Every semester, immediately before releasing grades for the first exam in any of my courses, I tell my students a story from my own undergraduate years:
I started college as a pre-med student with a major in psychology. Ultimately, I hoped to become a psychiatrist working for Doctors Without Borders, providing vitally necessary mental-health care to people in the world’s most underserved locations. Then I got to the introductory organic-chemistry course.
Despite what felt like herculean effort, I knew I hadn’t done well on the first exam; it was just a matter of bracing for the impact. In handing back the tests, the professor announced the highest grade in the class, the class average, and the lowest grade. Looking down at the exam I had just been handed, I knew that I was the student behind that lowest grade.
The professor didn’t publicly identify me by name, but that didn’t matter. There’s no shortage of ways to make students feel awful without technically violating student-confidentiality rules, and this was one of them. Even if other students didn’t know he was talking about me, I knew, and that was more than enough. Standing at the front of the auditorium, dry-erase marker in hand, he began to verbalize his disbelief at how anyone could possibly do that poorly on an exam. Whether in agreement or out of sheer discomfort, my classmates laughed. If someone did that poorly, he reasoned out loud, they must not even be trying. With a score that low, he suggested, they’ve probably never even come to class.
But there I sat, in the aisle seat that I had dutifully occupied twice a week, my failing exam face down on my desk.
Even if you have experienced some version of academic trauma, you do not need to “haze it forward” to your own students. You can choose to break the cycle.
Today, several years and a Ph.D. in psychology later, I tell my students that story for several reasons. For one, I want them to know that it is normal to experience academic setbacks. They do not define you, serve as a negative reflection of your character, or indicate that you are destined for perpetual failure. Rather, they are a universal part of the human experience and often serve as valuable learning opportunities. In fact, research shows that test performance improves after students learn how famous scientists have struggled, either intellectually or personally, en route to their achievements. Students benefit when they hear that their professors have failed, too.
If one of my students sees their score on an exam and would like to do better next time, I want them to know that my teaching assistants and I will help. We (obviously) will not do the work for them, but we will gladly clarify concepts, give study tips, or share test-taking strategies that they might not have known they needed. Most important, we will do so without making them feel bad for struggling or asking for help.
Above all, I tell students this story as a promise that I will not be the kind of professor I had in that organic-chemistry class years ago.
That professor was Maitland Jones Jr., who has been the subject of countless headlines this month after being dismissed from his teaching position at New York University following a petition from students who took issue with his introductory organic-chemistry course.
To be clear, it is not my place to say whether any faculty member deserves to lose their job. That’s not what this essay is about. Rather, it’s about how the public response to his dismissal is a story in itself — one that reveals a great deal about how we think about college students, the classes they take, and the people who teach them. The fallout also provides an opportunity for faculty members to reflect on how to teach as effectively — and inclusively — as possible. Here are some of my tips.
Recognize that you don’t have to teach the way you were taught. From undergraduate “gateway” courses to Ph.D. qualifying exams, many academic exercises exist to identify those who aren’t “cut out” for whatever may lie ahead. But effective teaching isn’t just about setting high standards and seeing how many — and which — students can be weeded out. Rather, it’s about helping every student develop the skills necessary to meet those standards.
Even if you have experienced some version of academic trauma, you do not need to “haze it forward” to your own students. You can choose to break the cycle. You can tell students that you want them to do well, even — and especially — after they happen to fail. You can simultaneously challenge students and challenge widespread assumptions about what it means to teach a “rigorous” college course.
Design a course that gives students room to stumble, and recover. In my courses, I have always allowed students to drop their lowest of four exam grades. Starting this year, I have taken this approach one step further by preferentially weighting the remaining three exams. In calculating their final grade, each student’s highest score is worth more than their second highest, which is worth more than their third highest. If someone’s scores consistently improve from one exam to the next, their overall grade will reflect that effort in a manner proportionate to their degree of improvement. As a result, students have an explicit incentive to persist to the very end of the semester.
No matter how you approach grading, you can also teach students how to take exams effectively rather than just focus on what’s going to be on the test. Quite simply, if students don’t know how to study effectively, it might be because nobody has ever taught them how to do so. Regardless of your course content or exam format, you can share evidence-based study skills and maybe even require students to practice them in course assignments.
After an exam, share tips on how to do better the next time. In my exam debriefings, I review some of the more challenging questions, show students exactly where the answers came from, and deliberately pull the curtain back on my question-writing process. It’s my hope that they will use this knowledge to generate their own practice questions and test themselves in advance of future exams.
If, like me, you teach large classes, you may not have the personal bandwidth or institutional support to apply Pedagogy Twitter’s teaching practice du jour. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something. Inclusive teaching is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. With a little bit of creativity, even those of us who teach 500–plus students every semester can do so inclusively, although our methods might differ from those of professors who teach 50 students.
Think of students as people, rather than caricatures. Inclusive teaching is not just a matter of how you design your courses, but also how you think about your students. In recent years, plenty of columnists have portrayed college students as lazy, coddled, entitled consumers who don’t know the meaning of hard work — unless, of course, they’re working on a public campaign to get their professor “canceled.”
As a faculty member, it has been illuminating to learn how many of my colleagues not only endorse that stereotype, but also allow it to trickle into their everyday teaching practices. Even more illuminating? Learning that this stereotype can be as readily (albeit selectively) applied to a college professor as it is to today’s undergraduates.
After tweeting about my experience as a former student in Jones’s organic-chemistry course, I found myself on the receiving end of the kinds of comments that are not particularly uncommon in faculty conversations about students. Much to my surprise, my Twitter replies informed me that I am incapable of rising to a challenge and don’t have thick enough skin to last a day in the “real world.” Complete strangers chose to let me know that I squandered the opportunity to be taught by one of the “world’s most prominent instructors,” whom I gravely disrespected by not getting a better grade. In fact, some argued, his teaching had saved lives: Had I become a physician, my patients clearly would not have survived.
Much more could be written about the subtext behind such comments, but I mention them here for one reason. If something sounds ridiculous when directed toward a faculty member, it’s probably worth rethinking whether that viewpoint — even if expressed in a subtle, coded fashion — is universally true when applied toward an entire generation.
Rather than assuming the worst about students before they have a chance to prove you right or wrong, why not make different assumptions? Why not assume that the vast majority of students want to succeed and will expend the effort required to do so? And meanwhile, you can assume responsibility for fostering a learning environment in which students are both challenged and supported.
Like many academics, my teaching philosophy is informed by the experiences — positive and negative — that I had as a student. If nothing else, here’s what I’ve learned: Treat your students the way you wish to be treated. Teach the kind of class you wish you would have taken, and be the kind of teacher that you wish you’d had — perhaps even the kind that your students who will become professors choose to emulate.
