Promoting successful student learners requires faculty members to reflect on their own roles as teachers. But while tenured and tenure-track professors routinely share their research interests with one another, frank discussions about teaching remain rare.
Relevant and vibrant pedagogical discussions are well established in some fields, such as digital pedagogy and rhetoric and composition, since both are significantly engaged in undergraduate teaching. And because their assessment is heavily dependent on classroom success, adjunct instructors have a material interest in the quality of their teaching. While many colleagues do pay more attention to teaching today than in past decades, faculty-reward structures still frequently rank research over teaching. If we want to help more students succeed academically, colleges need to adopt more student-centered instructional practices, requiring a significant shift in academic culture.
Some of these shifts have played out in the transformation of the general-education program at Stanford University, where I am a faculty member. In the past, required freshman courses transmitted specific, traditionally canonic material. Today there is a much clearer recognition that first-year students require particular pedagogies to ease their transition into college. Instead of designing courses in terms of field coverage, faculty members are asked to develop lectures specifically for the learning needs of new students and provide scaffolding that enables growth in fundamental academic skills. Meanwhile, term lecturers who lead discussion sections in these courses are available to offer students individualized attention.
The lecture sessions are relatively small, with as few as 40 and no more than 120 students, and discussion sections are capped at 15. The courses address fundamental questions or major problems and are drawn from across the whole university: “Rules of War,” “Bioethical Challenges of New Technology,” “Inventing Government, Ancient and Modern,” “What Is Love?” These diverse courses pursue common learning goals, equipping students with the ability to ask good questions, participate in discussion effectively, and reason critically.
Moving from a teaching model defined in terms of content transmission to a student-centered pedagogy represents a major challenge. It means faculty members must rethink their assumptions about teaching and place student-learning needs at the center of their efforts. In the research-university environment, small faculty gatherings held to discuss teaching and learning issues offer one effective way to help make this transition. When given the opportunity, many professors are actually eager to talk about their teaching, reflecting their genuine dedication to student success.
At stake, however, is more than the improvement of individual courses. In his presidential address to the Modern Language Association in 2008, Gerald Graff bemoaned the “courseocentric” mode of teaching in which faculty members develop their syllabi in isolation from one another: While we may know the titles of the courses our colleagues teach, we often have little idea of what really goes on in their classes, so we cannot structure our own classes in ways that would support longer-term student growth. To do so requires far more collaboration among colleagues, frank discussions, and a clear articulation of the curriculum’s goals.
One small step forward is taking place in Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, where individual units have begun to share syllabi for their required core sequences to promote student growth across a series of courses. A German major, for example, must complete three introductory courses: one on literature, the second on history and politics, and the third on philosophy. Faculty members have now begun to coordinate the learning goals so that the series better supports student development through the courses.
A greater focus on student learning has already led to significant changes in Stanford’s introductory physics courses. In light of concerns about student engagement, the department added more interactive, student-centered learning techniques to lectures, discussion sections, and labs. According to Patricia Burchat, the professor who led the effort, “Prior to our revamp of the pedagogy, there was little discussion of how to effectively facilitate learning in the large introductory courses. Now professors, support staff, and teaching assistants engage in discussions and planning on many levels—from weekly meetings within courses to across-course coordination of materials and teaching methods.” Because of such collaborations, the department has been able to respond more nimbly to the challenges of how to best serve the diverse range of student backgrounds, as a growing number of students choose technical majors that require some knowledge of physics.
Talking about teaching as a way to shine a light on student-learning issues is showing up throughout higher education in a wider range of institutions, with new strategies and more consistency. At the University of West Florida, for example, Claudia J. Stanny, director of the University Center for Teaching, Learning and Assessment and an associate professor of psychology, organizes peer mentoring. Professors conduct classroom observations and give one another feedback based on their observations. “When I pair faculty in this program, I encourage pairs from different disciplines so the focus stays on teaching and is less likely to devolve into discussions about specific content,” she says.
Two aspects of this strike me as crucial: the mere fact of getting faculty members to talk with one another about their teaching, and the abstraction involved in matching faculty members from different disciplines, which shifts attention toward teaching effectiveness and away from intradisciplinary debates.
Middlesex Community College and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have been engaging faculty members in discussions about how the curriculum should address exit-level expectations for students. With support from the Lumina Foundation and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, discipline-based groups—in contrast to the West Florida model—were convened in fields with high rates of transfer between the two institutions.
The goal was to explore how to enable students to reach learning goals defined by rubrics in quantitative literacy that were developed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Discussions were task-oriented, focusing on the effectiveness of particular assignments, while avoiding evaluative judgments on individual instructors. Those involved report that the process has built trust, fostered better collaborative relations, and resulted in a more clearly articulated curriculum.
Yet another example of greater focus on student learning: At Brandeis University, the Schusterman Center for Israeli Studies sponsors a summer institute that brings international scholars together for intensive study of the politics and culture of modern Israel. Modeled on the summer seminars offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Brandeis institute invites distinguished experts to address the seminar, but a core mission is pedagogic. Participants are asked to produce syllabi, in their areas of expertise, which they share and discuss with regard to some of the distinct challenges of teaching Israel studies: How to convey the material to students with little background? How to address students who bring strong religious convictions to class? How to cultivate critical thinking in classrooms when students show up with firm allegiances? The institute is remarkable in its combination of first-rate scholarship and in the explicit attention it pays to teaching strategies.
Student learning is also the touchstone of a new course-evaluation form that will soon be used at Stanford. While such evaluations typically measure the popularity of the instructor, the new form emphasizes the quality of learning in the course. Faculty members will enter specific learning goals for each course on the customizable evaluation form, and students will be asked how well the course helped them achieve each of the goals. Moreover, the evaluation results will be reported in ways that not only inform individual faculty members about the success of their courses but, perhaps more important, also promote discussion at the department level about the overall success of the curriculum.
All this attention to teaching does not imply an abandonment of research. However, it does require a shift in academic values toward the importance of demonstrable student learning. That can happen at research institutions only if faculty members in the tenure system—who include many of our most senior academics—become engaged in pedagogy discussions. This surely implies that teaching must be weighted more highly in the tenure process than is currently the case, and it points toward the need for greater emphasis on teacher preparation in graduate programs.
