MOOCs and beyond.
Yes, we can strengthen teaching without imposing on faculty autonomy.
Learning loss. Academic achievement gaps. A lockdown-fueled lost generation.
Currently, the most heated discussions of teaching are taking place at the K-12 level. But those in higher ed should also recognize that we, too, face our own teaching and learning crisis.
Students increasingly arrive on campus unevenly prepared, and, as a consequence of pandemic disruptions, many find it more difficult to adapt to college expectations about workload, time management and quality standards. All this places more pressure on instructors, who face challenges involving student motivation, classroom management, disabilities and learning challenges, discipline, and equity far greater than in the past.
Yet campuses have not figured out how to provide faculty with the kinds of training and support needed. The results can be seen in signs of burnout that include feelings of cynicism, inadequacy and self-doubt, decreased satisfaction, and a loss of motivation.
Even before the pandemic, there was widespread concern about whether instructors were fostering deep learning. After all, colleges did little to systematically assess what students actually learn, apart from letter grades, which have risen even as study time and reading and writing expectations fell.
What we know with some confidence is that:
Too often, we treat teaching as if this were nothing more than lecturing or discussion leading. In fact, some experts define quality teaching simply as a matter of organization and expressiveness. Others use indirect measures, such as how many students go on to take additional classes in the field and how well they perform in more advanced courses. But quality teaching also involves course design, activity planning and skills building. It entails the purposeful use of technology; valid, reliable forms of grading; and assessment and mentoring.
Effective teaching requires instructors to understand:
How, given other demands on their time, can we expect instructors to learn all this? It won’t be easy.
Teaching is at once an art, a craft and a science. The most effective instructors have a remarkable ability to improvise and extemporize, adjusting to students’ anxieties, needs and attitude. They engage in a process of continuous improvement, not only updating content but refining their instructional methods and honing their techniques and methods. They also possess an acute understanding of the psychology of learning; of learning’s social, emotional and cognitive dimensions; and of how to adapt to individual differences in interests, prior knowledge, learning style, motivation, memory, processing speed, emotional maturity and epistemological beliefs about self-efficacy.
To be sure, there are born lecturers and discussion leaders: dynamic, charismatic, witty, eloquent and captivating. Yet even the most mesmerizing instructors may fail in teaching’s No. 1 task: ensuring that students master and remember the course material and can apply it effectively in fresh contexts.
The obstacles to improving teaching quality are numerous, beginning with the belief among upward of 80 percent of instructors that their teaching is above average. Then, too, there’s the fear that professional development in pedagogy will erode the magic of teaching by coercing instructors to conform to a single model.
To this laundry list, I’d add yet another impediment: the fact that teaching is, to a great extent, discipline specific. While there are certain overarching guiding principles that define effective teaching, best practices vary starkly by field. In my own discipline, history, the kinds of approaches that work well—role playing, debates, myth busting, primary-source evaluation and what-if questions—don’t easily translate to other fields of study.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to improvement is a conception of the classroom as sacrosanct, as an essential element in professional autonomy that is protected by academic freedom. The result is that teaching exists largely within a black box, largely free from external scrutiny with the limited exception of student course evaluations. The only real impetus for improvement and innovations must therefore come from the instructors themselves.
Our current approach to enhancing teaching quality is largely voluntary, with individual faculty members free to take advantage of a teaching center or an instructional technology unit if they wish. Most don’t.
Nor does peer evaluation appear to have much impact. All too often, this is an example of the blind advising the blind, since the peer evaluators typically conduct an assessment without any prior training or a rubric with clearly defined expectations. Anyway, who wants to offend a colleague who will likely evaluate you at some point?
To make matters worse, there is little or no effort to ensure that courses within a single department are intelligently sequenced, let alone to better align complementary courses across disciplinary lines.
What, then, will it take to improve teaching quality? Here are eight suggestions.
Most of us entered the academy because we wanted to teach and believed that by teaching well we could transform student lives. Yet however fulfilling teaching might be on a personal level, many of us quickly encountered some unpleasant truths. That:
The big shift that needs to take place in pedagogy is from a teaching and teacher-centered paradigm to a learning- and learner-focused model that encourages students to take ownership over their education; engage actively in a process of inquiry, analysis, interpretation and argumentation; and apply their knowledge and skills in meaningful ways, solving problems and developing worthwhile projects.
A learning- and learner-centric approach does not preclude direct instruction, but its goal is to empower students to “solve problems, evaluate evidence, analyze arguments and generate hypotheses.”
Institutions have a variety of levers to strengthen the quality of teaching and drive the shift to an approach that emphasizes learning and outcomes. Offering smaller classes is surely one way. But even if we reduce class size, we must do something else: think of teaching less as performance and more as a design, planning, engineering and architectural challenge.
If we are to truly improve learning, overcome performance gaps and ensure that many more students master essential knowledge and skills, instructors must clarify their learning objectives, design activities to help students achieve those goals, frequently assess student progress and provide the substantive feedback needed to strengthen student performance.
Teaching, to be sure, is a performative act that benefits enormously from preparation, rehearsal and stage presence, as well energy and passion. But that’s not enough. Quality teaching requires us to “think different”: to recognize that the most effective instruction is first and foremost about learning experience design.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Resources for faculty and staff from our partners at Times Higher Education.
