Three years ago, two of America’s most influential universities made eye-popping commitments to improve teaching.
Harvard University announced that it would devote $40-million to encourage its faculty members to experiment in the service of learning. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor would run a $25-million project seeking much the same thing.
On both campuses, faculty members on and off the tenure track have submitted proposals for competitive grants of up to $50,000 to take calculated risks in their courses. They’re creating digital textbooks, organizing workshops on teaching statistics, assigning common reading in engineering, and, in all cases, studying the results.
Larger grants, up to $200,000 from Harvard and $3-million from Michigan, are intended to scale up the teaching experiments. At Michigan, that money will let 19 schools and colleges at Ann Arbor use technology to tailor advising to individual students and retool three architecture courses to bring in outside experts for intensive two- or three-day sessions.
Harvard has awarded about $2.5-million so far, and Michigan nearly $9-million. Their lofty status in private and public higher education may prompt others to try something similar, if less pricey, several observers say.
“Harvard and Michigan are opinion leaders,” says Dan Bernstein, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and a former director of its Center for Teaching Excellence. “For being smart people, we have a lot of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality.”
It’s too soon to judge the impact of the efforts on the two campuses and beyond. But it’s worth examining the underlying philosophy. Can money spark change where other attempts have failed? Will it overcome cultural and structural obstacles? And what can colleges without the same kinds of resources take away?
Here are some lessons emerging from the experiments.
Money sends a message
Dedicating a pile of money to teaching makes a powerful statement, says Catharine H. Beyer, a research scientist for the assessment of student learning at the University of Washington.
“Once you say, ‘I have $40-million, and this money is going to the improvement of teaching,’ " she says, “you’re basically making a big announcement in neon that teaching matters to this institution.”
A dash of peer pressure helps, too. The programs at both Harvard and Michigan mirror the process that professors are accustomed to in applying for research grants. “You can be rejected,” says James P. Holloway, vice provost for global and engaged education at Michigan, who is directing the effort there. “The fact that it’s competitive has an impact.”
If such projects spread to other campuses, they could counterbalance similarly aimed policies in many states. In recent years, lawmakers have tied test scores to funding formulas, required universities to make public their students’ course evaluations, and pushed for faculty members to produce plans to measure and improve learning. Paying for teaching experiments is a carrot, not a stick.
Money alone isn’t enough
Look at broadly adopted innovations to teaching, like flipped classes and the pedagogical role-playing technique Reacting to the Past, and you’ll find that money didn’t play a central role, at least not at first.
Reacting to the Past arose because Mark C. Carnes, a professor of history at Barnard College, realized that despite his best efforts at lecturing and promoting discussion, his students were bored. So he experimented with the role-playing methodology, which started to spread mostly by word of mouth.
Barnard’s support was more moral than financial, says Judith R. Shapiro, president at the time. She and the provost went to Mr. Carnes’s class to play the role of street rabble in the French Revolution. Modest financial help subsidized his assistant, administrative costs, and office space.
“It’s not so much that money is an incentive,” says Ms. Shapiro, who is now president of the Teagle Foundation. “It’s making sure that the lack of money isn’t a disincentive.”
Over the past decade, Reacting to the Past has spread to 350 campuses. As the experiment has become an enterprise, grants have helped to pay for an outreach coordinator and to create and edit new games. “Word-of-mouth and volunteerism constitute the motivational core,” Mr. Carnes wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “But innovation requires a functional infrastructure, too.”
On its own, money is unlikely to spark a new idea. And giving professors money to do something they don’t already want to will fall flat, says Mr. Bernstein, of Kansas. If money can help “provide resources to enact something you’d like to do but can’t imagine fitting into your life,” he says, “then it’s highly motivating.”
The payoff: conversations
While Harvard has awarded millions of dollars in grants, the discussions and collaborations its annual conferences have spawned have been most rewarding, says Erin Driver-Linn, director of the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching. “The largest part of our strategy is around convening and bringing people together,” she says. “It’s the act of sharing that’s important.” The most recent meeting, in September, drew some 500 people, chiefly Harvard faculty and staff members.
Intellectually engaging conversations, particularly across disciplines, tend to happen less frequently than many faculty members would like. Instead they get caught up in the day-to-day bustle. The “chance to sit with colleagues in a structured way every so often,” says Mr. Holloway, of Michigan, is “something that faculty in general long for.”
The effect of those conversations often lingers long after the grants run out. “Even when the program is gone, you created the capacity to share these ideas,” he says. “The real impact is the residue of knowledge.”
Thinking about teaching can also spark change. Faculty members who have spent at least five hours a week trying to improve their teaching report using class discussions, small-group activities, student presentations and performances, and experiential learning far more often than did peers who didn’t similarly focus their attention. The latter group lectures about twice as often, according to the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement.
Incentives, too, must change
Improvements in teaching won’t amount to much if the incentive structure guiding most decisions on tenure and promotion doesn’t also change, says Mr. Bernstein. While faculty members consistently report caring deeply about teaching, research often assumes prime importance in their career advancement.
Mr. Bernstein wonders how much energy junior faculty members, even at Harvard and Michigan, will be encouraged to devote to teaching: “It’ll be interesting to me to know whether this is something people can do only if they’re already world famous.”
At Michigan, guidelines issued in 2012 encouraged tenure-and-promotion committees to give “full recognition” to candidates whose bids include a record of creating new instructional methods.
Harvard has not changed its policies, says Ms. Driver-Linn, but cultural norms have started to shift. “We are changing by giving attention and status in being part of something big and wonderful,” she says of the experiment. “It has its own incentivizing force.”
One faculty member at Harvard, Beth Altringer, has noticed a higher priority on teaching. Early in her academic career, she says, she was often advised to minimize attention to teaching, because it would pull her away from research. Now a lecturer on innovation and design, Ms. Altringer used a $50,000 grant to develop a tool to assess students’ development in group projects. The financial assistance was crucial, she says, as was the community of support that the Harvard project provided: “It says, ‘If you care about teaching, we care about you and we’ll help you grow.’ "
Time Vs. money
Faculty members’ time is often their scarcest resource. Some grants at Harvard and Michigan have helped professors to explore a new teaching approach or to pay graduate students to study previous efforts. That, in turn, can prepare them to embrace change and innovation in their own teaching careers.
The sum doesn’t need to be large, says Richard L. Freishtat, senior consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. Its grants are usually just $3,000. An environmental scientist, for instance, hired a graduate student to conduct a literature review and develop activities and field lessons to enliven a course the professor hadn’t taught in several years.
While larger grants, like those at Harvard and Michigan, allow for changes on a far bigger scale, Mr. Freishtat says, faculty members can still accomplish a lot with comparatively little money.
“It’s not an issue of motivating them. It’s giving them resources to enable them to make something happen,” he says. “Sometimes $1,000 is enough.”
