My former editor, Dan Berrett, first pitched the idea of this newsletter after covering the teaching beat for several years. I asked what had motivated him to do so. Here’s what he wrote:
About five years ago, I remember sitting at a meeting with several other editors when the discussion turned to teaching. We noticed that stories on that subject were consistently among our most read. I had an inkling about why: It’s the thing that almost every professor does — and that just about everyone feels ill-prepared for. This data point always stuck with me: 98 percent of professors noted that teaching was “personally ‘essential’ or ‘very important’,” according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Talk about your universal concerns!
That data point also undergirded what I kept hearing in interviews with faculty members and teaching experts. Even (and maybe especially!) those who were considered adept at teaching tended to feel humbled by it. So it seemed like having some sort of space for us to share what we were hearing and to connect readers would be worthwhile.
Five years on, we’re happy to say that we have a loyal and engaged readership. You have been willing to share successes and failures, point us to useful innovations, and call us out when you think we’re ignoring critical challenges that prevent faculty members from doing their best work. Your insights have also deepened our expertise as reporters covering teaching and learning, and for that Beckie and I are grateful.
This week I looked back at the more than 200 issues of the newsletter, along with many of the stories we’ve written on teaching, to see what has occupied your attention and how the field has changed since we first began publishing.
Here are a few takeaways:
Teaching has become an increasingly public enterprise. In an early issue of the newsletter Dan wrote, “teaching is a private act” when discussing how some colleges were trying to change that dynamic. Throughout the years we’ve provided many more examples: find a teaching buddy, bring the department together to talk about teaching, create teaching communities across campus, and so on.
But two things have fueled a deeper and more public conversation around the value of good teaching and the dangers of mediocre instruction. One is the growing concern about disparities in student outcomes by race, income, and first-generation status, and how much of that has to do with the ways in which students are taught. Below I talk about how that has pushed once-innovative teaching strategies into the mainstream.
The other, of course, is the pandemic. When professors were sent home in the spring of 2020 and told to move their classes online, the collective need for help put teaching front and center in any conversation about higher education. Colleges held dozens of workshops to help their faculty members, and virtual support groups sprang up overnight for faculty to discuss common challenges. Beckie wrote about this being a silver lining in an otherwise bleak two years.
The pandemic has lowered the barriers between professors and students, for better and worse. Before Covid, it was relatively easy for professors to maintain strict boundaries between themselves and their students. Sure, they might get an email at midnight asking for an extension on a paper. But they often didn’t know too much about students’ lives outside of the classroom.
Teaching during a pandemic, however, has meant that professors now know where students live, how much access they have to quiet space and strong Wi-Fi connections, and whether competing pressures are affecting their ability to meet deadlines and do solid work. Students, too, learned about their professors’ home environments and the many obligations they have to juggle as well. In short, people let their guards down, and each became more human to the other.
On the plus side, that has led to increased empathy and greater willingness to reconsider what traditions may have outlived their usefulness. We have written about the benefits of flexibility with assignments and deadlines and the value of carving out class time to make connections with your students.
The downside, of course, is that it is easy to become overwhelmed by students’ needs and the lack of boundaries between work and personal time. We have written extensively about faculty burnout and whether pandemic-driven flexibility has been beneficial or harmful to both students and professors.
The way higher education trains and evaluates instructors needs to change. This is not a new problem: Beckie wrote back in 2017 about why student course evaluations — the main way in which instructors are evaluated — are hugely problematic. And she’s written regularly on the topic ever since.
But creating better ways to foster and support good teaching has become a more pressing issue over the years. The pandemic highlighted the insufficient support faculty members have historically received to improve their craft. I wrote a couple of stories in the past year about the lack of teacher training most faculty members get and why the science of teaching rarely makes its way into the classroom. Those sparked a number of newsletters in which readers weighed in on what could help.
Recently, Beckie wrote about how more research universities are creating teaching tracks, which could improve educational outcomes and reduce faculty burnout.
Once-innovative forms of teaching are becoming mainstream. In 2018, Beckie introduced Chronicle readers to the term inclusive teaching in a story she wrote about two professors at UNC-Chapel Hill who had closed equity gaps in their science courses by rethinking their classroom strategies. In the years since, we’ve written a great deal more about this and related innovations in teaching, as instructors and teaching experts took a closer look at the connection between classroom practices and differences in student performance.
Similarly, the pandemic and related social-justice movements have sparked conversations on how stress inhibits learning, and how trauma-informed teaching can help fix that. Active learning, too, has become more common in recent years as research continues to show how it can lead to greater learning.
That’s not to say that it’s been an easy lift, and we’ve written plenty about what inhibits teaching innovation as well. But judging from reader responses, instructors have become more open to approaching their teaching in new and different ways.
There’s obviously plenty more to say about how teaching has changed and will continue to change. So I’ll end with a few questions. What else would you like to see us write about in the newsletter? What issues do you need most help with in this next stretch of time? And finally, what other trends in teaching and learning have you noticed over the past few years that we should be aware of? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your ideas may appear in a future newsletter.
Thanks again for your continued support of our newsletter. If you feel your colleagues might benefit from reading it as well, please spread the word. They can sign up to receive their own copy here.
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
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.
