Why Faculty Hate Teaching Evaluations

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In This Episode

On paper, student teaching evaluations make a lot of sense. Who is better positioned to say whether a professor did a good job than the students who took the course? But dig a little deeper, and there’s good reason to question whether colleges should be relying on teaching evaluations to inform big decisions about an instructor’s promotion, pay, or even continued employment. So what’s wrong with this system? And why do colleges still cling to it, despite research that shows it’s flawed?

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Related Reading:

• Sign up for The Chronicle’s Teaching Newsletter (The Chronicle)
• Teaching Evaluations are Broken. Can They Be Fixed? (The Chronicle)
• A University Overhauled Its Course Evaluation to Get Better Feedback. Here’s What Changed. (The Chronicle)
• Meta-analysis of faculty’s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related. (ScienceDirect)

Guest:

• Beckie Supiano, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech -recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Beckie Supiano The sort of broad understanding among many professors is it’s a popularity contest. It’s a student satisfaction survey. Students are basically telling you: Did I like my professor?

Jack Stripling Toward the end of a college semester, the tables get turned. Students who have been graded and critiqued for months finally get a chance to let professors and their colleges know how they felt about a class. The teaching evaluation, as it’s commonly known, is a time-honored tradition in higher education. It’s an opportunity for students to gush about the inspiring professors who have changed their lives or to exact some small justice on the disorganized blowhards who have made classes miserable. As it turns out, a lot of college instructors hate these evaluations and question how they’re used at colleges. To talk about why, I’ve invited Beckie Supiano back to College Matters. Beckie is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she writes about teaching and learning. She’s also co-author of The Chronicle‘s popular teaching newsletter. We’ll add a link in our show notes where you can subscribe.

Beckie, welcome to the show.

Beckie Supiano Thanks so much, Jack.

Jack Stripling Well, let’s start simply. What are teaching evaluations and how are they being used on college campuses today?

Beckie Supiano Okay, so near the end of the semester, students get a survey that they’re completing about the course and the instructor. These vary a lot. Back in the day, when you and I were in college, we would have filled these out in the classroom. The professor would probably leave the room, hand them out on paper. These days, they’re done online. Students are asked a number of questions. They will vary some from campus to campus, but a combination of some free response, short answer, and they might also be asked to give a numerical rating, say on a one to five scale, both of the course and of the instructor.

Jack Stripling How do people feel about this? How do teachers feel about them?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, so I think to answer that, let me just back up a little bit and talk about how these things are used. So the original idea, as I understand it, was that this is a way to get feedback from students to improve instruction. The professors would hear directly from their students in an anonymized, after the course is done, kind of a way about what worked and what didn’t. I think, you know, that’s hard to argue against. Getting feedback can be really valuable. The thing is, that’s not the only way these are used. On some campuses, some portion of students’ responses is available to students who might want to take this course in the future. When you’re registering for the next term, you can see feedback from students who’ve taken a course before. But the main thing, and the reason these are so controversial, is that they’re often relied on pretty heavily in performance evaluations for faculty. So when a college is trying to determine if someone did a good job as a teacher, this is often the main and sometimes the only source of data on whether someone’s a good teacher or not. And that’s where it gets really messy.

Jack Stripling Huh, so this isn’t just some perfunctory task that students are doing. It actually might affect whether a professor gets promoted or gets a merit raise, that type of thing?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, absolutely. So this is something that is sort of a hurdle for someone on the tenure track who, you know, needs to show that they’re a good enough teacher to stick around on campus. And also for the majority of instructors who are adjuncts, they’re really only being evaluated on their teaching. So a lot can really ride on this number. You know, someone might be averaging the one to five rating that students have given a professor, and then that’s it, you know, or close to it. It’s the seemingly objective information on if someone is good at this part of their job or again, in the case of someone who’s contingent, kind of their whole job.

Jack Stripling I don’t think I realized I had this level of power, Beckie, when I was a college student. I might go back and write some of these.

Beckie Supiano Honestly, I don’t think students often know how these surveys are used or how they’re supposed to think about filling them out. Some colleges have tried to provide students with a better sense of what the surveys are used for and what kind of feedback is valuable. I mean, I don’t think I would have known about that when I was an undergraduate either, how would you?

Jack Stripling So professors might be leery of them, even though they want the feedback perhaps, they might be leery of how they might be used. What’s the general consensus among professors about teaching evaluations?

Beckie Supiano It’s hard to find someone who’s like a stalwart defender of using student course evaluations as the primary or sole measure of teaching quality. I think that’s pretty hard to defend. There are a bunch of problems with these, right? So some of the problems with course evaluations are just about the questions students are being asked. I think most people could agree, students are in a position to tell you some things about the course and the instructor. After all, they hopefully came to class and experienced it. And unlike anyone else, they were in the room, day after day, week after week. They can give you feedback on what this person did and how the course was organized. And if the assignments matched what was described in the syllabus and had something to do with what they were later asked to apply on an exam. Great. But students are asked about lots of other things too on some of these colleges’ survey forms and sometimes things that they might not really be in a position to speak to, like is this professor a fair grader? I mean you probably have an opinion on if your own work was evaluated in a way that you liked, but that’s different from being fair because you have no idea how they graded anyone else in all likelihood and so how could you know that? Or a student might be asked about the professor’s expertise; they probably don’t really know how to evaluate that. And then there’s some questions that just really don’t pertain to anything that you’d want to evaluate looking at teaching. Like I’ve seen a question about if someone’s enthusiastic. I mean, that’s really subjective, but it also might not actually have anything to do with learning, which is ostensibly the outcome the colleges are going for here. So there’s some questions about that. What do these answers actually get you? And the sort of broad understanding among many professors is it’s a popularity contest. It’s a student satisfaction survey. Students are basically telling you, did I like my professor? That might matter. But I’m not sure anyone would say that should be the main quality that keeps someone employed on a campus is if students like them or not because students might like a professor for really great reasons or really superficial or even detrimental reasons, right? Like, oh, this professor just, you know, let us do whatever we wanted and was a really light grader and let us just kind of go off topic in our discussion and, you know, do whatever we kind of wanted in class. That might not be the most desirable outcome long term for students or for the college.

Jack Stripling If that were the case, it does seem like there are things that professors could do to sort of game the system. If this is a popularity contest, it might affect how you teach the course.

Beckie Supiano In big and small ways that can be an issue, right? I mean, I think professors kind of understand that this is what’s happening. And so they might feel pressured to be flexible, to be responsive. Now, that’s not necessarily all bad. Students are receptive to professors treating them like people. And I think that’s probably for the best. But where’s the line between that and just kind of doing customer service management, right? That’s probably not the relationship we want professors and students to have. And this also can be pressure about how hard or easy someone is as a grader, how difficult a course is seen. Difficult is often seen in negative terms by students. And so if professors’ north star is getting a good rating on their course evaluations, that might be a different set of incentives than if their goal were to create the best learning environment for their students.

Jack Stripling So there’s a few different touch points of people who are involved in this process. There’s the students that we’ve talked about who may or may not know the gravity of what they’re doing. There’s the professors who have some skepticism about these evaluations and their efficacy. What about administrators or department chairs who presumably are looking at the results? What’s your sense of how they’re using them and how they feel about them?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I mean, I think, again, anyone who’s really looked into this topic is going to have some reservations. And we’ve written in The Chronicle about instances of colleges that have really overhauled their process because professors have been swayed by the literature out there, the research literature showing that there’s at best a weak and maybe no relationship between learning as measured on student performance on exams and how students rate their professors. So “what are we measuring here” is a concern. And then also there’s a lot of evidence that students’ responses are full of implicit bias against professors, particularly women and professors of color, but other identities too. And then, you know, students are harsher on professors teaching certain kinds of courses, right? Is this course required or not? Is it quantitative or not? So, you know, just seeing some of those patterns I think would give most people working in higher education some pause. But I think the real issue here is that most people in higher education leadership aren’t really in a position to evaluate teaching in a different way. How would they do that? I mean, there isn’t an agreed upon understanding of what good teaching is. A lot of people in higher education don’t really think it’s something you can define or measure. And so this is sort of the thing everyone is doing because doing something else would be really hard.

Jack Stripling So Beckie, I think part of what we would hope for with a teaching evaluation is a well-rounded view of a professor. So you’d get a high response rate, you’d have people dispassionately evaluating professors. What’s your sense of whether that’s happening?

Beckie Supiano Good question. So let’s talk about the response rate first. That’s really important, especially if you’re doing a numerical rating, because if you’re averaging a bunch of numbers, you want to have good representation from the class. And everyone’s provided this rating. It’s not all hinging on just a few students who might have extreme, strong opinions that are leading them to fill this out.

We know that since course evaluations have moved online and are done now on students’ own time outside of class, the response rates are really low in a lot of cases. So even if this were an otherwise really good survey tool, that would be concerning. There are things that professors can do to get a better response rate, like ask students to fill it out in class. There’ve also been some experiments where instructors have given a small number of extra credit points if a certain percentage of students fill it out. There are some colleges that technically require students to fill this out. I think some of the same ones that give students access to other students’ evaluations of other courses. So there are things you could do to get a higher response rate. Those things are usually not happening. Then there’s a question of how the people who are interpreting this information, right, the professors who are hopefully looking at this to get some formative feedback about their instruction, and then the people, you know, in a department trying to decide is this person an adequate teacher or not, they should have a sense of how to interpret these results. And you know, just thinking about what do these numbers show you? What happens if you average them? What kind of comparisons are reasonable to make just statistically? Again, probably not happening on most campuses.

And even if you were doing all of those things, there is this other concern that the results with students’ feedback about their instructors is colored by bias. We have better data on this about gender than race, just because the professoriate is pretty overwhelmingly white on many campuses. So it’s hard to get good data, you know, looking at different racial groups just numerically. But we know that students are harsher on women. There’s one paper out there that shows students have gendered expectations about who teaches in their own discipline. Usually, that would mean men, but not always. It depends on what your department is, what you’re majoring in. And that students penalize professors — meaning give them harder feedback — if the professor differs from the students’ expectations, right? So basically, if students think professors in this discipline are supposed to be women, they’ll be harder on a man. If they think professors are supposed to be men, they’re harder on women. Of course, just mathematically, generally speaking, this is a penalty for women who are less represented in higher level professor roles.

Jack Stripling What do you hear about how maybe interactions with students follow this gender dynamic? Do you think there are different expectations in terms of how a woman professor might interact with a student than a male professor?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, this comes up a lot in a bunch of ways that students have different expectations and different sort of descriptive language for how they talk about professors based on gender. It kind of boils down to, in general, there seems to be a tendency for students to take men more seriously and to expect women to be more caring, kind of motherly toward them. And that’s hard to get away from. Another study on course evaluations had TAs teaching an online class. And when they told students, the TA who they never interacted with in person, was a man versus a woman, like the same interactions were rated differently, which shows there is just some deep cultural idea about what men and women are supposed to be like that’s hard for students or any of us to move away from. There’ve been other studies that have looked at, you know, can you take steps to mitigate this bias in students’ feedback? Not really. Can you train people to spot it when they’re reading the results? Also kind of not really. So this is a stubborn problem.

Jack Stripling You know, there’s part of me that looks at this skeptically and says, well, of course professors don’t like teaching evaluations. No one likes to be evaluated, least of all by a 20-year-old. I mean, God forbid. But the more you talk about it and the more I’ve read about it, the more I see that there is some real research about this that’s concerning in terms of the biases you described. We had a reader who wrote to us who said that the response on her campus had gone from something like 99 percent to 5 or 15 percent in terms of who is returning these because they’ve all gone online. I talked to a friend of mine just yesterday who’s a professor at a community college. I was asking him about this. He said, look, they’re doing this at home. I don’t know if they’re sitting around drunk deciding, you know, whether or not I’m a good professor. And there’s a lot of weight behind this. So we’re leaving this sort of controlled environment that maybe used to exist where everybody sat down and dutifully filled these out to something quite different. And it makes me think of things like TripAdvisor, where the person who is the most happy or least happy is likely to write a review of a hotel or restaurant, and the middle gets ignored. Do you see any relationship between how we evaluate hotels and restaurants and how people are evaluating professors on college campuses?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I think that comparison would probably make a lot of professors cringe, right? Because when you’re evaluating a restaurant or a hotel, it’s kind of fine, I think, for it to mainly be about if you liked it, if you felt satisfied. I mean, that’s what you’re paying for, right, is to experience those things. Is that really what we want students to be getting out of college or is it something else, right? I mean, if you think the idea is for students to have sort of the most frictionless possible experience where they go through the motions of classes and enjoy that, that’s one thing. But if we want them to learn stuff, that’s at cross purposes with enjoyment sometimes, or at least in the short term. And so, you know, it’s not just that satisfaction maybe shouldn’t be the only thing we care about; it’s that it might actually, especially when the semester’s not even over yet, just not be the right thing to look at at all. I mean, I think many of us can look back on our own educations and think about things that felt great at the time, that really ended up not being very educationally valuable. And also courses that maybe we kind of suffered through where we actually did learn a lot, but we didn’t realize it until later when we got to the next thing.

Jack Stripling I’m also struck by the idea that professors who are conscious of how the evaluation might come out might teach differently or act differently. We’ve already talked about women being expected to be mothers to students. But what about just in terms of what you’re doing in the classroom? Do you think that could be affected by the fact of knowing that students are going to evaluate you at the end?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I mean, when we asked professors for their feedback and after our colleague Beth McMurtrie wrote a story about evaluations, we invited readers to weigh in with their own experiences and several hundred of them did. And a few of them touched on this very thing, Jack, right? We heard some professors say they avoided pushing against students’ preordained opinions with facts from their course because they didn’t want to upset them, because they an eye on the fact that they were going to be evaluated. And also, you know, professors feel this pressure to be incredibly responsive. And again, professors probably should be responsive to students, but this idea of, you know, you’re going to get an instantaneous email answer in like the middle of the night when you’re studying probably isn’t really very reasonable. And in the last several years, we’ve seen professors kind of run themselves into the ground, trying to be so very responsive. And so there’s concern about that. And then, really, one of the things that worries me the most, just as a teaching beat reporter, is that professors might be disincentivized to try new teaching approaches, even ones that have very promising evidence from other instructors, because doing something new in the classroom often doesn’t go great the first time. And if you’re in an environment where you’re being judged on your results right now, with no context, then it’s much better to just do what’s expected adequately than to try something new that might be better. And so course evaluations can really be a hindrance to professors trying to improve their instruction, kind of perversely, given that they’re supposed to be giving professors feedback to improve their instruction. So one of the things we know from literature on teaching and learning is that when professors have students be more actively engaged in their learning in class, it tends to be educationally valuable. So instead of your classic model where someone is standing up on a stage giving you a lecture – in a big class, right, not a little discussion seminar – the move is instead for students to do some preparation at home before they get to class and then spend class time solving problems, often collaboratively with their classmates, with the support of the professor in the room who might be picking questions that are similar to something they’ll be expected to do on the exam, that have sort of a common stumbling point that many students will struggle with. And then the professor can walk the students through, like, oh, a bunch of you got this question wrong. Let’s look at the misunderstanding underneath that so that you understand the next time it comes around. Basically, when people have to apply something, they learn it better than if they just listened to someone talking about it. And often professors will make analogies to learning a musical instrument or playing a sport that someone could describe it to you all day long, but until you try to do it, it’s really hard to know if you can or not. So active learning has a lot of good evidence behind it. One of the things we know though, is that students don’t like it. Students don’t wanna work in groups, students don’t wanna do problems in class. Students prefer lectures in many cases, especially If someone’s good at giving one. You can hear a really nice fluid lecture. You feel great, like, oh, that was so interesting. I learned stuff. I took some notes, maybe. But that doesn’t mean any of it really stuck for you. And then, I guess, in theory, you’re supposed to go home and do those practice problems yourself and see if you can apply it. But are you really gonna do that? We know that students don’t always do that. In other words, there’s this understanding that active learning is pedagogically valuable but disliked by students. So if you’re a professor, and you’re kind of thinking like, oh, maybe I want to try doing a little bit of this active learning in my class. I’ve heard it’s really good. It helps student performance. It helps them, you know, do better in their subsequent courses. Great. But you know that students are going to dislike it and then students are going to evaluate you, and that’s going to matter for your own career trajectory. You kind of might not want to do it, even if you think it would be better for students and maybe better for you.

Jack Stripling So Beckie, you mentioned that we got feedback from some faculty members about teaching evaluations. What specifically did they share?

Beckie Supiano We heard from some 300 professors and they didn’t hold back. I’ll read you just a few examples, Jack, of the things that people wrote in to tell us. “It has generated a culture of fear and pandering to students’ whims … I spend a lot of time adding niceties to my emails so they do not accuse me of being mean or something similar.” And, “emails must be replied to at all hours and every day of the week. Constant extensions must be granted and extra help provided, even on general things like writing skills. And most importantly, I have to spend more time than ever in my career acting as emotional support for students who come to me to talk for long periods of time about personal issues and mental health crises.”

Jack Stripling Wow, so it sounds like we’re in a culture among some of these professors who feel like they really just gotta keep the customer satisfied.

Beckie Supiano Yeah, I think that is the message a lot of professors have gotten from this way of evaluating their teaching.

Jack Stripling Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling What you said about active learning and that sort of being a drag for students is interesting to me, because I can see being in a class and sort of going through drills just being exhausting, and leaving that class not feeling like it was fun. But this is probably the second or third time I’ve brought up Dead Poets Society on this podcast, but I’m gonna do it yet again. We have this Hollywood ideal of a professor who taps into something in the student, and inspires that student, and makes that student develop a love of whatever the course is about. This typically in Hollywood is set in the humanities. But, is there nothing to that? Is there no value in being an inspiring teacher?

Beckie Supiano I wouldn’t say there’s no value. I think we all like being inspired and maybe it’s helpful, but it’s different from learning.

Jack Stripling No, Beckie.

Beckie Supiano I’m sorry. It’s just like learning is hard, right? I mean, think about it, even just as a writer, does it always feel great while you’re doing it? It doesn’t. It’s work. Learning is work. It’s taxing. And we are always kind of looking, all of us, for some shortcut, right, to not have to really do the work. But at a certain point, it really is work. And sometimes just thinking back, I mean, [I] spend probably too much time re-evaluating my own education in light of what I’m learning about in my reporting now. It’s like, oh, I had some teachers and professors who I really enjoyed being in class with and I would have told you they were amazing at the time. And in retrospect, I maybe didn’t learn a ton from them or I learned some things, but not really the material they were supposed to be teaching me.

Jack Stripling Right.

Beckie Supiano And I had other instructors along the way who were not the snazziest, not the most exciting, but who really did create conditions where I actually learned the material and still know it and can use it. And I’m at a point now where I can see the value in that. And that’s kind of why I think this short term, in the moment, how’d you feel about class… I mean that tells you something. I don’t want to say student feedback isn’t important. Students can point to some real glaring problems that no one else is in a position to see, like if someone is being verbally abusive to students or just not covering the material the course is supposed to.

Jack Stripling Or super disorganized.

Beckie Supiano Something, yeah, something egregious or just something, you know, a problem like being disorganized. Like that’s a fixable problem that your department should probably know about if you’re struggling with that as an instructor.

Jack Stripling I can see how the student has sort of a limited perspective about whether the course was effective. And you’ve mentioned that there’s research out here about teaching evaluations and their effectiveness. What can you tell us about that?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, there’ve been a bunch of smaller studies trying to show: Is there a link between how students rate their professor and the students’ learning? I think typically this is looking at performance on that final exam, which students would be taking after they’ve rated their professor to see, you know, is this related? Because generally there isn’t some agreed upon sense of like, what is good teaching, other than teaching that leads to learning, right? And learning we measure usually by looking at student performance. Again, these are not perfect measures, but it’s what’s generally used.

A while back, like 2016-17, there was a meta-analysis where a team of scholars looked at all the evidence from a bunch of different studies that have been done on this and kind of got under the hood of the methodology and really tried to see like, what is this connection between how professors are evaluated, like professor’s ratings and student learning. And they concluded there’s really not a link, and that the individual studies that found one had methodological problems or other things that hadn’t really been accounted for. And the authors of that paper came down pretty hard on like, if what you’re trying to do is have good teaching that leads to learning, this isn’t the tool for you. This is really capturing student satisfaction.

Jack Stripling I feel like we should pause on this. So, a meta-analysis that looked at a lot of the other research around this, found that there’s really no correlation between how highly students rate their professors and whether they learned anything.

Beckie Supiano: That’s right.

Jack Stripling: That seems like a problem, Beckie.

Beckie Supiano I mean, it does, right? And so I think about this sometimes as a higher education reporter, right? Like there’s just some stuff that we’re all just used to. We’ve been writing about the same things for years. It’s like, oh, everyone knows this. Like if I tell — like when I talk to professors, a lot of them will say to me in an interview about their teaching, well, you know, no one really ever taught me how to teach. And I just nod along. I don’t even write that down. Like I’ve heard that eleventy billion times. I know no one probably taught this person how to teach. That’s just normal. But if I go and talk to someone who doesn’t work at a college and doesn’t think about higher ed all day and say, well, you know, most professors really have no training in education or content knowledge about it, that sounds really surprising to people who are maybe like saving up to send their kid to college or people who graduated themselves and just kind of assumed their professors knew something about teaching. But people in higher ed land know the assumption is that your content knowledge expertise is the prerequisite to being a good teacher, and the rest of it just kind of magically happens, or doesn’t.

Jack Stripling Are there colleges that are looking at these facts on the ground, understanding there might be a problem here, and trying to do something better?

Beckie Supiano There are. Yeah, it’s work. One college that’s going through this process right now is Hamilton College in New York. Maybe six or seven years ago, the University of Southern California had a big overhaul of how they evaluate teaching. And you know, there are other things you can do too. You can review someone’s course materials. You could also look at, is someone going out of their way to improve as an instructor? Colleges often provide some sort of professional development in teaching. Most professors don’t take advantage of it. The ones who do could theoretically have that incorporated into the view of how they are as an instructor. And the professors who’ve overhauled their whole course to align it better with what we know about effective teaching and learning. And sometimes it takes a few years to see good results from something like that, but you could know what someone was trying to do and why. And, you know, give them credit for that instead of the system we have now that again, kind of rewards people for just going through the motions of what’s expected and not doing something that might backfire, but that also might be better.

Jack Stripling So we know there are some places that are investing time and effort into this, but what might be standing in the way of improving this system?

Beckie Supiano Oh, it’s the usual things, Jack. It’s time and money, right? Look, colleges don’t put undergraduate education front and center from a financial standpoint. They just don’t. I mean, you see these really large enrollment courses. Is that because someone has decided that’s the best way for students to learn is to put 400 students in a room? No, it’s cost benefit analysis, right? Like you can, you can do it that way. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it, right? To come up with some other way to evaluate teaching, you would have to figure out what you think good teaching is and then spend the time and money. Like it would take professors and administrators digging into this probably more, not just putting it all on students doing free labor for you, rating their professor. And you might not always like what you find either, right? Like if you start to do a more thorough investigation about teaching and come up with some sense of good or bad teaching, you have to be prepared to take some kind of action based on that, right? And I don’t know that anyone really has the appetite to do that. The places that I know of that have changed their approach have really done it, not even so much from a concern about like, let’s provide a better educational environment — although I’m sure they’d say they care about that — it’s really been from this understanding of like, oh, this is unfair to our faculty that this is how we’re evaluating them, right? Like, maybe it would be best for students if colleges put more time and energy into providing really good learning environments that would set students up for future success. And that conversation is just kind of rare, honestly, in higher ed.

Jack Stripling And part of it being because it takes time and money to do some of these other things that you’re describing. But I wonder if it’s worth sort of closing on what might be the philosophical barriers to developing a better teaching evaluation system. There are some assumptions, I think, baked in about teaching, how it works, and whether people can actually get better at it. How might those assumptions affect whether there’s a hunger for developing a better way of evaluating teaching?

Beckie Supiano Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think most people in higher ed have kind of clear ideas about what it takes to be a successful researcher and what goes into that. There is not a comparable understanding or appreciation of teaching, right? Teaching is devalued in our society, certainly, you know, looking at how K-12 teachers are treated and thought of, generally speaking, it’s not like a high status line of work. And the idea is that if someone on the faculty really has great scholarly expertise, then that’s all it takes to be a good instructor. Students kind of sit at the feet of this content knowledge expert and absorb by osmosis their knowledge. There isn’t really any evidence to support that that’s how learning works. And we do know some stuff about learning from psychology and other related fields. We also have evidence in higher ed that good instruction does play a role in student performance. Not the only role, of course, right? Students have to show up ready to learn. They have to do the work. Faculty don’t have a magic wand. But we know that when professors actually take steps to change the way they teach, it can lead to real results. But that idea is at odds with this culture that just thinks, you know, teaching is some like God-given, natural ability. And that just being really smart and someone who did well in school yourself means that you can teach.

Jack Stripling Oh my. Well, It sounds like we would have to let go of this myth of the natural teacher in order to make a lot of progress on this. But I’m glad you’re reporting on it, Beckie, and thank you for sharing your insights about it.

Beckie Supiano Sure thing. Thanks for having me.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com.

We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.