that adults put more value on being able to practically apply their learning while pedagogy suggests that children naturally focus on postponing immediate application for future needs. These four sets of assumptions establish significant guidelines for creating adult learning environments (Knowles, 1970, p.39). The concept that learning can be made more effective by taking advantage of the innate ability of learners to be self-directed did not originate from Knowles' theory of andragogy in 1970. Montessori, Dewey and Neill had all proclaimed the advantages of recognizing the self-directing capacity of learners and focused their attention on children as learners. Their arguments seriously undermine one of the key assumptions of andragogy; the assumption that adults are more self-directed than are children. Montessori felt that learners were predominantly self-motivated and that they generally learned by themselves (Montessori, 1955). She also acknowledged that the teacher only played a small part in the learner's overall environment (Montessori, 1955). Dewey felt it was important that the educator did not impose a direction on the student, but acted as more of a guide and an assistant (Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 1902). Montessori argued that, because of old prejudices, adults fail to recognize the self-directing capacity of children (Montessori, 1955). The oppressive and controlling habits of traditional education prevent adults from observing the child as an individual. Neill also believed strongly in the self-directing capacity of the child. In his experimental Summerhill School in the 1920s, Neill went so far as allowing children to choose whether to attend school (Neill, 1962). Therefore, the progressive education theorists believed that both children and adults are innately self-directing, but that it is our societal prejudices that prevent us from tapping into the self-directing nature of the child. The perception that an adult's experience should be made a central part of the learning process did not derive from Knowles. The progressive education theorists were far ahead of Knowles in developing thoughts on recognizing the learner's experience. Their work also supports the claim that the child's experience is equal to that of an adult's. John Dewey, in particular, was of the opinion that for learning to be effective it needs to be based on the learner's experience (Dewey, 1902). Dewey maintained that learning is merely symbolic if there is no relation to learning and a person's experience. Dewey criticized the tendency of "old education" to ignore the child's experience and to compare the child as immature in comparison to the adult (Dewey, 1902, p.12). Montessori's opinions support Dewey. Montessori argued that "we form a barrier not paying attention to the inner power of the child or what they can teach us" (Montessori, 1955, p.47). A comparison of Knowles' third assumption with the ideas of the progressive education theorists makes it clear that Knowles did not come up with anything original. The progressive education theorists do not specifically focus on the concept of readiness to learn in the same manner as Knowles, but an overview of their writings reveals the similarity of their thoughts on the subject. In Neill's Summerhill School, for instance, some classes were organized according to age, but others according to interests (Neill, 1962). It is logical to agree with Knowles that adults differ from children in their developmental stage, but this does not necessarily entail that adults require a different approach to teaching. The concept that learners learn best when they are able to apply learning did not begin with Knowles. Montessori and Dewey advocated the need for practical application of learning long before Knowles and again focused their thoughts on children as learners. Dewey felt that "the divorce between learning and its use is the most serious defect of our existing education. Without the consciousness of application, learning has no motive to the child." (Dewey, 1966a, p.73) Naturally, the same principles can be extended to all learners regardless of age. Neill also claimed that education should involve real doing (Neill, 1962). Dewey strongly believed that the educational system needed to better represent life. He also criticized the preoccupation with subject centered learning in "old education". He felt that the constant state of change in our society rendered much of subject centered learning obsolete (Dewey, 1966b). Curiously, his ideas of preparing people to deal more effectively with a continuously changing world is similar to Knowles' theory of "helping people to grow in their ability to learn" (Knowles, 1970, p. 34). Dewey thought that the prevalent thinking that adults are more suited to practical application than children reflects the beliefs of the "old education" system more than the actual needs of the learners. According to Dewey the child learner would be perfectly content to apply their learning to specific problems (Dewey, 1966b). We can easily conclude that age is no longer an adequate means of distinguishing andragogical from pedagogical assumptions. Many theorists, including Knowles in his later writings, argue that new definitions are needed to erase some of the confusion in the debate. The most common opinion, now held by Knowles among others, is to portray andragogy as self-directed learning and pedagogy as teacher directed learning (Rachal, 1983). This new and more accurate distinction brings us right back to the progressive education theorists. It was the progressive education theorists who first came up with the idea of distinguishing between progressive education and traditional education. In summary, their idea of progressive education represented self-directed learning and traditional education represented teacher-directed learning. We cannot ignore the impact of Knowles' theory on the field of education, but we can benefit from ignoring the confusion it created and focus on the ideas put forth by the progressive education theorists. UNESCO echoes a similar sentiment and now discourages use of the term andragogy (Draper, 1998). Comparing Knowles' andragogy with the ideas of the progressive education theorists also makes it clear that the main assumptions of andragogy are not specific to adults and that andragogy as a theory explaining adult learning did not contribute anything new to the field of adult education. 

Sources:

Dewey John. (1902). The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, John. (1966a). "The Dewey School." Dewey's Educational Writings. Ed. by F.W. Garforth. London: Heinemann.

Dewey, John. (1966b). "My Pedagogic Creed". Dewey's Educational Writings. Ed. by F.W. Garforth. London: Heinemann.

Draper, James. (1998). "The Metamorphoses of Andragogy". Canadian Journal of Studies in Adult Education. Vol. 12 (1), May.

Knowles, Malcolm S. (1980) The Modern Practice of Adult Education. Revised and Updated. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Regents.

Knowles, Malcolm S. (1970). The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy. New York: Association Press.

Montessori, Maria. (1955). Childhood Education. Translated by Joosten A.M., Chicago: Henry Regnery Co.

Neill, Alexander. (1962). Summerhill. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Rachal, John. (1983). "The Andragogy - Pedagogy Debate: Another Voice in the Fray". Lifelong Learning: The Adult Years. Vol.6 (9), May.

Prepared by Jay Friedman (OISE/UT)

Reflective practice

Webinar: Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice

Join Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral, authors of Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice: Capacity-Building for Schoolwide Success, as they draw on lessons learned from educators around the United States and present a definitive guide to developing a schoolwide culture that both values reflection and uses it to ensure that teachers—and their students—reach their full potential.

Creating a Culture of Reflective Practice
Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 3:00 p.m. eastern time

Presented by Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral

Register Now

Learning to teach

How to Make our Conversations about Teaching More Productive

Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Where do your new ideas about teaching and learning come from? Perhaps some come from Faculty Focus and this blog? We certainly hope so! But most college teachers don’t get instructional ideas from the literature. They get them from other teachers, usually in face-to-face or electronic exchanges. Interesting, isn’t it, how much pedagogical information is passed on and around in these very informal ways.

If we’re learning to teach and growing instructionally through conversations with each other, that makes it appropriate to ask: What are we learning from each other? Techniques? Good strategies? Solutions to problems? Shortcuts and quick fixes? Is that all we could be learning from these conversations? Asked a different way, what would make these conversations better? What could help them promote, motivate, and sustain our growth as teachers?

Over the years, I’ve tended to be pretty critical of how we talk about teaching. Here’s a quick rundown of what I think compromises the quality of those conversations:

• They’re often too ad hoc. They occur without planning. Two faculty members meet at the departmental coffee pot and start talking about excused and unexcused absences. They haven’t prepared for the conversation. They share what they think and advocate for the way they handle the issue.
• The talk focuses on anecdotes and experiences. Like students who come to class not having done the reading, conversations about teaching are about what’s going on in our individual teaching worlds: “Guess what happened in my classroom and here’s what I did about it.” Granted, there’s wisdom that derives from practice and others can learn from it, but that’s not an automatic outcome and it shouldn’t be what we usually talk about.
• The quality of pedagogical opinions is uneven. All teachers have opinions and all opinions merit a respectful listen, but not all opinions are good, correct, appropriate, or universally applicable. Moreover, many pedagogical opinions are presented with more conviction than evidence.

Here are some changes that I believe would make our teaching conversations better and more productive: 

• Questions should play a central role in our conversations about teaching. We should bring more questions than answers to the conversations. They may be the questions we are asking ourselves, the ones we can’t answer, or the questions for which we’d love to have a collection of potential answers. Questions drive learning! They make us look at what we know and uncover what we don’t know. They cause us to seek out what others know and lead us to the next (and often) better questions. Our conversations would improve if we asked more and answered less.
• Our conversations need to move beyond techniques. In the beginning, the what-to-do and how-to-do-it focus is essential, and teachers should always be on the lookout for good techniques. But by mid-career, it’s time to explore why—why are we using that policy, why does that activity work in some courses but not others, why won’t students accept the responsibility for learning, why doesn’t our feedback make the next paper better. Our conversations need substance—stuff we can think about, chew on, view from multiple perspectives, and then dig a bit deeper.
• Good talk about teaching stretches out from experience to evidence. At this point, there’s not much new under the pedagogical sun. Somebody else has already thought about it and often been there gathering evidence. In the dynamic milieu of the classroom, few things are known definitively, but something is known about most things. There needs to be a commitment to find out and learn in conversations.
• Arriving at a discussion prepared improves the quality of the exchange. Ideas need to have been thought about and questions framed. A good article, read beforehand, can give the discussion both structure and content. What makes a good article for discussion? It raises more questions than it answers. It presents a position that can be seen from different perspectives. It challenges conventional thinking. It doesn’t even need to be an article–a pithy quotation can take thinking to new and different places. This blog regularly highlights articles that have made me think. In Faculty Focus Premium, we are launching a new feature where we identify a good article for discussion and provide a set of questions readers can use to launch a productive exchange with colleagues or for personal reflections. Preview Reflections on Learning: Giving Students Assignments They Hate »
• And the most fundamental tenet for good conversations about teaching: let the discourse be civil, agree to disagree, work to convince each other, debate, argue, but always grant others the freedom to decide for themselves.

Faculty inertia

 

‘Fear of Looking Stupid’

Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods.

David Matthews

An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: they are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.

For example, one of the university’s online courses in statistics, which has been shown to be “incredibly effective at teaching students in half the time,” was not adapted by the statistics department for use on campus, said Richard Scheines, dean of the department of humanities and social sciences. “This is a source of real frustration,” he told the Global Learning Council Summit 2017 in Berlin last month.

Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews.

She followed the progress of four projects to improve teaching -- such as the introduction of a test to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses before starting their courses -- two of which failed.

One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that ”a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.”

But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their “personal identity affirmation” -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ “No. 1 challenge” was to make sure that they were “not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.”

Herckis also found that many academics clung to a “very strong” idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975.

“When our gut tells us to do one thing and an article tells us another,” Herckis told delegates, it is very difficult to change behavior. Another issue was that faculty were much more likely to be more enthusiastic about making a change that they had come up with by themselves, rather than adopting something tried and tested by others.

With universities in many countries under pressure to improve their teaching quality, the project could be of interest to other institutions seeking to overturn ineffective teaching methods. Scheines argued that higher education needs to invest far more in similar anthropological projects to work out how change actually happens. “We need ears and eyes telling us what’s happening on the adoption,” he said.

About 20 years ago, clinical medicine created an entire field of “implementation science” to check whether doctors were adopting best practices, and higher education now needs to do the same, he argued.

In line with the project results, Carnegie Mellon lecturers would be showered with “love” and told not to “worry if students hate you for a semester” if they experimented with new ways of teaching, he said.