How to explain the difference between college/high school...professor/teacher

[Mercudenton]

I was looking around the web to find a good resource to explain how teaching/learning at college is different to high school.

I was struck that although you can find a reasonable summary of what is different from the student perspective (along the lines of your on your own now/more responsibility/more self-study etc, it is harder to find meaningful discussions of the difference from the point of view of the instructor.

Indeed, surprisingly, a few people who have tried to articulate the difference seem to find no-one agrees with them. I'm thinking of Alexander H. Bolyanat who a few years ago tried to explain why he didn't like students calling him "teacher" (https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/02/07/professor-explains-why-he-asks-not-be-called-teacher-essay  ) -- not, he insisted, because he wanted to feel superior but because he didn't think it helpful to students' learning to continue to use a term that triggered in them a mental image of high school. The comments on the article were almost universally negative -- telling him to get over himself, focus on more important things, and explaining that teaching is very important and if didn't like it he should get a job at an R1 university (which seemed like the academic equivalent of telling someone if they don't like some aspect of contemporary America government policy they should move to North Korea). Other articles seem to move along the same lines of insisting we should all be happy to call ourselves teachers and stop using the other hoity-toity words. e.g.  https://www.iceinstitute.org/blog/2018/6/18/which-are-you-professor-lecturer-instructor-or-teacher

I found this very frustrating, since I don't think anyone is trying to deny that teaching is important -- unless, perhaps, you are at an R1 institution. But the question is how is the nature of that teaching different between a university faculty member who teaches and someone who is an upper-case T Teacher in a school. I know the distinction is not hard and fast (there will always be someone who says my xth grade teacher was better than any college professor I had), but as a rule surely we can admit there is something different going on and that people with PhDs will teach qualitatively differently? If not, how can we justify asking students to spend money to go to college?


I'm not talking about "methods" or styles or strategies of teaching; nor am I necessarily talking about the obvious fact that faculty will teach more difficult or complex subjects. Indeed my primary frame of reference is my own heavy load of the basic survey class (with content outside of my research area, so the answer can't be that I'm teaching stuff I've studied in-depth at grad school). Students regularly tell me they enjoyed it because I taught it so differently to how they had learnt the same stuff at high school. What I'm looking for is what is the difference (which I don't think is something unique to me) and most importantly how to explain it?

Why is all this important?  I think four reasons:

1. The more that full-time faculty with terminal degrees and an ongoing commitment to some kind of scholarly engagement (reading widely if not research) are marginalized for adjuncts, the more it behooves us to find ways to explain why "instructors" are not all created "equal" (and by equal I am not talking in any way about "social or professional status" but just difference. I think we need to be better at explaining this difference.

2. The more HE becomes influenced by learning outcomes the more we essentially create the equivalent of State common standards like High Schools. We need ways to explain why higher education is intentionally more open-ended than this.

3. As Bolyanat argued, I do think that language matters in setting cultural expectations. Sure, whether a student says teacher or professor may not in itself make a huge difference in itself, but it might be symptomatic of a broader issue. Indeed, when I first moved to the US I was shocked to hear my college students calling assignments "homework" -- a word that no-one in the country in which I was educated used beyond high school. Again, how significant is it? Well kind of -- since language does (as the postmodernists have surely taught us) help define reality, and if "homework" is how students see assignments, then they will give it homework amounts of time, when they should really be doing more work out of class than in.

4. Finally, centers for learning and teaching often draw their advice from educational theory. We are often advised to (and I paraphrase) mix it up in our teaching styles and avoid the mere dull impartation of knowledge, sage on the stage etc. I've come to wonder how much of this is a reaction against schoolish approaches (again not that teachers are all dull, but that common standards and sheer volume of classes etc. probably conspire to make it a much more wooden experience and force even the most creative teacher to teach more to the test). But what if the kind of teaching potentially produced by people with PhDs (I say potentially because I'm not denying that everyone needs practice and experience and growth in their communication skills) is already qualitatively different from this stereotype of a lecture in which bits of undigested facts are served up cold? What if there is something essentially different even when we are pursuing an old-fashioned lecture -- because it is more... I don't know, edgy, iconoclastic, revisionist, provocative and yes, even a bit self-confident and  occasionally perhaps even a little bit arrogant and controversial (since a professor being someone who actually has an argument to make and something to profess) than you'd ever get in high school... then are we being unnecessarily encouraged to spice up our lecture with pedagogical techniques based on a false presumption of what we actually do and thus a wrong diagnosis of what the problem might be?

[mahagonny]

1. The more that full-time faculty with terminal degrees and an ongoing commitment to some kind of scholarly engagement (reading widely if not research) are marginalized for adjuncts, the more it behooves us to find ways to explain why "instructors" are not all created "equal" (and by equal I am not talking in any way about "social or professional status" but just difference. I think we need to be better at explaining this difference.

Yet, if you read the fora regularly you'd get the impression that adjunct faculty are very few.

By 'we' you certainly mean the 'regular' faculty, the tenure track faculty, should be doing the explaining to the students what the difference between adjunct and tenure track professor is. But if, as you say, full time people are being marginalized for adjuncts, then from the student's perspective (oh, yeah I remember them...the students) the adjunct is more and more the norm. So why not let the student find out first hand by talking to the adjunct professor what his training, ongoing development, relationship to the employer and the academic community, lifestyle, etc. are?

It continues to amaze me how much tenure track faculty on the fora claim to know about us, whereas in real life, the chair who wants a relationship is the exception.

Well, here's a reason. Job security. One of the most persistent parts of the experience of teaching as an adjunct is the sense of being a terminal outsider. Having tenured people be at liberty to explain to students what we are as opposed to what they are, without that opportunity ourselves, underscores the 'outsider' experience. The icing on the shit-cake.

In addition, any explanation from the tenure track is likely to be informed in some way by some form of umbrage about the theory of tenure itself being chronically threatened by corporatization. It always comes out sounding like a tenure track cheerleading team.

[Mercudenton]

I wasn't really trying to talk about the contrast between an adjunct and full-time faculty -- more the difference between high school/teacher and full-time faculty.

I can see I probably opened up this alternative question by my first observation, however. Since I'm primarily interested in the question of what makes higher education education different to high school (and what makes a professor different to a teacher) I didn't actually mean to imply a qualitative difference between a hypothetical adjunct and a hypothetical full-time faculty. So by "we" I did not actually mean just full-time faculty, I meant many any faculty who are trying to model something in higher education teaching different to other forms of pedagogy. Adjuncts are included in my "we".


Instead my point was that absent a concerted attempt at educating administration about how higher education is different to other forms of education, I wonder if it is the high school model that comes to mind when administration think about what teaching they need. This means they simply think about a straightforward delivery of "content" mechanism and do not ever think that the freedom to innovate, disrupt or be risky -- i.e. what I think is the essence of higher ed teaching -- will never be achieved with adjuncts, for precisely the reasons you suggest regarding job insecurity and "outsider" status.  In other words, its the failure to imagine higher education teaching properly that leads to such poor treatment of adjuncts.

This might be what you were saying, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't coming across as saying "adjuncts don't teach well" and full-time faculty do. To this end, I should probably have phrased the sentence "all instructors are not created equal" better to avoid that impression, as on reflecting that is not quite what I meant. Perhaps I really meant "all instructional contracts are not created equal".

[mahagonny]

This might be what you were saying, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't coming across as saying "adjuncts don't teach well" and full-time faculty do. To this end, I should probably have phrased the sentence "all instructors are not created equal" better to avoid that impression, as on reflecting that is not quite what I meant. Perhaps I really meant "all instructional contracts are not created equal".

Teaching quality never being objectively measured, 'good teaching' in higher education is generally assumed to be that which is being done by 'regular' faculty (tenure track). Everything is measured against that idea. Adjuncts are declared to be good teachers when the thought process is 'they are teaching nearly as well as the regular faculty do in many cases.' It's a mindset that allows for a lot of guessing. It's the account generally given by the insiders.
In some fields, the guy with the PhD can be the one who stayed in college the longest while others were having success in the field and this did not have time for more education. Now that he has a full time teaching position, that's his whole world.

I wasn't really trying to talk about the contrast between an adjunct and full-time faculty -- more the difference between high school/teacher and full-time faculty.

That's the primary difference though. The college teacher, unlike the high school teacher, is likely to be an outsider in the workplace. A 'part time'  'temporary' employee, year after year. If he works for the state university, he also likely has a statement in his contract proclaiming that he's not an employee of the state. that statement, of course, comes from his employer, the state.
Now, if your project is to explain what the college teacher should be, the endgame is pretty predictable. It will be calls for more hiring on the tenure track. A steady supply of these calls has been an integral part of the status quo for the last 30 years as it keeps an adjunct contingent in tow for added talent and cost savings, thus, freeing up enough funding to hire the 'regular faculty,' the ones you are thinking about, the ones who will be shown to the public on the college webpage.

[Caracal]

I understand part of what you are trying to articulate and agree with you about some of it, but I don't really think it helps to try to draw some sharp distinction between teaching and professing. I'm fine with being referred to as a teacher. I wouldn't want my students to address me as teacher-"Teacher, Teacher may I use the bathroom"-but I doubt K-12 teachers love that either.

I'm with you on teaching fads. We've had this discussion here, and part of the problem is that terms like flipped classroom which describe something very particular in STEM fields, don't actually make much sense in the humanities. Most of the people who like to complain about how terrible lectures are seem to have very little idea of what the point of a lecture is, or how it can be used to engage students and promote discussion.

Broadly, however, what a lot of this misses is that good college teaching is mostly about figuring out how to leverage your strengths and balance that with with other considerations. I don't do as much group work or structured discussions as some people I know, because I'm just not very at facilitating that stuff in class. I do some of it, bu I'm not good enough at it to make it the basis of my teaching. I'm not sure that is any different than good high school teaching. Most of us do better if we can figure out a way to do our jobs that lets us do more of what we are good at, and less of what we aren't.

[AvidReader]

As someone who has taught extensively in both (private) secondary school and as an adjunct (and also as a dual enrollment instructor) I feel uniquely qualified to respond to this, but my experiences might be different than others', of course. But I am responding to the original post more than to the subsequent discussion.

1. Names are irrelevant to me. My secondary students called me Dr. Reader. My university students usually call me Dr. Reader, and sometimes Teacher (or Miss), but it seems to be regional/cultural more than anything else. I think it stayed more consistent in secondary classes because the students discussed me across the student body, so new students didn't need to learn my name. I do point out to my college students, early on, that they no longer need to ask to use the bathroom, which seems to be a hard transition for them.

2. There is extensive oversight at the high school level: I submitted syllabi and weekly lesson plans, had quarterly observations, etc. The texts were set and hard to change, and objectives very detailed (50+ per class), so I had less flexibility in content. As an adjunct, I usually had one observation each year, and a set textbook, but the objectives were more flexible, and it was up to me to determine how to apply them to class content. At a public high school, I think more time would be dedicated to test preparation, which could certainly affect teaching style.

3. Much of my time in secondary was spent helping parents figure out ways to make their students do work. At college, there are far fewer parents. Parent meetings are the biggest reason I left secondary school teaching. Training students to work independently is part of my lesson plans for introductory college classes.

4. I did feel I got to know students better in secondary school, both through teaching many students for multiple years and also because the contact hours are far higher.

5. Teaching duties extend outside the classroom in secondary school: hall monitor, lunch monitor, arrival and dismissal monitor, sports games (recommended, not required), open house, parent meetings, etc.

6. There is more "busy work" in secondary teaching. I couldn't cancel classes for a week to meet individually with students, so any sort of independent consultations required me to find an interruptable activity that would allow me to supervise the whole class while carrying on the meetings. But otherwise, I run my classrooms very similarly in both types of schools, with a mix of lecture, activities designed to reinforce the lecture, and discussions. I have heard from students that my classes are not like the high school classes they encountered, but aside from the busy work, I don't know how.

7. I had substantially more free time as an adjunct. In 4 years of secondary teaching, I taught 6-8 classes during school hours and graded for 3-5 hours every evening (and usually a full day on the weekend) to keep up. In 4 years, I attended 2 conferences and scraped out one article, and nothing I produced was as polished as I would have liked. In my first year of adjuncting (5/5/2 at 3 different universities, with 5/2/1 preps), I attended 2 conferences, wrote a full draft of my book manuscript, and fully revised an article that had been languishing for 5 years. My scholarly engagement more than doubled.

AR.

[polly_mer]

The biggest difference I see is the existence of majors versus gen ed.

Gen ed is very much like high school.  Individual courses belong to each teacher and add up to a nebulous 'liberals arts' intro.

The major courses involve acculturating aspiring professionals to the norms of being an engineer, historian, etc.  Specific content is a means to learn to think like the desired professional.  While a good bit of content is essential to the specialized background for the practitioner, the biggest differentiator is the shared techniques and mindset of the professional.

Adjuncts in gen ed are really teachers, just like high school.  Practitioners in the field teaching one course for the major are helping meld theory and practice for the novice to the field, that's professing which is teaching content and socializing the novice to the norms of the field.

[downer]

The variety of different kinds of high schools and different kinds of colleges means that the goal of "the difference" is unachievable. Especially if you look at it in international context.

The answers you get will just refect the personal hobby horses of indivual posters.

[Mercudenton]

Now, if your project is to explain what the college teacher should be, the endgame is pretty predictable. It will be calls for more hiring on the tenure track. A steady supply of these calls has been an integral part of the status quo for the last 30 years as it keeps an adjunct contingent in tow for added talent and cost savings, thus, freeing up enough funding to hire the 'regular faculty,' the ones you are thinking about, the ones who will be shown to the public on the college webpage.

I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you that the contractual status of "adjunct" does indeed mean being an "outsider". But as I tried to explain the previous post, I'm not actually just thinking of "regular faculty" when I pose this question. I'm not really thinking of individuals at all, but of the actual ontological nature of the teaching. So not how are college teachers different to high school teachers but how is college teaching different?  What is qualitatively different about college level teaching? Inevitably I do think this has to be linked to the question of "what is different about the way people with terminal research degrees teach their subject" so if we are defining adjuncts as people without such degrees then maybe the distinction is fair; but as you know lots of adjuncts do have this and remain research active and engaged in contemporary debates in their fields.

[Mercudenton]

I understand part of what you are trying to articulate and agree with you about some of it, but I don't really think it helps to try to draw some sharp distinction between teaching and professing. I'm fine with being referred to as a teacher. I wouldn't want my students to address me as teacher-"Teacher, Teacher may I use the bathroom"-but I doubt K-12 teachers love that either.

But surely it must make some sense? Surely college is qualitatively different experience? Why am I a college professor who is qualified to teach in higher education but not in school?

As I tried to say in the opening post, it's not really about my preference for what I'm called that's at stake. Call me Al - I don't care. It's rather about thinking how language reveals cultural expectations and attitudes.

I understand that me, you,  the high school teacher, Jesus and Confucius all could be labelled teacher. But we're not all Teachers. So what is the difference?

But I guess I don't really want to get caught up on the question of terminology as it is probably a dead end. Even if we say we are all teachers, what kind of teachers? Do we teach differently? What is the nature of this difference, and how do we explain it?

[Mercudenton]

As someone who has taught extensively in both (private) secondary school and as an adjunct (and also as a dual enrollment instructor) I feel uniquely qualified to respond to this, but my experiences might be different than others', of course. But I am responding to the original post more than to the subsequent discussion.

AR - thanks, these are all good distinctions. I feel that they tend to focus on structural  differences, though, whereas I'm trying to get to think about the actual nature of the pedagogy. I know these structural differences do feed into that, and they can't entirely be separated but I'm still interested in the question of how we would define (albeit in theory) the difference between what a college professor does and what a high school teacher does in terms of their actual teaching content, methodology, and teleology. And I know this might be discipline specific, which makes it tricky to generalize.

[Mercudenton]

The biggest difference I see is the existence of majors versus gen ed.

Gen ed is very much like high school.  Individual courses belong to each teacher and add up to a nebulous 'liberals arts' intro.]

Maybe, but I'd resist this not least because I spend a lot of my time (as  full-time tenured professor) teaching gen ed and I don' t think what I do is much like high school at all. I know gen ed is not always realized in its ideal form and you're probably right it does indeed sometimes even often does seem just like an extension of high school, but I think this is not inherent in it.

For example, in my gen ed in world history I devote a considerably time to the history of race and racism. From my students' feedback, I sense they've never done anything like this in a history high school class - i.e. an approach to history that explores the ideological construction of a concept over time (rather than "the history of slavery" or  "the history of a particular 'racial' group"). Perhaps I'm over-achieving int he gen ed. but this is the only time students will ever get any history, and so it seems gen eds should actually import -- albeit in simplified form -- a lot of the taste of the Major which marks out college from highs school.

So I guess from my own personal experience -- 300 gen ed students a year compared to 15 Majors -- I'm not happy to mark the difference as existing only in the Major.

[mahagonny]

Now, if your project is to explain what the college teacher should be, the endgame is pretty predictable. It will be calls for more hiring on the tenure track. A steady supply of these calls has been an integral part of the status quo for the last 30 years as it keeps an adjunct contingent in tow for added talent and cost savings, thus, freeing up enough funding to hire the 'regular faculty,' the ones you are thinking about, the ones who will be shown to the public on the college webpage.

I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you that the contractual status of "adjunct" does indeed mean being an "outsider". But as I tried to explain the previous post, I'm not actually just thinking of "regular faculty" when I pose this question. I'm not really thinking of individuals at all, but of the actual ontological nature of the teaching. So not how are college teachers different to high school teachers but how is college teaching different?  What is qualitatively different about college level teaching? Inevitably I do think this has to be linked to the question of "what is different about the way people with terminal research degrees teach their subject" so if we are defining adjuncts as people without such degrees then maybe the distinction is fair; but as you know lots of adjuncts do have this and remain research active and engaged in contemporary debates in their fields.

Some of it's not that different, or not different at all, and indeed we have a core course in my field lately that is similar to something that was offered in my high school but with less rigor and moving much slower. It is taught by full time faculty. I don't see how the terminal degree makes a difference in that situation. It's boilerplate, basic, fundamental stuff. Some of it's new age-y kind of stuff and in my opinion even way too light on fundamentals.
You seem to be saying the mere fact that someone has a terminal degree makes the experience different for students, whereas I'm saying the instructor's work conditions (which can be downright shitty sometimes) affect the experience of the kid sitting in the class. I think we are both right some of the time. But I recently asked around the forum whether the experience of getting the PhD was a life transforming event, and I was surprised at how many said 'eh...not that much.'

Adjuncts in gen ed are really teachers, just like high school.  Practitioners in the field teaching one course for the major are helping meld theory and practice for the novice to the field, that's professing which is teaching content and socializing the novice to the norms of the field.

Agreed, but why would it affect the student experience how many courses this adjunct is teaching? is it because that is the type of adjunct professor whose life choices you approve of?

The variety of different kinds of high schools and different kinds of colleges means that the goal of "the difference" is unachievable. Especially if you look at it in international context.

The answers you get will just refect the personal hobby horses of indivual posters.

Substandard teaching conditions for adjunct faculty is a well known thing. No space or pay   for meeting with students after class, etc. No computers. Some academics have apathy as their hobby horse.

[polly_mer]

Adjuncts in gen ed are really teachers, just like high school.  Practitioners in the field teaching one course for the major are helping meld theory and practice for the novice to the field, that's professing which is teaching content and socializing the novice to the norms of the field.

Why would it affect the student experience how many courses this adjunct is teaching?

A chemical engineer who is helping novices learn thermodynamics as relevant to the practice of separations could be very different in mindset than the teacher who is trying to make their course relevant to the general population.

There's a hugely different mindset between

'you students will master this to become successful in your field.  Failing this class means you don't get to progress to being a professional'

and

a South Park Mr. Mackey assertion of "This is really important, m'kay.  Racism is bad, m'kay, so we're going to do something in this class, m'kay, that is only for this class.  So take it seriously, m'kay, because this is my job to teach you something that is really important.  Somehow we didn't bother during mandatory K-12, m'kay, and you could have avoided this particular class by taking any of the couple dozen other courses in this gen ed category so you wouldn't have to be exposed to these really important particular ideas that few of the adults in your community know in this academic sense."


The point isn't the exact number of classes for a given faculty member.  The point is whether someone is a historian, musician, engineer etc. who teaches the novices in their particular field or whether that someone is a teacher who specializes in history, music, etc. subject matter  at the college level for the masses, most of whom are taking a convenient one-off to check a gen ed box.

[mahagonny]

Adjuncts in gen ed are really teachers, just like high school.  Practitioners in the field teaching one course for the major are helping meld theory and practice for the novice to the field, that's professing which is teaching content and socializing the novice to the norms of the field.

Why would it affect the student experience how many courses this adjunct is teaching?

A chemical engineer who is helping novices learn thermodynamics as relevant to the practice of separations could be very different in mindset than the teacher who is trying to make their course relevant to the general population.

There's a hugely different mindset between

'you students will master this to become successful in your field.  Failing this class means you don't get to progress to being a professional'

and

a South Park Mr. Mackey assertion of "This is really important, m'kay.  Racism is bad, m'kay, so we're going to do something in this class, m'kay, that is only for this class.  So take it seriously, m'kay, because this is my job to teach you something that is really important.  Somehow we didn't bother during mandatory K-12, m'kay, and you could have avoided this particular class by taking any of the couple dozen other courses in this gen ed category so you wouldn't have to be exposed to these really important particular ideas that few of the adults in your community know in this academic sense."


The point isn't the exact number of classes for a given faculty member.  The point is whether someone is a historian, musician, engineer etc. who teaches the novices in their particular field or whether that someone is a teacher who specializes in history, music, etc. subject matter  at the college level for the masses, most of whom are taking a convenient one-off to check a gen ed box.

OK I guess. You're differentiating the adjunct who is there because he knows how to teach something. The full time faculty could do it, but they're busy with other things. As opposed to an adjunct who's understood to bring expertise to the department that wouldn't be there otherwise. Who is therefore less like the high school teacher. Maybe that's what you mean.