Archive for the 'Teaching and Learning' Category

An interesting message for students?

Published on July 10, 2010 in First Year Seminar and Teaching and Learning. 1 Comment

Registration for our first year students began this week, and with it, my interest in enrolling students in the First Year Seminar I teach who really want to be there. For an FSEM to reach its potential to be more than just another freshman class, the students need to buy in to the premise that the purpose of the course is neither grades nor credits but to introduce new students to the best that education can be: real school.

This challenge has become noticeably more difficult since the FSEM became a requirement, rather than an opportunity. We need to find a way around this difficulty. The last time I taught an FSEM, the first day of class as we were introducing ourselves, one student announced:

I want to tell you that I have no interest at all in the topic of this course, that the only reason I’m taking it was that it was the last open FSEM when I registered. I hope you won’t hold my honesty against me!

I’ve thought a lot about this student since that day nearly two years ago. It was as if she was looking for an ‘excused absence’ from the engagement that I hope for in my students. From conversation over the term I inferred that she would be happy earning a minimal passing grade, as long as I didn’t expect her to buy into the course in the way I clearly did. On the one hand, I appreciate her honesty since I am sure that from time to time there are other students who choose to stay unengaged, but do so as unobtrusively as possible. But on the other hand, what am I supposed to do with a student who doesn’t want to be there, who really isn’t willing to ‘take’ the course in more than a superficial way, not the way it was intended. More generally, what should a teacher do with a student who has no interest in a course, but must take it to satisfy a requirement?

Enter Gardner’s intriguing post of the other day. Gardner posits that

[T]he strategic foundation for learning is interest, a particular kind of intrinsic motivation that manifests as openness to new ideas, a willingness to be in conversation, a genuine reaching-out to the unfamiliar and sometimes even the daunting or repellent. A penchant for wanting to know. A habit of inquiry.

Gardner references Paul Silvia’s work on interest. For me, the money quote from Gardner’s post is

[I]nterest is far from simple, … acquiring the ability to make something interesting to oneself is one of the highest metacognitive capacities we can develop.

What I infer is that the common view of interest as something that either happens to you or not is not accurate, that interest is something that can be fanned like a spark into a flame, and that it’s even possibly to enhance one’s own interest in a topic.

If this is true, then it rules out any ‘excused absence’ for students who lack an interest in the topic of a course; Rather, it demands that they develop an interest. It also suggests that learning how to fan the flame is an important tool for teachers to master. I look forward to Gardner’s fleshing out of this notion, preferably with practical suggestions! No pressure, Gardo.

Engagement vs. Grades

Published on January 26, 2010 in Teaching and Learning and What is Education?. 2 Comments

I am still surfing on the wave of energy I picked up from attending the Educause Learning Initiative 2010 Annual Meetings last week. As Gardner Campbell has said, faculty development is not a frill, but rather the oxygen academics need to breath. (Someone retold this quote in a session I attended though Gardner himself was elsewhere, and of course, I’d heard Gardner say it before.) I still have much to process before I blog on the conference itself, but the energizing made me pick up something the other day that I need to just put out there.

At my institution’s State of the University address two weeks ago (another subject I need to blog about), we learned that the new watchword is productivity, as measured in particular by retention and graduation rates. I understand metrics, but I wonder if these two illuminate or obscure problems.

As a macro economist, I am very sensitive to what we call “aggregation error.” When you look at the big picture, say by computing an average, you always lose information. Aggregation error asks: Does the average accurately characterize the group? Imagine a group consisting of half poor people and half rich people. The average suggests the group is middle income, which is completely misleading. That’s aggregation error. If the government asked ‘Do we have a poverty problem?’ the answer based on the average income would be ‘no’. And it would be wrong.

One key to student success in higher education appears to be engagement, and student engagement has become a big issue–look at the growing importance of the NSSE, etc. I want to teach students who are engaged in the topic we’re studying. I would rather teach someone who cares about their learning, than one who gets good grades without caring. Perhaps I have a personal bias here. I never thought much about grades in college. I cared about learning and I worked hard and let the grades fall where they may. I was not an A student, but I learned more than many of my friends who were. (One example: I tutored friends who ended up with better grades than I, but didn’t necessarily understand more.)

Inside Higher Education recently reported on a fascinating study about the relation between grades and engagement. It’s commonly understood that grades, engagement, and most importantly learning are positively correlated. The study confirms that grades improve with a student’s engagement, but finds also that the result isn’t necessarily ‘high’ grades. Engagement causes progress, better grades (and thus better “student outcomes”), but not necessarily ‘high’ grades. Engagement is a good proxy for learning, but grades are only a weak proxy, a point I’ve stressed before. The study points out that earning high grades doesn’t necessarily mean one is engaged. As a consequence, using grades to measure engagement is a type of aggregation error.

While organizations necessarily look at aggregate data as metrics, we must not forget that students are individuals, and the institution needs to treat them (and provide support for them) as such. One size doesn’t fit all.

The most important job of a university teacher is designing the learning environment

Published on January 8, 2010 in Assessment & Grading, Teaching and Learning, The Future of Higher Education and What is Education?. 4 Comments Tags: ELI2010.

What does a teacher at the university level do? This is a question I’ve pondered for some time, as I’ve been following changes in higher education, for example, the growth in the for-profit sector, and the growth in on-line learning. There seems to be a growing trend for instructors to be assigned to teach courses they didn’t design; rather, the instructors are simply plugged into a course, given a syllabus and told which text to use. They may not even create the exams. This trend, which I find disturbing, is part of the process of commodifying teaching. The role of the instructor seems to be limited to presenting content, and often but not always, doing the grading. While I can see some advantages to this trend (for example, cost efficiencies, tighter rein on what is taught which is important for prerequisite courses) I wonder what it does to learning. My fear is that it reinforces the transactional notion of education as a collection of facts to be transferred to the student. This transfer is then stamped with the certification of a grade, credits earned, a degree, etc. But is it education?

When I was a new teacher, I saw my role as the provider of course content (through lectures), and the examiner to see how much content was assimilated by each student. I was supposed to be the content expert, even when I taught courses for the first time, or on subjects I had never studied! In graduate school when I was asked to teach a course whose subject I had no experience with, I was told: “You’ve studied microeconomics. This is just applied micro.” And I did it. In my first year as a full time faculty member, I was assigned to teach two courses on subjects I had never studied. That’s just part of what happens at a small liberal arts college, but it’s not ideal.

I now have a broader conception of (good) teaching. The most important job of the teacher is designing the learning environment for a course. Learning occurs when students interact with and make meaning of the course materials, as they interact with the instructor and other students. How, and to what extent, that interaction will occur is an integral part of the learning environment design process. When a student interacts with the course materials, he or she is confronted with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The instructor provides expert guidance about how to understand the new ideas and ways of thinking. Other students can similarly catalyze the learning process for their peers by asking questions the student didn’t think of (or verbalizing questions they were reluctant to ask), and by presenting new insights or by providing a more accessible explanation than the instructor did. A course lacking quality instructor interaction is merely self-study; there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a university course and the learning process will be hampered.

Suppose you were plugged in to teach a course that you didn’t design. Suppose you believe that students learn best by writing about the subject, that writing requires students to think more deeply about the subject than simply reading the text does. Suppose that since writing is an integral part of your teaching, your practice is to give essay exams. Now suppose that the course you are assigned to teach emphasizes content coverage over content mastery. The administration wouldn’t articulate it that way, but that would be the reality for the average student. They simply say that you as instructor need to cover the content. And the content would be assessed by giving a common, departmentally designed multiple-choice exam. Would the teaching be different from if you had designed the course? Would the learning be different? I suspect that students who are brighter, or who learn more quickly would earn better grades in the course you didn’t design. But would the course be teaching students or merely sorting them? I’m trying (really!) to keep my biases out of this parable, but I do believe that ownership of the course design matters, that it has an impact on learning.

When an instructor designs a course, he or she is making decisions explicitly or implicitly about a number of dimensions which define the learning environment. These dimensions include:

To what extent will the instructor tell, coach or model for students?

How much of course ‘content’ will be pure content (i.e. facts or findings in the discipline) vs. knowledge creation or research?

Discovery: Are students expected to discover insights or will insights be provided to them by the instructor or text?

Meaning Making: Are students expected to make meaning or will they be told meaning?

Authenticity: How much of the course work is mere school work vs. real? (The difference is the extent to which people outside the course care about the results.)

Degree of Interaction: What degree of interaction is expected between students and faculty, between students and other students?

What is the source of the course materials: Professor vs. Text (secondary sources) vs. Readings/Literature (primary sources) vs. Student Creation? Also, who selects the course materials? (e.g. Professor chooses the text (or Dept chooses the text) or students find their own information.)

How will class time be used? Lecture from the text or instructor’s knowledge vs. Discussion vs. Demonstration/Laboratory/Learning by Doing vs. Student presentation of content (not for the sake of learning presentation skills but to instruct others.)

To what extent will out of class work be structured or unstructured?

Were any of these dimensions things you haven’t explicitly considered before? What other dimensions can you suggest?

The answers to all of these questions about course design should be based on the course objectives (nominal and actual). Course objectives might include:

Exposure to a subject/ability to be successful through the end of the course (i.e. to learn/remember enough to achieve a certain grade on a final exam, but without any real expectation of retaining or transferring to other contexts). Few teachers would articulate their goals this way, but many teach and assess this way, especially in general education courses.

Introduction to particular skills such as writing, speaking, computing, music performance, artistic performance.

Practice in and ability to demonstrate disciplinary analysis (e.g. thinking like an economist, analyzing a problem like an economist would)

After designing the learning environment, the next most important job of the teacher is to be a learning guide, that is, to facilitate each student’s learning process as an individual journey. This requires building (or at least being open to) a professional relationship with each student. The final responsibility for this journey is with the student, but he or she needs to believe that that teacher is willing, even eager to guide them. The teacher is, after all, on their own intellectual journey albeit further along than one’s students. Am I suggesting that the teacher meet regularly, face-to-face with each student? No. Rather, the teacher needs to make students believe that he or she welcomes and values the opportunity to discuss course material with them. Sometimes this interaction occurs face-to-face before or after class or during office hours. Sometimes it may be a phone conversation, or an email exchange or an IM chat. Most often, though, it occurs in class sessions when the teacher lectures or leads discussion, and when he or she responds to student questions. The critical factors are showing one’s own interest in and enthusiasm for the subject, and showing respect for what students have to say, even when it may reveal misunderstanding. Fundamentally, a good teacher is one who makes students believe that his or her goal is to help them get from where they are intellectually to as far as they can go over the course of the term.

How many students see university education this way? I suspect that students see ‘school’ as an aggregate thing. A degree is a series of courses. A course is a series of lectures (say), which a student is supposed to tune into, and learn at least some of it. The student sees themselves as part of a whole (the class), or buying into a whole (the ‘standard curriculum for the course’ or perhaps the teacher’s knowledge of the subject), rather than engaging in their own unique journey in which they create their own understanding of he material. School is like a ski lift. Hop on, ride a while, hop off. Students connect for as much as they can or want to, and they learn accordingly. Their success is defined by their relationship to the whole (did they ride the ski far enough up the mountain?), not their progress in their own learning (making their own way by hiking up the mountain).

Do faculty perceive their responsibility as teaching students or teaching courses? Are we taking steps to move closer to or further away from the idea of a personal educational journey when we commodify university courses? As long as a course lasts a full term, I think it’s the latter. If we could decompose courses as they currently exist into smaller modular pieces that could be combined in different ways, maybe then commodification of the modules would make sense.

Anyone planning to attend this year’s Education Learning Initiative annual meetings can hear more about these ideas at the session I’ll be presenting. I hope to see you there!

Does poor nutrition cause the swine flu? (No)

Published on October 29, 2009 in Economics and Teaching and Learning. 1 Comment

I’m writing in response to Laura’s post here on a piece by Thomas Friedman. Friedman’s piece reminds me of why I could never be a regular, on-a-schedule, blogger. Because if I don’t have anything to say, I’d have to write something like this, which really doesn’t say anything worth reading. Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the legion of Friedman-bashers. I teach from The World is Flat, though I think The Lexus and the Olive Tree is probably better. But this article has nothing to teach us about how the world works.

There are two issues here I want to comment on:

The economics: How do recessions work?
Teaching/Learning: Can we teach creativity/innovation?

There is no necessary connection between the two issues, which is one reason I didn’t like the article. Let me discuss the economics first, since that’s something I can claim expertise in. Then I’ll go on to teaching creativity.

In his article, Friedman cites a conversation with Todd Martin, someone of no particular authority. (Friedman describes Martin as, “a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.”) Martin’s argument which Friedman accepts, is that the same job skills that make one untouchable in a flat world, keep one employed in a recession. Okay. But Martin actually argues that our failure to teach those job skills is a cause of the current “Great” Recession. This is a stretch (my polite way of saying nonsense). Here’s an analogy that may help your understanding: Good nutrition may keep you from getting sick, but does lack of good nutrition cause the swine flu? No. Martin, and by extension, Friedman are arguing the latter. Let’s look more deeply at what’s going on.

Friedman’s argument for economies over the long term, as expressed in The World is Flat, makes a lot of sense. (You may have to read to Chapter 15, where he admits that these are general tendencies in a globalized world, rather than laws of nature.) I’m not going to justify them here. But Martin’s argument for the causes of the Great Recession does not make sense. He should study the history of business cycles.

The features of the current recession which Friedman describes (lawyers who do only what is asked of them are the first to be laid-off) are not unique to this recession, but rather are characteristic of every major recession. Megan McArdle, in the Atlantic Monthly, quotes another lawyer as saying “the partners were pretty honest that they were probably going to end up firing plenty of people who would have been just fine if there had been any work for them [emphasis added].” But there wasn’t enough work for them. That’s the nature of a recession.

Who do you think the boss will fire if not the people who have so far not distinguished themselves? If you accept the premise that the lack of business requires lay-offs, who do you let go? (I’m not arguing that this is a good thing, but rather just that that’s how businesses operate. If they don’t do this, they may go out of business themselves if the recession is bad enough.)

Part of the reason why the current downturn feels so bad is that the last major recession we experienced in the US occurred in 1982. Anyone under the age of 40 probably has no significant memory of it. As a consequence, our view of recessions is that of fairly minor inconveniences as we experienced during the minor recessions of 1990 and 2001. The unemployment rates of the last two recessions peaked at 7.6% and 6.3% respectively, compared with our current unemployment rate of 9.8%. This is not to diminish the pain experienced by those who were unemployed during those recessions, but each of those recessions lasted only eight months. (Yes, I know unemployment stayed ‘high’ longer than just eight months.) Contrast this with the peak unemployment during the Great Depression: 28% and a duration of more than a decade.

McArdle notes: “There’s something in us that needs to believe that awful things must happen for a reason. And in some cosmic sense, they do–there are no uncaused causes running around the universe. But that doesn’t mean that the reason they happened is that the person they happened to did something to deserve it.” We live in an imperfect world, where bad things do happen. Period. The Great Recession was caused not by our ineffective teaching of creativity and innovation. It was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble, which occurred when the market for a very innovative financial product, the collateralized mortgage obligation, imploded. Lot’s of people have been hurt; only a few deserved it.

If the earlier part of this post was mostly a response to Friedman’s piece, the rest is mostly a reaction to Laura’s. Laura quotes Laura McKenna as saying that schools don’t do a very good job of teaching innovation. One thought that occurred to me was that creativity and innovations are broad concepts. In a sense they don’t exist in the abstract. It’s hard to imagine teaching creativity outside of a specific context: Creative writing, for example. Or teaching innovation.

McKenna’s argument doesn’t really respond to Friedman’s assertion. It only says schools can’t, not that they shouldn’t teach creativity/innovation. I think this argument reflects the traditional divide between skills and content. Students who only learn content find they don’t have the content they need for a changed world, while students who learned a particular skill set, say critical thinking, are better able to find productive employment in a changed world.

I don’t teach K-12, so I may be way off base here, but my approach is to teach students rather than content. (Is that the difference between teacher and learner-centered teaching?) My job isn’t to teach (i.e. present) content; it’s to encourage/enable/create an environment for students to learn. In this context the teacher as consultant metaphor works well for me, at least up to a point. My client is each student.

Laura mentions her son being punished in school for ‘coloring outside the lines’. Punishing a child for doing something ‘different’ on an assignment seems counterproductive to me, unless you see your job as teaching and grading content (or teaching following the rules, which is a bit different). The question for teachers ought to be what are the meta teaching goals each student needs to obtain, and how can you guide each (individual) student to attain those goals while using the talents and abilities embodied in each of them?

Teaching as Modeling Disciplinary Practice

Published on August 3, 2009 in Assessment & Grading, Economics, Teaching and Learning and Wikis forTeaching/Learning. 4 Comments

Over the Christmas holidays last winter, as I began to plan for my Spring courses, it struck me that it was a truly fascinating time to study macroeconomics and finance. Yes, I realize this is much like the neurosurgeon remarking on how interesting the tumor is in the patient he is treating. Each time I teach a course, I look for a hook that will capture student’s interest. So I wondered how I might exploit the current economic situation to that end.

One result was the international finance course I teach every two or three years, staff permitting. This year I organized the class as a research team to explore the global implications of the 2008 financial crisis and economic recession, an event which was unfolding in real time as we studied it. The dynamics of nearly all aspects of the course, from selecting course materials, to what occurred in class sessions, to grading were different from traditional courses.

Early on we decided that our goal would be to produce an analysis of the “Great Recession,” something that would be useful to people outside the class. At the time we started, there was no such analysis that we were aware of. The result is available at http://2008financialcrisis.umwblogs.org . This is not merely a student project, something only having meaning within the context of the course. Rather, we set out to create a meaningful piece of economic analysis, every part of which I have vetted and believe in.

About the time we had drafted the analysis, we ran into an arbitrary deadline–the end of the semester. I asked students what they wanted to do and a substantial number said they were willing to keep working to finish the project. Roughly half the class continued to work after the semester was over, and roughly half of those were seniors who had graduated. I believe this is evidence of genuine engagement.

After the semester, we revised the analysis and published it on the website above. You should note that the global part of the analysis has yet to be posted. Several of us continue to work on that and hope to have it up in a couple of weeks.

In June I realized that the project could not be completed this summer because the economic crisis has not run its course. I plan to continue the work next year. I have two students from the seminar who have agreed to be team leaders, and I am recruiting a handful of promising sophomore economics majors do to the data collection. We’ll see how far this goes.

Teaching as Coaching?

Published on July 6, 2009 in Assessment & Grading and Teaching and Learning. 7 Comments

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This is another in my irregular musings about teaching, learning and how grading should help rather than hinder the latter.

Does the textbook have a responsibility for student learning? No, it’s just a source of course content. Does the teacher have a responsibility for student learning, or is the teacher as expert just another source of course content? Most people would say the teacher does have a responsibility for student learning, but are most course environments set up that way? I would say no, not really.

For some time, I’ve been thinking about the parallels between sports and school. Participants generally think sports are fun, otherwise they wouldn’t participate. School? Not so much.

Once the sports team has been selected, the purpose of coaching and the objective of players is to improve performance. There is regular assessment with clear consequences: players that perform the best get more playing time. The purpose of coaching is to improve performance. If the team’s performance doesn’t improve, the coaching hasn’t been very successful. (Admittedly, this is a collective goal, like a group project.) But by and large it is successful. Virtually every team I’ve witnessed improves over the course of the season.

Can we say the same thing about teaching and learning in school? I’m not sure. There’s certainly evidence to the contrary. In a recent article in Peer Review, Bain and Zimmerman retell the story of the experiment conducted by physics professors to see how much learning actually took place in their intro classes. They conducted pre and post-tests of the some of the fundamental content in their course. When the professors gave the post-test, several months after the course, they discovered essentially no change in the survey scores, indicating no learning of the fundamental content. More alarming was their finding that the change in survey scores was unrelated to the grades students earned in the course. ’A’ students scored better on course exams and other graded assignments, but they didn’t learn the fundamentals of physics any better. Bain & Zimmerman argue that this result is not limited to physics but applies to all disciplines.

In school, when a student receives a poor grade, they usually feel bad, even guilty, and they often blame the teacher. As teachers, we tend to discount the student, thinking ‘they failed’ Our emphasis is on delivery of the content, more than on coaching over and over to help the student get it right. There are some exceptions to this: composition courses where students write and get feedback repeatedly, and teachers who go out of their way to provide recurrent feedback to students who can’t seem to get it. But this is not the norm. Usually, the content drives the schedule, and students are supposed to get the content and move on to the next topic.

I think that teachers teach with the expectation that successful students will earn an A. Anyone less than that, isn’t really successful. We teach the content; we assess learning of the content. At that point it’s sink or swim. The expectation is that the good students will get it, and the rest, well, they’re not good students so the fault lies with them. We claim to offer help to students who don’t make the grade. But we don’t really expect that everyone or even very many students will come to our office hours. By and large, we expect that students will do the lion’s share of their learning, their remediation on their own. We test them, we give them the correct answers and we expect them to figure out where they went wrong on their own. There’s a certain contradiction in thinking here. At one level, we act as if everyone should get an A. (We often teach to the level of A work.) But we don’t really believe that, and in an important sense, for those that don’t, we wash our hands of them.

Compare this with sports and coaching. In sports, there is little expectation that players will perform perfectly on the first attempt. Once players have made the team, the purpose of practice is not to delivery content (how to field a grounder), though there’s a great deal of that done. The purpose of practice is to provide repeated opportunities to improve performance. The objective of coaching is to help players improve from where they are. After all, if the goal is to improve the team’s performance, helping each player to improve will contribute to that goal, even if no players become all-stars.

In school, grading tends to be a sorting mechanism of whittling students down. The grade is perceived as a judgment about one’s personhood, rather than as helpful feedback. Not surprisingly, students push back against grades.

In sports, assessment is more directly connected to performance. The goal of learners and teachers is to build one up, not document how one falls short of perfection.

I wonder if teachers could learn from the sports approach. That is, if we are more interested in learning than sorting.

More on the balance between liberal arts teaching and scholarship

Published on June 9, 2009 in Teaching and Learning and What is Education?. 0 Comments

Terry Dolson and I have been conversing about the balance between scholarship and liberal arts teaching. This is a response to Terry’s last response, in which she says:

I believe that if faculty could see clearly that the WAY they teach may have even more impact on the majority of their students than the CONTENT they teach, then they would feel compelled to explore new techniques.

What’s missing from both our earlier posts is the nuance that the roles a faculty member plays in scholarship and in teaching in the liberal arts are different, but equally important, equally legitimate. If one thinks that scholarship is one’s real work, but that teaching is like service, merely something that one is required to do, I think one misses the point of liberal arts teaching and is likely to fail at it.

It’s a question of audience and respect. Successful scholarship requires “recognition in one’s field.” Recognition in this context is more than the accolade you receive from others. It’s the response to the respect that you show in your work. It’s the response to your making others think in ways they haven’t before, or in your taking them to intellectual places they haven’t been before.

Successful liberal arts teaching is the same. You must show your audience respect for where they are in their intellectual journey, by treating what you do (as well as what they do) seriously. The respect you receive is the response to making your students think in ways they haven’t before or in your taking them to intellectual places they haven’t been before. But it’s also doing it explicitly in the context of liberal arts. This is where many introductory courses fail. They are designed only as introductions to the major, as gatekeeping courses for the select few who will be inducted into the priesthood of believers (i.e. the major). It may be that only some students can be majors in a field, but all students should be able to understand the context and contributions of a discipline in the liberal arts. Or to phrase it differently, anyone can teach students who have an affinity for the field, but it takes a serious teacher to be effective at teaching those students who do not, at making those students see the relevance and import of fields outside the major. It takes a serious teacher to help all students see that courses outside their major are just as important and worthy of respect as courses in the major. That is the liberal arts ideal.

Vision for the Future of Teaching & Learning at UMW

Published on April 16, 2009 in Teaching and Learning and UMW Teaching Center. 2 Comments

If the preeminent value at UMW is teaching excellence, which I believe it should be, then the UMW Teaching Center should play a prominent role at our institution. This is in contrast to the former Teaching Innovation Program, which seemed to be at best tolerated by the administration and which was ignored by many faculty, much like the crazy aunt sequestered in the attic of the family home. This former reality needs to change or we will only be giving lip service to how much we value quality teaching.

At present, teaching is considered a largely personal responsibility that only becomes public if there is a problem. Teaching preparation seems to be generally viewed as something we each have to do, but not something we care for, kind of like paying the bills or doing yard work around the house. Oh, there are some people who like those activities, but for the rest of us, we recognize their value, but we don’t really enjoy them or think of them as a craft. Teaching is too important to be considered a “don’t ask, don’t tell” activity, which faculty are supposed to learn on their own. If teaching excellence is genuinely valued, it needs to be valued collectively and viewed as a collective responsibility.

I wonder how many faculty put genuine time and effort into thinking about ways to improve their teaching. I wonder how many faculty seriously assess how their teaching turned out at the conclusion of each course. It’s probably more than I think, but it’s not something we hear about. This needs to change. We need to make our teaching activities (thinking, preparation, doing, assessing) more transparent. We need to make teaching a more public responsibility, something that we value collectively, something that we put more effort into thinking about.

We need to get faculty to consider developing a ‘teaching agenda’ analogous to one’s ‘research agenda’. What are our goals for developing teaching expertise? How can we build time into our already busy schedules to achieve those goals? Can you imagine sharing teaching agendas (say in one’s department) in the same way that one shares research agendas? I think it would be a cultural sea change if faculty simply began to think in terms of a teaching agenda.

How can we build a genuine community of teaching excellence at UMW which touches all our academic departments, and which all faculty and staff see as valuable? This is one of the goals of the new Teaching Center, one which we haven’t achieved as yet. At present, we have a number of teaching communities, but we don’t have a teaching community. The communities include:

• The UMW Teaching Center, which exists to this point as the programs developed by the ad hoc Teaching Center Advisory Committee (TCAC), and as the successor to the Teaching Innovation Program.

• The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT), which should be thought of primarily as about teaching rather than technology, as anyone who has worked with them can attest. They don’t need my accolades, but in my view DTLT over the last decade has consistently done the most profound work on teaching and learning of any organization at UMW.

• The First Year Seminar Program, which has shown incredible promise as a model of both teaching excellence and teaching community.

• The Writing Intensive Program and the Writing Center, perhaps our longest running successful teaching community.

• The Speaking Intensive Program and the Speaker Center, following in the mold of the WI program, and equally successful.

• The Academic Departments/Majors. This is probably the group which is least often thought of as a teaching community and yet it’s the one which may have the most direct and lasting impact on our students. Academic departments are the front line troops in teaching. It is in academic departments that teaching succeeds or fails.

How can we strengthen these communities, and more importantly, how can we strengthen the connections between them, to form a more integrated, corporate teaching community at UMW? It will take more than verbiage, more than a statement that teaching is valued, no matter how high the source, more than an entry in the academic catalog that asserts that we are about teaching. It will take more than money. And it will take more than offering some programs. All of these are necessary, but none is sufficient. What then? The experience of the Teaching Center Advisory Committee over the last year provides some answers.

The TCAC started as a very diverse group, including faculty and staff from the College of Arts & Sciences, and the College of Graduate and Professional Studies. It included people who actively supported the former Teaching Innovation Program, and those who had not. At the beginning, there was a strong sense of suspicion about different peoples’ motives for participating, as well as what their values were. Since then, this sense has changed dramatically, and I think, permanently. How did the transformation take place? It was the result of working together intensely over a year to develop a vision for the teaching center, an initial set of programs and a job description for a director to execute the plan.. In the process, we modeled a clear vision for what a teaching community should look like.

If we want to expand this to the university as a whole, we should engage in an extended initiative (lasting a year or longer), in which we think about ways to engage the academic departments, as well as the other teaching communities, to work together to build a genuine community of teaching at UMW. This initiative should revolve around building a world-class teaching center, not as an appendage, but rather as an integral part of everything we do as teaching. The initiative should not seek a one shot treatment, but rather a change in the institution’s culture and practice.

It is no secret that there are problems with higher education in the United States today. Look at the many calls for assessment of higher education outcomes that we’ve observed in recent years. Look at the growth of the For-Profit sector of higher ed. Look at the work done by Derek Bok and many others from within the academy.

What is less well known is that there is significant grant funding available (e.g from the Teagle Foundation or Lumina Foundation) for institutions willing to seriously explore how to improve teaching and learning in novel ways. This should be one of the first orders of business for the new teaching center director.

Suppose in a few years, as the new Convergence Center is set to open, we have a progressive administration and a relatively new teaching center director with vision and knowledge of the latest research and practice in higher education teaching and learning. The administration calls for a year-long initiative to radically rethink (or just to think about) teaching and learning at UMW under the direction of the TC Director and advisory committee. The initiative is kicked off at the opening faculty meeting of the year in August, with an appropriate outside speaker to motivate our work on the initiative. My first thought is someone like Michael Wesch, but perhaps someone outside the group of avant garde practitioners, someone with a more conventional background would be more persuasive and effective at getting people on board, someone like Carl Weiman. During the year, additional speakers will be brought in to give presentations on pedagogical research to maintain the momentum. Others will be brought in to give hands-on workshops on various pedagogies.

The president calls for each department to prepare a study of teaching practice in their courses/major(s). How do they teach at the introductory, intermediate and advanced levels? How does the teaching methodology vary across faculty? How effective is their teaching? How might they teach better? How might they better assess their teaching? An initial report from each department would be due by the end of the first semester. The Academic Deans of our colleges allocate additional hire-behinds to support this work, at least one for each department.

The Deans state publicly that no faculty member would be awarded highest merit in teaching effectiveness if they do not engage seriously in this initiative. Or perhaps a special merit award would be given for this work. Funding would be supplied to follow words with action.

The president, provost and deans will state publicly that serious engagement with this process is of signal importance to the university and should be valued as part of the promotion and tenure process. They will meet with to the Promotion & Tenure Committee, communicate their views about this, and develop a consensus about how it might be appropriately weighted in promotion and tenure decisions.

During the second semester, the steering group will review the departmental drafts prior to drafting an overall report describing the state of teaching and learning in the institution and summarizing a needs-assessment. The needs-assessment will provide an action plan for the activities directed by the Teaching Center and executed by all the teaching communities mentioned above, including the academic departments, over the next few years. The departmental drafts and the overall report draft will be shared with all parties so that participants can learn from each other prior to revising their reports.

Another important outcome of the initiative would be the development of meaningful assessment methodologies, developed by each department rather than imposed from external authorities. Assessment for across-the-curriculum programs will be developed by drawing on the most appropriate models adopted by departments.

The final report volume will be published as a model of 21st Century Teaching and Learning, and its findings presented in appropriate national and regional conferences. In subsequent years, members of the UMW community will be invited to numerous universities and other venues to explain how the UMW transformation was accomplished.

From this point on, all new faculty will be given an orientation to UMW’s teaching philosophy and expectations as developed through the initiative and spelled out in the final report. The orientation will be run by the Teaching Center. The Center will continue to host speakers, promote conversations and other programs about effective teaching and learning. The Center will also sponsor research by members of the UMW teaching community to stay on the cutting edge of higher education pedagogy. The research will be disseminated among faculty and staff at the university as well as to regional and national disciplinary and interdisciplinary audiences.

UMW will never be the same. But only if we have the will to pursue this vision.

Learning as Work vs. Play

Published on March 29, 2009 in Economics and Teaching and Learning. 3 Comments

A curious thing happened last Friday in my intro class. We have been studying the theory of the Firm and one of the themes I emphasis (which gets short shrift in the textbooks) is that successful firms are profitable precisely because they create products that consumers value; that is, firms create value that didn’t exist before. We started this study almost a month ago with a case study on the Apple iPod, which the students could readily identify with and see how it was consistent with the value creation theme. Friday as we brought the study to a close, I spent the first 10 minutes doing another brief case study focusing on the coffee cup sleeve that came along with the coffee I had purchased at Einstein’s that morning. While a rather trivial product, it provides a robust example to illustrate many behaviors of firms we have studied over the last month.

Does the invention of the coffee sleeve provide value that didn’t exist before? Yes, the group agreed. Who captures the majority of that value? Is it the entrepreneur who invented the sleeve and produces it now? Is it the coffee shop? Is it the coffee customer? How much does the coffee shop raise the price of a cup of coffee to account for the cost of the sleeves? Probably little or nothing, we concluded, since the sleeves are likely very inexpensive per cup. This suggests much of the value goes to the customers. How profitable are the sleeves to their producer? That depends on several issues. Since a lot of people buy cups of coffee, even if the price per sleeve to Starbucks is low, the sleeve producer probably makes a good profit on the volume. Are the sleeves difficult to produce? No. Then have other producers begun to produce their own sleeves, thereby taking away the profits of the inventor/original producer. We had several examples of the sleeves in the classroom, one I brought and a couple students had with the coffee they brought to class. The students thought to look at the sleeves and found patent and patent-pending numbers. This suggests that the investor is being rewarded through higher than normal profits, and that those profits haven’t been bid away by competitors.

Now to my point. The students were highly engaged by this discussion—not only that, but they were getting it. About three quarters through though, I noticed that no one appeared to be taking any notes.

This caught my attention because at the beginning of class I saw a student in attendance who had not been in class all week due to illness, and she was clearly still not feeling 100%. I asked her why she was there and she said she didn’t want to miss any more class sessions because copying a classmate’s notes wasn’t an adequate substitute. So when I saw that students weren’t taking notes on the discussion, I realized that anyone who missed Friday’s class would likely not have any knowledge of the coffee sleeve discussion.

At the end of the discussion, I asked why no one had taken notes, and the response surprised me: “We didn’t think this was part of the lecture,” they said, “because you were just telling us a story about something random.” I related the episode in my senior seminar later in the day and a good student said, “They didn’t think to take notes because the discussion was fun, rather than work.” Wow!