For most of the history of formal education, faculty members would have described teaching as an art or a craft. While many of us would still identify with those descriptors, the drift in the scholarship of teaching and learning in the 21st century has moved steadily in a different direction. Now we approach teaching as a science — one that can be gradually refined and improved with research from fields such as neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Scholars of teaching and learning now study brains and conduct experimental research and surveys. Faculty-development literature loves phrases like “evidence-based,” with said evidence typically sourced from a small number of fields. That scholarship has sparked tense debates about the best methods for designing or teaching a course, in the same way that medical researchers disagree about how best to maintain a healthy body.
In an essay in The Chronicle last month, Sarah Rose Cavanagh described a faculty backlash against the “demands of student-centered teaching” and proposed a reset. Faculty disagreements on best practices in teaching have become too heated, she wrote, as we argue forcefully for our preferred methods of caring for our students and dismiss advocates of other (and especially of traditional) teaching methods. Faculty members feel pressured to justify every classroom decision with the latest scientific evidence — a practice that, in my view, has only intensified the heat and driven away some instructors altogether.
Here I hope to extend Sarah’s argument. Yes, we need to better tolerate disagreements over the best or latest research findings on teaching and learning. But in addition, we should be willing to listen to practitioners who are experimenting with classroom strategies, even if they aren’t steeped in the research.
I was reminded of that in April when I gave some lectures at Northwestern University, the place that awarded my doctorate in 1997 and that gave me my first full-time job at its teaching center. When I stepped into the center’s office for a lunch with its current staff, I recalled an experience from my final year of graduate school that has shaped my approach to teaching ever since. One might even call it my “origin story” as a teacher-scholar. And it resulted, not from any in-depth education research, but from the habits of a caring and thoughtful teacher.
In my Ph.D. program, I was a teaching assistant and taught my own courses in composition and literature. In both contexts, my goal was to guide undergraduates through lively discussions about literature, like the ones that had inspired me. What actually happened was frustrating and baffling: Students sat silently while I asked question after question. Occasionally a desultory hand would rise, followed by a comment to which nobody but me responded. I spent a lot of time in those years wondering what I was doing wrong.
In the final year of graduate school, I was hired for a part-time job at the university’s teaching center by Ken Bain, who founded teaching centers at multiple universities and wrote an influential 2004 book, What the Best College Teachers Do. On my first day on the job, he gave me the following instructions: Browse the center’s library, and learn a little bit about what we do here.
The library contained a few bookcases and a wall of file cabinets with photocopies of essays and articles about teaching (this was the late 1990s), organized by pedagogical approaches. I was running my finger over tabs in a filing cabinet, and stopped at one about discussion-based teaching. The first article I pulled from that folder, published in 1981, was by a historian named Peter Frederick, and it was entitled, “The Dreaded Discussion: Ten Ways to Start.” I sat down to read.
This would be the moment — in the action movie of my life — when the camera would zoom slowly into my widening eyes as realization dawned: Here were 10 concrete solutions to my baffling dilemma. Instead of just posing questions, Frederick gave me recipes to get students talking and liven up class discussion. A common feature of his suggestions: They drew in all students instead of relying on confident volunteers.
One of his discussion starters, for example, asks students what images they remember from a text. I began using the technique immediately, and for many years after. When teaching a work of literature, I would start class by asking students to think about a single image or scene from the text that stood out to them. I had them write it down and share what they had written. I collected their descriptions on the board and asked: What patterns or connections do you see? What did you learn from them?
I used that exercise especially with texts that I had to teach frequently, and with every new group of students, a different collection of images would fill up the board. I was never quite sure what insights would emerge from the discussion. The same was true for some of the other strategies Frederick recommended. I was energized by the uncertainty and began to look forward to class discussion: What new things would I learn from those image collections that day?
In April, after I returned home from my visit to Northwestern, I found an online copy of Frederick’s article. Rereading it, I was astonished to realize how deeply it had affected me. Far beyond solving my immediate problems as a new teacher, it sparked a lifetime of classroom experimentation and enticed me to pursue a career in faculty development.
The principles that Frederick lays out became truths to which I have adhered. “Because we have much to learn from each other,” he wrote, “all must be encouraged to participate.” Looking back, I have based almost every teaching decision I make on the notion that each student in the room has a unique voice, and that my job is to surface all of those voices week after week.
I wholeheartedly bought into his next principle as well: that we should not leave the process to chance, which had been my practice until I read his essay. If every voice matters, he argued, we should “devise ways in which each student has something to say, especially early in the class period.” Starting class by asking every student to write something down and share it in pairs became a standard practice in my classroom.
Forty years after his article was published, you’ll find that practice recommended in multiple bodies of college-teaching literature, from the notion of “high structure” in the inclusive teaching research of Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy to the notion of “dynamic lecturing” in the work of Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek. The wisdom of inviting all students to engage through structure crossed many contexts in college teaching.
We have plenty of research now about why such structure helps, but it was very limited and not easily accessible when Frederick was writing his tips. Instead, what a reader finds in his essay is the product of a thoughtful and creative teacher who experimented in his own classroom to find practices that worked with his discipline and his students. He taught for 20 years before that essay appeared, and in 2001 he received the major national award for teaching in his discipline.
Reading “The Dreaded Discussion” again, four decades after its publication, feels like entering a bygone area of faculty development — one before the field turned to the natural and social sciences for evidence and inspiration.
To be clear: I highly value those research-based sources of inspiration. And I have participated in the turn toward evidence-based teaching myself, as I have discovered fascinating findings and ideas in the work of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. I love to read about new research in those fields from researchers like Michelle Miller or the Learning Scientists. All of us who make recommendations on college teaching, whether we do so as professionals or as colleagues, should have a solid foundation of understanding in terms of how brains operate, and how learning works.
And you no longer have to stumble upon useful teaching advice in a dusty file cabinet — it’s easily available to instructors at all levels of experience.
But I would hate for us to lose touch with the possibility that good ideas about teaching and learning can come from other kinds of sources. A lone practitioner, toiling in the fields of a single classroom, might develop a new approach to a sticky problem in education that turns us all in a new direction. Maybe that approach doesn’t emerge from the existing science, but the existing science — like all science — remains constantly under construction. An intrepid experimenter might lay the path for more traditional researchers to follow.
I also fear that the heated debates and the pressure to conform to the findings of evidence-based teaching have turned some faculty members away from listening to scholars of teaching and learning. When we present ideas that we claim are aligned with our best knowledge of how students learn, and then teachers try those methods in their classrooms and fail, we shouldn’t be surprised to see them dismiss the research. Every classroom presents a unique context, and any claim to universality in a teaching method is doomed to fail for some.
Failure doesn’t mean we should abandon the search for better methods. The vast, long-term project of improving college teaching remains paramount 40 years after Peter Frederick wrote his article. It deserves the full attention of researchers using scholarship from the natural and social sciences to improve what we do in the classroom.
But it also needs the creative thinking of inspired teachers tackling a problem or taking note of an experience that could illuminate the classrooms of others, and sharing it in forums like conferences, books, or essays like the ones published on these pages. Just such an article helped enlighten me when I was dreading class discussions three decades ago, and ultimately shaped the course of a career.
So the answer to the question in my title is yes, albeit a qualified one. Before you turn your classroom into a laboratory, poke around first in the bookshelves, file cabinets, and resources available in the 21st century to familiarize yourself with the major findings of research on teaching in higher education.
And then, by all means, start experimenting. You might discover new strategies that will help the rest of us become better practitioners of our always-evolving craft.
