I talked to Wieman after he read my recent story about the challenge of bringing learning science into the classroom, and emailed me about it. The problem, he said, isn’t that professors hold the wrong beliefs. The problem is that college and university leaders don’t understand that good teaching practices can be defined and learned. As a result, most institutions do not have built-in incentives and rewards for effective teaching.
Following is an excerpt of that conversation, condensed and edited for clarity.
In your email, you sounded pessimistic about the likelihood of universities’ being able or willing to change systems to encourage and reward good teaching. Why do you feel that way?
Well, I’m pessimistic about it happening in this short time scale, for two reasons. One is the appreciation I’ve gotten of how fundamentally baked into the structures and the culture the current teaching approaches and beliefs about teaching are. They’re just so deeply ingrained.
The other reason is a more immediate, pragmatic one. They have in place a teaching-evaluation system which is, everyplace, just student evaluations. We’ve got lots of data showing they really are not useful for improving teaching. But nobody’s done anything different. And so even if a provost says, “We want to do this better,” the tools aren’t there for them to put in place something that’s meaningful.
You argue that colleges choose leaders who don’t understand or prioritize good teaching. Is there a disconnect between what colleges say — which is, “We value excellent teaching” — and what they do?
I’m not sure there’s a disconnect. It’s more that they can value good teaching, but they don’t have any idea what good teaching really means.
I look at it as the lack of an understanding that there really is expertise on teaching. There really are teaching methods that are more effective, have been well demonstrated, and that aren’t just, you know, being friendly to students and entertaining them. And you go on and become a university administrator without any clue about that.
When I gave talks, I would make sure that I would talk with some fairly high-level administrators — deans, provosts, occasionally presidents — because I could get these people in a room and talk about what we know about teaching more effectively. And you know, [the fact] that we have methods that have been tested and have shown better student retention, better learning — it’s exceptional to find someone [among them] for whom this is not a completely new idea.
Do you think that mediocre teaching is one of the things that’s contributing to this broader disillusionment with higher education that we’re seeing across society?
Absolutely. You look at people outside the university, and you ask them, What’s the point of this university? And their belief is, well, it’s so they can educate our children. But you get inside the university, and they’re all talking about the great research they’re doing for the world and the impact on the economy of their discoveries. There is this really big disconnect between what universities think they’re doing that’s important and what the population thinks is important.
How do you improve teaching in a way that doesn’t add one more thing to the plate of already-overworked professors, particularly during the pandemic? Are there strategies and lessons that don’t require professors to magically find another five or 10 hours in their week?
The quick answer is no — it takes extra time. But we have pretty good data on that. If you have a good training program, it takes the typical faculty member about 50 hours.
So they have to find 50 hours in their life. They spend more time than that in departmental faculty meetings every year. So this is not really a tremendous investment for an institution. But this is something that takes some time to learn. I don’t think there’s any way around that. It’s just a reality.
Can the average student tell when teaching is mediocre?
No. We have good data on that. Students cannot detect good teaching, and there are some basic reasons for that. [What you’d need to really ask them is:] How much did you learn compared to what you could have learned if this course was taught really well? And that’s obviously impossible. A student just can’t decide that.
You might argue they could detect more-effective teaching practices, but the data shows they can’t. They’re just comparing what they’ve experienced, and teaching is different in different departments. So you don’t have a clear standard.
At the University of British Columbia, where we had this systematic, widespread effort to introduce better teaching methods, we did see that by the time students were in their third or, more often, fourth year, they were much more aware of good teaching practices and less-effective teaching practices. But that’s about the time they were ready to graduate.
Can the average professor tell when teaching is effective or not?
When they just go in and watch a classroom, they absolutely cannot. We did some experiments on that, too. They don’t have the expertise and background and knowledge to do that. Even people with quite a bit of training, if they didn’t know the student population well and the subject well, they couldn’t tell. You have to interpret so many complexities in that situation.
Also, to clarify, I was interpreting your question as: Could your typical professor walk into the typical classroom and tell if it was good teaching or not? That’s different from saying: Can you have a professor learn to do good teaching and understand — in their context, in their courses — what good teaching is? That’s something that clearly can happen, and has been happening. Various small programs are doing it. Now they’re growing and spreading, and things like the [Association of American Universities’] STEM initiative is pushing that to be broader.
What would it take for colleges to put teaching at the forefront of their concerns?
The work at UBC was part of one institution showing that, if you have appropriate training for people to understand how to teach effectively and why it works, then they can learn without a tremendous amount of difficulty. But you have to have some clear incentives for them to do that. And so that’s one of the problems right now.
If the leadership at some prominent university said, “We know these are better teaching methods. We’re going to require everybody to be evaluated on how well they achieve those. We’re going to hire new faculty based on their understanding and readiness to implement these in their teaching,” then that would make change happen very quickly. But right now, you don’t have anybody willing to take that lead.
Talking About Teaching
The next session in our Talking About Teaching series is coming up on Friday, February 25, at 2 p.m., ET. The subject is how to foster motivation and engagement in your class. If you’d like to participate, sign up here. You’ll also get access to a special Slack channel where you can connect with colleagues and post questions and ideas.
Here’s a question I have for you: What is your biggest teaching challenge right now? Write to me, at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and tell me your story.
ICYMI
- Advocates of inclusive teaching tend to assume that every instructor has plenty of authority, power, and status to share, write Chavella Pittman and Thomas J. Tobin in this Chronicle advice piece. But what if you don’t?
- Online learning is vital to the future of higher education, and colleges must help instructors create excellent online teaching experiences, say online educators in this Inside Higher Ed opinion piece.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beth
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