Professionalizing college instruction: IHE article

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/all-college-professors-should-be-scholars-0

Professors, [Steven Brint] wrote, "are required to demonstrate no skills in pedagogy, no understanding of the relation between specific types of pedagogy and subject matter content, and no understanding of the aims or purposes of education. For most, college teaching is, in short, an amateur activity, performed with limited regard to effectiveness, as long as teaching evaluations are acceptably high ..."

Let's pair our demand for placing true professionals in all classes with higher standards of teaching competence and ongoing evidence of continuing professional development and professional practice.

All students who aspire to a bachelor's degree ought to be taught by a content expert and an active researcher, with the sole exception of courses offered by skilled practitioners -- artists, performers, authors, health-care providers, judges, lawyers, technologists -- who bring real-world expertise and experience into the classroom.

Thoughts on fixing the college experience by insisting that faculty members be both practitioners in their field and excellent teachers who know the discipline-based educational research in their fields?

[marshwiggle]

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/all-college-professors-should-be-scholars-0

Professors, [Steven Brint] wrote, "are required to demonstrate no skills in pedagogy, no understanding of the relation between specific types of pedagogy and subject matter content, and no understanding of the aims or purposes of education. For most, college teaching is, in short, an amateur activity, performed with limited regard to effectiveness, as long as teaching evaluations are acceptably high ..."

Let's pair our demand for placing true professionals in all classes with higher standards of teaching competence and ongoing evidence of continuing professional development and professional practice.

All students who aspire to a bachelor's degree ought to be taught by a content expert and an active researcher, with the sole exception of courses offered by skilled practitioners -- artists, performers, authors, health-care providers, judges, lawyers, technologists -- who bring real-world expertise and experience into the classroom.

Thoughts on fixing the college experience by insisting that faculty members be both practitioners in their field and excellent teachers who know the discipline-based educational research in their fields?

In some disciplines, where there is a lucrative job market outside academia, being too picky could make it hard to hire anyone. Also, as far as I know, in STEM a lot of the pedagogical research tends to focus on first year courses, (obviously, since the enrollment is high enough for statistical analysis), so the pedagogical research is thin for higher-level courses. (I stand to be corrected on that.)

In principle, I agree that profs should be aware of current pedagogical research in their disciplines.

[Hibush]

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/all-college-professors-should-be-scholars-0

Thoughts on fixing the college experience by insisting that faculty members be both practitioners in their field and excellent teachers who know the discipline-based educational research in their fields?

It is definitely possible for a school to insist on both. Hiring faculty with a commitment to become excellent teachers and supporting them with a great center for pedagogical training is one way to achieve that goal.

That approach is expensive. I expect it is one of the costs that makes Williams report an annual educational expense of $115,000 per student.

[Hegemony]

I don't think "excellent teachers" and "discipline-based educational research" go together as much as the Education people think they do. Don't we have a current thread (the latest of many) deploring the Ed.D.s and all the educational "experts"?  At my place, they've set up a whole office that marches us through workshops on how to teach. One problem with the workshops is that they're as condescending as heck — condescending to the faculty, as if we have no idea what "knowledge" is or any common sense about how to teach our subjects, and condescending to the students, who are supposed to be marched through similar assignments "reflecting on their learning process" and "analyzing their learning styles" and all that. Our syllabi are now so jammed full of required palaver (half a page on what an A grade means, half a page on what an A- means, and so on) that they're up to 20 pages and students read them even less than they did before. And every four or five years a new educational philosophy comes down the pike and we are marched through a new set of trainings and compelled to write up a whole new set of documents about our learning process and our teaching process and our assignment process and our assessment process and on and on. Bah, humbug.

[dismalist]

The continued infantilization of ... us.

[downer]

From the article:

But we also need to do something more: we need to hold ourselves to higher professional standards.

What you mean 'we,' kemosabe?

[Puget]

I don't think "excellent teachers" and "discipline-based educational research" go together as much as the Education people think they do. Don't we have a current thread (the latest of many) deploring the Ed.D.s and all the educational "experts"?  At my place, they've set up a whole office that marches us through workshops on how to teach. One problem with the workshops is that they're as condescending as heck — condescending to the faculty, as if we have no idea what "knowledge" is or any common sense about how to teach our subjects, and condescending to the students, who are supposed to be marched through similar assignments "reflecting on their learning process" and "analyzing their learning styles" and all that. Our syllabi are now so jammed full of required palaver (half a page on what an A grade means, half a page on what an A- means, and so on) that they're up to 20 pages and students read them even less than they did before. And every four or five years a new educational philosophy comes down the pike and we are marched through a new set of trainings and compelled to write up a whole new set of documents about our learning process and our teaching process and our assignment process and our assessment process and on and on. Bah, humbug.

As someone in a field that actually studies learning and memory with, you know, real science, I have to agree. I am sworn by a solemn oath to my field to explain there aint no such thing any time someone starts talking about "learning styles" among other things. This makes me an annoying person to the "education experts".

Our "center for teaching and learning" did an online teaching institute this summer that was so bad and condescending (without actually covering what we needed, which was specific tech solutions of online teaching) that it nearly caused a revolt and resulted in some half-assed semi-apologies about how they would do a better job of "listening to and respecting faculty" in the future. At least they paid us for it.

The person teaching it had a PhD in English, not an EdD by the way, but someone with a PhD in English should not, under any circumstances, try to explain the effects of stress on the brain to a bunch of psychologists some of whom are experts on exactly that. That person should definitely not then ignore comments from the participants suggesting that she allow the actual experts in the (zoom) room to speak to that point and instead continue with her incorrect script. It was really a brilliant display of both Dunning-Kruger and really poor social cognition.

[TreadingLife]

What gets me are the pathetic sample sizes and the complete lack of replication studies to support the original "findings".

Active learning may be great, but is it really better than traditional lecture in terms of outcomes? I haven't seen enough evidence that it is, despite the push in most "teaching and learning centers" to move faculty away from the traditional lecture format. Show me the data.

Don't bring an anecdote to a data fight.

[mahagonny]

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/all-college-professors-should-be-scholars-0

Professors, [Steven Brint] wrote, "are required to demonstrate no skills in pedagogy, no understanding of the relation between specific types of pedagogy and subject matter content, and no understanding of the aims or purposes of education. For most, college teaching is, in short, an amateur activity, performed with limited regard to effectiveness, as long as teaching evaluations are acceptably high ..."

Let's pair our demand for placing true professionals in all classes with higher standards of teaching competence and ongoing evidence of continuing professional development and professional practice.

All students who aspire to a bachelor's degree ought to be taught by a content expert and an active researcher, with the sole exception of courses offered by skilled practitioners -- artists, performers, authors, health-care providers, judges, lawyers, technologists -- who bring real-world expertise and experience into the classroom.

Thoughts on fixing the college experience by insisting that faculty members be both practitioners in their field and excellent teachers who know the discipline-based educational research in their fields?

Yes. You can get all the fancy ideas you want, but you'll be lucky if you get the same service this year that you got last years with what you're paying.

[OneMoreYear]

[snip]
As someone in a field that actually studies learning and memory with, you know, real science, I have to agree. I am sworn by a solemn oath to my field to explain there aint no such thing any time someone starts talking about "learning styles" among other things. This makes me an annoying person to the "education experts".
[snip]

This summer, I was required to participate in a training in which we had to 1) identity our own learning styles, 2) talk about how we would use the insight into our own learning styles to teach our students, 3) discuss how our students' learning styles would affect their learning in our classes, and 4) identify how we would adapt our classes to reach students with diverse learning styles.  I discovered that they are still teaching "learning styles" in our education department.  It was crystal clear to me that it would be inappropriate to bring up the complete lack of empirical support for "learning styles" during this training, given that empirical support apparently was not a requirement for anything discussed in the training.  Thus, I finally just started giving my answers regarding "learning preferences" rather than "learning styles" to get through the training without saying anything that would get me fired..

[mahagonny]

Here's an idea that would improve the student experience and save lots of money, and probably upend the whole system if it were implemented: understand that the PhD is no substitute for practitioner skill and accomplishment in performance related majors. fine arts. The million ($20million, adjusted for inflation) dollar mistake guy with the PhD who claims to play the tuba, or know how to paint or act, but can't, but knows how to navigate through the system deftly leaves a long trail of confused, disappointed students. Or develops an embouchure problem right after getting tenure so he won't have to practice any more.

on edit: And while we're at it, how many schools even want better learning outcomes? I find just as often they want a dumbed down curriculum to shuttle students through. Ka-ching!

[PScientist]

What gets me are the pathetic sample sizes and the complete lack of replication studies to support the original "findings".

Active learning may be great, but is it really better than traditional lecture in terms of outcomes? I haven't seen enough evidence that it is, despite the push in most "teaching and learning centers" to move faculty away from the traditional lecture format. Show me the data.

Don't bring an anecdote to a data fight.

I am certain that it depends on your discipline and the learning outcomes that you are trying to achieve, but a large effect is very well documented in a widely-replicated survey that measures conceptual understanding of Newton's laws of motion in physics.  Here is the classic paper: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED441679 .

[Hegemony]

Our "center for teaching and learning" did an online teaching institute this summer that was so bad and condescending (without actually covering what we needed, which was specific tech solutions of online teaching) that it nearly caused a revolt and resulted in some half-assed semi-apologies about how they would do a better job of "listening to and respecting faculty" in the future. At least they paid us for it.

The person teaching it had a PhD in English, not an EdD by the way, but someone with a PhD in English should not, under any circumstances, try to explain the effects of stress on the brain to a bunch of psychologists some of whom are experts on exactly that. That person should definitely not then ignore comments from the participants suggesting that she allow the actual experts in the (zoom) room to speak to that point and instead continue with her incorrect script. It was really a brilliant display of both Dunning-Kruger and really poor social cognition.

Puget, I genuinely think we may be at the same university. I wonder if we know each other in Real Life. I did that same teaching institute led by someone with a PhD in English, with the same complete lack of specific tech instructions which was what we all actually needed. At least we were paid, but we were not paid enough to endure that. It was an utter, infuriating waste of time.

I actually said to one of the underling officiants in the training — someone who has been here longer than most of the folks leading it — as I was asked to fill out yet another worksheet aligning simplistic learning objectives with simplistic condescending assignments, I said, "Look, I have been teaching for more than thirty years. And I know what would make my teaching better, if I only had time to do it. I would go through all the times I mention a certain difficult concept, and scaffold them so the students could get a better running start at the idea, and then I'd devise some low-stakes assignments to make sure they had a grip on it. And I'd read that new book by Smith that probably summarizes a lot of this better than the old book by Jones, and then I'd take out Jones and put Smith on the reading list, and then redo the bank of test questions to reflect Smith's approach. And I'd straighten out that PowerPoint that I put together at the last minute, and that every year I think, 'This is crummy, I should redo this one.' I would do all of these things before I would fill out this set of documents on simplistic learning objectives." And the underling looked to see if anyone was watching, and then rolled his eyes and said, "I totally know what you mean. But they make us do it."

Which is to say, I feel your pain.

[spork]

Nothing will change as long as scholarly productivity is the coin of the realm for academia. Training in good teaching ought to be a mandatory part of any doctoral program that supplies, or thinks it supplies, college instructors. But it's not and won't be.

[marshwiggle]

What gets me are the pathetic sample sizes and the complete lack of replication studies to support the original "findings".

Active learning may be great, but is it really better than traditional lecture in terms of outcomes? I haven't seen enough evidence that it is, despite the push in most "teaching and learning centers" to move faculty away from the traditional lecture format. Show me the data.

Don't bring an anecdote to a data fight.

I am certain that it depends on your discipline and the learning outcomes that you are trying to achieve, but a large effect is very well documented in a widely-replicated survey that measures conceptual understanding of Newton's laws of motion in physics.  Here is the classic paper: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED441679 .

This is what I was referring to when I said:

Also, as far as I know, in STEM a lot of the pedagogical research tends to focus on first year courses, (obviously, since the enrollment is high enough for statistical analysis), so the pedagogical research is thin for higher-level courses. (I stand to be corrected on that.)

The research is scientifically valid, but it is very discipline-specific, and as far as I know it is essentially limited to mostly introductory courses, so higher level courses with more abstract concepts and more cognitive load are more uncharted territory.

On an aside, Teaching and Learning at my university has never herded faculty into some sort of generic "training session". All of their activities are voluntary, and there has always been the understanding that instructors will have to evaluate for themselves what techniques and tools might work for them and how. (And in case anyone is wondering, they're always open to both full- and part-time faculty. And free.)

Just by way of saying that, like anything else, it can be done well or poorly.