Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:
- Beth describes a project at the University of Virginia designed to help instructors stick with active learning and other strategies to improve student performance.
- Beckie hears from readers who think it’s a really bad idea to ignore negative student evaluations.
- We catch you up on teaching-related stories you may have missed.
What’s Really Holding Professors Back From Innovative Teaching?
Campus teaching centers often find that their first challenge is getting faculty members in the door. The second is convincing instructors that different forms of teaching, like active learning and group work, produce better results than a traditional lecture does.
The third and perhaps greatest challenge is to help professors institute those practices in the classroom. After all, changing how you teach is tough — and not always successful on the first, second, or even third try.
Two researchers at the University of Virginia are putting some numbers behind those teaching dilemmas. In particular, they want to know what’s preventing faculty members, including some who have used the services of UVa’s Center for Teaching Excellence, from actually changing the way they teach. What they’ve found is helping them shape future research and design more-effective support systems.
First the study. Hannah Sturtevant, a postdoctoral research associate at the center, and Lindsay Wheeler, assistant director of STEM-education initiatives and an assistant professor at the center, have surveyed about 300 faculty members in STEM disciplines over the past couple of years about what obstacles prevent them from adopting new teaching practices.
“We really wanted to understand why they aren’t engaging,” says Wheeler. “Why do we see greater than 80 percent lecture in many of these courses, when research suggests active learning is really effective for students?”
The top reason, instructors said, was a lack of time to plan for teaching, on top of other responsibilities. Tied for second: tenure-and-promotion guidelines, which emphasize research over teaching, and classrooms with fixed seats, which inhibit active learning.
Sturtevant and Wheeler also found plenty of frustrations with students. Instructors say that students often haven’t prepared for class, or resist active learning. Other barriers include a lack of training in active-learning techniques for teaching assistants and large class sizes.
Drilling down into the data, the researchers found that a lot rests on departmental culture. If a faculty member says her department does not support active learning, she is less likely to try it herself.
Those findings may not surprise teaching-and-learning experts, but Sturtevant and Wheeler say that being able to pinpoint the problems on their campuses can help lead to solutions. “This study has shown that there’s this extra piece, not just about encouraging faculty members to try,” says Sturtevant. “We need to support them while they’re doing the practices.”
To that end, the Center for Teaching Excellence is expanding its Ignite program, originally designed for new faculty members who want to redesign a course within a small learning community, to allow more senior faculty members to participate. It is also creating a teaching-methods course for teaching assistants in STEM.
Center staff members are also doing more work with entire departments. They’re discussing how best to create a curriculum that is aligned, so that it’s not just an individual faculty member trying to change a single course. “If it’s the third course in a series,” says Wheeler, “and all the others are lectures, then students are going to push back.”
Changing tenure-and-promotion guidelines to support teaching reform is a tougher hill to climb, but the researchers hope that the survey results, which show how significant those guidelines are to teaching reform, can accelerate conversations with senior leadership. “Things move very slowly,” says Wheeler, “but there is potential to use data to drive change.”
A study is also underway to better understand what makes for successful group work. A group of graduate students is digging into that now, working with undergraduates who have agreed to audiotape group conversations and share working documents. “If we don’t get the student perspective, we’re missing an important piece,” says Wheeler.
The researchers are expanding the survey to include non-STEM faculty members, to see if they face similar barriers in their teaching. And they hope to share their survey instrument with other colleges.
Do you use your campus’s teaching-and-learning center? Has it helped change your teaching, especially if you hit some of the roadblocks described in the UVa survey? If so, drop me a line, at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
