Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

Many faculty believe that traditional, face-to-face courses are superior to online courses.   Indeed for many, the possibility that this belief is false is not worthy of consideration.  I am agnostic about this question.  In my teaching, I have experienced profound educational experiences, involving serious intellectual engagement in both face-to-face class sessions and in online environments between class sessions.  Until recently, I haven’t felt any need to choose one over the other since I can do both in a ‘blended’ course.  I’ve never set out to build a blended course; indeed, it’s only been in the last year that I became familiar with the term.  For me, it was just good teaching.

One of the things I’ve tried to get my mind around is that ‘thing’, that feeling or sense of connection that occurs in “good” face-to-face class sessions, that makes people think such class sessions are superior to online courses, and that we haven’t been able to replicate in an online environment.  Last January’s ELI Conference moved me a step closer to answering the question.  In one session I heard the term “ambient awareness” the sensitivity to and awareness of what others are thinking.  The term appears to come from a New York Times article written by Clive Thompson last fall.

Thompson says

It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. … This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Later that day, I was talking about this topic with Kelvin Thompson, someone with a great deal of online teaching experience, who described this ambient awareness as ‘social presence,’ the connections with and awareness of connections within a group.  This awareness creates a feeling of intimacy and community.  It is, he observed, what you feel in a sports bar in Pittsburgh while watching the Steelers play.

I believe that micro-blogging tools, like Twitter, provide one way of replicating this ‘thing’ (ambient awareness or social presence) in an online course.

As Harold Rheingold describes it:

Twitter is not a community, but it’s an ecology in which communities can emerge. That’s where the banal chit-chat comes in: idle talk about news, weather, and sports is a kind of social glue that can adhere the networks of trust and norms of reciprocity from which community and social capital can grow.

Community is a key element in the ambient awareness that happens in “good” face-to-face class sessions.

Over the last year, I’ve used twitter in my intro courses as a medium for minute papers as I described here.  I’ve found it a unusually rich way of seeing where my students were having difficulties.  It has provided a different channel for connection, a feeling I’ve discovered with my professional twitter network.

In my view,  true learning, deep learning is less about information transmission, and more the result of an interactive experience where students engage with the material and with each other under the direction of the instructor.  A good class “session” then, does not require a place, but rather an interactive, communication network between learners and teachers.  This network can be provided by a physical classroom space, but in principle at least, it should also be possible to create online, particularly with the thoughtful use of tools like twitter.

Today’s Inside Higher Education has a thought-provoking article on the increasing number of websites which provide class note sharing.  One important aspect of this discussion, which is underplayed in the article, is the understanding that note sharing doesn’t promote deep learning.   The act of note taking involves processing the information in the learner’s mind.  The notes embody context which is less meaningful for another person.  It is this engagement with the material that leads to deep learning.  As a consequence, having someone else’s notes even when they are well done only promotes shallow learning.

I often take notes during conference sessions, but the notes may not be very meaningful to anyone else afterwards, since their purpose was not to create a transcript but rather to record clues or records to allow me to locatein my mind the insights the session generated.

I’ve struggled with this problem in my experiments to have classes create collaborative notes, which build on the notes of previous classes.  It’s in the creative act of taking the inputs of text and  discussion and converting them into a useful product that true learning occurs.

Terry wrote a response to my previous post in which she explores the conflict between disciplinary expertise and true liberal arts teaching.  What follows is my response to her.

There is a genuine tension between scholarly expertise and liberal arts teaching. It is not trivial to be both an expert in a field and an excellent teacher of the liberal arts. Compare the average faculty member at an R1 institution where research productivity is the preeminent value with the average faculty member at an institution like St. Johns College where the preeminent value is the ability to engage students in the millennial long conversation about how to live the good life, and where research expertise, as it is defined in R1 institutions, has little place. To say that it is difficult to do both is not to say that it’s impossible. That is in principle what the Ivy League colleges are supposed to offer. But it is not easy, and in my view it can’t be done by focusing exclusively on one’s discipline or that discipline’s methodology in one’s teaching. Faculty who teach with such a focus inevitably fail to satisfy the liberal arts ideal which requires one to think more broadly.

At the same time, we are disciplinary practitioners and so it makes sense to teach in the context of our disciplines. What each discipline has to offer is a particular and distinctly useful way of looking at phenomena. That’s certainly what I do.  At the same time, I try to regularly remind students that this is only one framework for viewing the world, that other frameworks exist which can provide another view, and that by looking at an issue through multiple frameworks, one is more likely to fully understand it.

It’s hard to imagine a multidisciplinary or true interdisciplinary Ph.D. which trained one in the liberal arts. General education, tends to give one a breadth of knowledge across the fields, but expertise in none. A person trained in this tradition is unlikely to be both a scholarly expert and an excellent teacher of the liberal arts.

After many years of Jerry Slezak getting the blame for my posts, I have moved my blog site to http://pedablogy.stevegreenlaw.org .   (Jim Groom and Jerry should get the credit for the move since they did the lion’s share of the work.)

Please update your RSS feeds to reflect this.  Thx!

“Let’s say instead that you decide that what you really want to concentrate on is building the very best teaching institution that you can, one which offers a superb range and quality of education specifically tailored for the needs of the public of your state.”

Tim Burke, Swarthmore College

In a recent post I claimed teaching excellence should be the preeminent value at UMW. Many universities claim to value teaching excellence, but what does such a claim mean? Does it have any operational significance or is it merely marketing? How would one measure the extent to which teaching excellence was achieved at a university? These are the questions I plan to explore in this essay.

The default assumption at most universities is that all faculty do a good job teaching. Of course, there are a small number who get weeded out during the probationary process due to demonstrably poor teaching (say consistently scoring in the bottom five percent on student course evaluations), though even that may not be true at research universities. But the metrics we use to assess teaching are coarse rather than fine. They don’t differentiate very well between adequate and excellent teaching. On what basis then can we claim to provide teaching excellence? On what basis can someone outside our institution judge?

A common measure of teaching quality is student/faculty ratio or average class size. All else constant, smaller class sizes are thought to correspond to better quality instruction for a number of reasons: they enable greater use of active learning pedagogies like discussion; they also allow the instructor to connect with each student, making it much harder for students to avoid engaging with the course material. A low student/faculty ratio indicates that a school has enough resources to support quality teaching, or that it values quality teaching enough to allocate relatively more of its resources to teaching.

Liberal arts colleges generally have lower student/faculty ratios and smaller class sizes than comprehensive universities, yet courses at liberal arts colleges are not all necessarily excellent. Similarly, we generally think of R1 universities as valuing research more than teaching, and yet there are no doubt some excellent teachers at such institutions. It’s not unusual for the best teachers to be assigned large lecture classes, so class size is clearly not the only determinant of teaching quality.

Another common measure of a school’s quality is the percentage of faculty holding doctorates (or terminal degrees) in their fields. But this doesn’t tell very much about teaching quality. A doctorate is a measure of content expertise, which is necessary but not sufficient for effective teaching. More important, Ph.Ds. are research degrees–most Ph.D. programs provide little in the way of teacher training. This means that few new assistant professors will be excellent teachers. As Matt Lungerhausen notes,

“To be honest, most recent PhD’s really learn to teach in their first two or three years on the job.”

Tim Burke explains how difficult it is to identify and recruit quality teaching faculty.

“It’s a really fundamental problem: great teaching doesn’t offer the same kind of external record that research or publication productivity does. … you can tell almost nothing about the difference between a competent teacher and a classroom dynamo from a conventional academic c.v.”

How then can we help the faculty we do hire become the best teachers they can be? How can we create an environment to nurture the development of effective teachers? After all, it takes years to develop a good teacher, and some will fail in the process. What would such an environment look like?

At present, the highest value in academia is scholarship. Faculty with the best scholarly records in terms of publication, grant acquisition, etc. are the ones who obtain positions in the most prestigious institutions, and the ones who get paid the most at whichever (four year) institution they are employed. This is true even at a school like ours where teaching is valued. And this sends an important signal: teaching may be valued but it’s not what the institution values the most.

Yet scholarship is important. One characteristic of higher education is that teachers will be practitioners in the field. Scholarship is a complement to good teaching. To teach the field, one must know the field, one must be current in the field, and research is the means to do that. So the answer is not to downgrade scholarship as much as to upgrade teaching. How can this be done at an institutional level?

First, we need to build a world class center for exploring teaching and learning, along the lines of what I outlined in my earlier post. The center should promote both teaching practices and pedagogical research. It should also disseminate research findings, by sponsoring research presentations and publication. Such efforts would do much to promote the reputation of UMW as an institution which pays more than lip service to teaching excellence. Fortunately, we have the beginnings of such a program already in place.

Second, we should reward instructors who employ best practices from pedagogical research. Since few faculty learn those practices in graduate school, a university that values teaching would provide faculty development in pedagogical practice. We should require all new faculty to participate in a year-long colloquium conducted by the teaching center. The colloquium would explore the latest research on cognition and teaching and would investigate specific methods for incorporating active learning pedagogies in one’s teaching. The content would cover the range from effective lecturing to the pedagogies listed here. Each participant in the colloquium would be expected to develop a plan for improving one of their courses implementing what they learned from the colloquium. Each plan would have to be approved by the teaching center staff before the participant’s responsibilities in the colloquium would be certified as completed. We could offer a similar opportunity for experienced faculty who wished to improve their teaching effectiveness.

Third, tenure, promotion and pay raises should be linked to enhanced teaching effectiveness, as evidenced by participation in the teaching colloquium, by implementing best practices pedagogies into one’s teaching, and by other teaching innovations or experimentation. This would be in addition to what we do now to document our teaching effectiveness (e.g. student course evaluations, etc.).

How can we increase the time and effort faculty put into their teaching, without diminishing their scholarship? Quite simply, we must reduce teaching loads. This is the fourth leg on which this program would stand. While this may be a tough sell politically, we should make the case that teaching less doesn’t mean working less, but rather teaching better. Reducing teaching loads in the context of an initiative to build an institutionalized program for teaching excellence would be novel and probably an easier sell than reducing teaching loads to enhance scholarship. It’s naïve to think that we can ask faculty to do more without providing them the resources to do so. Only by providing the resources can we convince both internal and external audiences that the shift in focus is serious and central to who we are.

For example, we should give a course reduction to every faculty member who participates in a teaching center colloquium. The resulting teaching innovation plans can be used as evidence that the course reductions were not work reductions.

Fifth, as I noted in the earlier post, there’s a strong tendency in academia to see teaching as a private activity, rather than a collective responsibility. We need to change that and in the process make our teaching more transparent. Students should have a better idea what’s in store for them in a given course. Teachers should be able to learn from other teachers’ good ideas. We do that presently in only an ad hoc and inefficient way. We should make this transmission of the teaching craft more explicit. In the same way that good governance is enhanced by sunshine laws, good teaching can be enhanced by transparency. If nothing else, requiring faculty to be more transparent about their teaching would send a powerful message about the way we value teaching at our institution. Such transparency is simply not done anywhere in higher education that I am aware, so this would be a another way to make UMW stand out.

Tim Burke, in the essay quoted at the beginning of this piece, points out that building a teaching university won’t be easy. But a large part of that difficulty is that there is no model to follow. UMW could provide that model, if we truly value teaching excellence.

I thought I’d never write one of these posts. I always found it a bit odd and even unnecessary when people write these. But I feel the need to explain where I’ve been, and in some way, this may help me get back into the blogging saddle. So this post is really for me.

This has been a long, tough year for me. I’ve gotten a lot done, but also been party to some initiatives which didn’t work out. One of the side effects of this busyness was that I stopped blogging. I found I didn’t have time or energy for it. I also stopped reading blogs. I’ve missed both. But now I’m back.