Teaching Revival

Big changes in the classroom were on the way, according to an authoritative report by the federal government.

Experts were realizing that disciplinary expertise and research prowess were no guarantee that a professor could teach. Some colleges were devising alternatives to rote learning, helping students integrate knowledge from different subjects, or challenging them with courses on contemporary problems. Teaching was finally going to matter.

That was 75 years ago.

Back then, concerns about teaching arose because of what the report, the “Biennial Survey of Education,” described as the “rapid growth of colleges and universities.” Today the pressure comes from new places: concerns about the return on the investment in increasingly expensive degrees, shifting student demographics, discoveries in the science of learning, and the influence of new technology.

Academe may finally be taking notice. Rising numbers of professors report using teaching methods that demand more of students than the traditional lecture often does. They are increasingly using class discussions, incorporating student-selected topics in their courses, and assigning group projects and cooperative learning.

In the early 2000s, campus conversations about learning, assessment, and academic rigor were rare, says Josipa Roksa, co-author of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the 2011 book that argued that many students showed meager gains in their critical-thinking skills during college. While faculty members once dismissed concerns about teaching and rigor, she says, they rarely do now.

Even elite institutions acknowledge that the classroom experience is not all it should be. Harvard University and the University of Michigan have dedicated tens of millions of dollars to support experiments to improve teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level.

“We’re at a moment in which there is no dogma about what’s going to work,” says Peter L. Galison, a professor of history of science at Harvard. “Everyone accepts that this is an experimental time.”

One of the biggest experiments in recent years has been massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Initially they were hyped as cure-alls that could lower costs, increase accessibility, and improve education. Now the prognosis for MOOCs has become more realistic and nuanced. But MOOC fervor had an unanticipated effect: It generated a useful debate about teaching—one that wasn’t welcome at first.

“MOOCs opened the door, in a threatening way,” says Michael S. Roth, describing how Wesleyan University’s exploration of MOOCs in 2012 allowed the faculty to share ideas across disciplines. “People were doing interesting experiments,” says Mr. Roth, Wesleyan’s president, “but no one would know about it.”

While MOOCs have not been a panacea for concerns about cost, access, or quality, the rhetoric about them did shake faculty members’ sense of complacency, says Edward Maloney, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

“The MOOC momentum pushed people to think about teaching in ways they hadn’t before,” he says. “That’s a huge shift.”

Changing student demographics have also sharpened the focus on teaching, says Mr. Galison, of Harvard. His traditional lectures weren’t reaching students the way he once thought they did. In part, that’s because students’ relationship to knowledge has changed; many of them grow up with a trove of information at their fingertips, thanks to the web. Others are used to learning asynchronously and at their own pace.

“Even if we had no idea about MOOCs,” he says, “the existing forms of lecture and demonstration are having trouble reaching a generation of students and adult learners who are used to getting information in other ways.”

Two distinctive dynamics of the craze over MOOCs helped spark renewed attention to teaching, says Fiona M. Hollands, associate director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The first is that these courses are designed for a general audience. Faculty members have had to think carefully about who their students are, and how to appeal to and motivate them.

The other is the peculiar ecology of prestige in higher education. Elite institutions like Stanford University got the MOOC ball rolling. That made it acceptable for professors elsewhere, Ms. Hollands says, to teach MOOCs and tackle questions about teaching. And when institutions like Harvard and Michigan signal through their grant programs that they’re interested in improving instruction, others are likely to follow suit.

Teaching is already a central concern elsewhere in academe, including at community colleges, which lack the resources for splashy grant programs or MOOCs. The needs there are also greater than at most four-year institutions, which is why researchers study the effectiveness of community colleges’ student-success courses and supplemental-instruction services. More than a third of community-college faculty members, a national survey found, say they spend at least five hours a week thinking about ways to improve their teaching.

Ms. Hollands, who has studied MOOCs, still isn’t sure how much the attention to teaching has translated into actual changes in instruction, particularly at four-year colleges. Reams of data on thousands of MOOC students may one day allow colleges to analyze what works and to refine their strategies. But that hasn’t happened yet.

For now, faculty members have adopted many familiar ideas. Some professors, Ms. Hollands says, are paying more attention to the pacing of their lectures, breaking them into three- to five-minute segments to better match students’ attention spans. Others are requiring students to submit questions before class about the day’s reading.

To some critics of MOOCs, such methods fail to take advantage of technology and the courses’ large enrollments. “It is really just perpetuating the traditional model of teacher-centric learning,” one faculty member told Ms. Hollands, lamenting the absence of social networking, crowdsourcing, and project-based learning in many MOOCs. “We have a quiz after seven minutes and you just listen to someone else lecture, then we have another quiz and then we go to the discussion board. How is that innovative?”

The tools that faculty members adopt may ultimately matter less than their willingness to experiment, say several experts. The education researcher George D. Kuh has called that willingness “positive restlessness,” or a disposition to continually improve.

Such an attitude can’t be dictated from the top, and it often develops when a professor feels that students simply aren’t learning as well as he or she wants them to. If a lesson isn’t working, many professors start to view it as an intellectual challenge, says Richard L. Freishtat, senior consultant for the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Teaching and Learning. More than anything, this gap between intent and result fuels a sense of restlessness among faculty members accustomed to solving difficult problems.

“They’ve been at the top of what they do,” he says, “and that carries over to teaching.”

Related: One University Takes Multiple Paths to Improve Teaching

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