What Kinds of Teaching Improvement are Most Important?

Which kinds of teaching improvement are most important for the Teaching & Learning Collaborative (TLC) to support over the coming years?  To advance that discussion, I'll suggest three interdependent goals now, and a couple more in an upcoming post:

1. Support learning-centered teaching.  There's a lovely cartoon showing a boy with his dog. The boy is talking to his friend, and boasting that he's taught Spot to whistle.  The friend responds dubiously, "I don't hear him whistling."  The first boy retorts, "I said I taught him. I didn't say he learned it!"

I hope we can help an increasing number of faculty teach in a way that's guided by the actual learning that occurs in their academic programs.  Faculty who understand teaching in this way ('the learning paradigm') believe that virtually every student is capable of excellence, if teaching can guide and stimulate them appropriately.  Because it's not obvious at the start what needs to be done to help students achieve excellence, there's a certain amount of trial and error every term - the instructor tries something and, if it works for some students, do more of it. If it doesn't work for some students, try something else.

• The alternative view of teaching, sometimes called the 'instruction paradigm', is reflected in the comments of Spot's owner.  Teaching and learning are independent activities.  If you organize and present the content clearly, then you've taught it.  If the students learn it, that's entirely to their credit. If they don't, that's on them, too.  

Of course, it's not simple for faculty (or students) to see whether and how the student is learning, which leads to a second goal for TLC and units like it.

2. Support evidence-guided teaching. Because teaching needs to be guided by actual learning, then the faculty need to gather evidence of how the learning process is going.

More easily said than done.  For example, if the faculty member assesses the wrong thing --  testing whether the student can remember an expert's analysis when the real goal is to help students learn to analyze for themselves -- then scores or grades will mislead both the instructor and the student.

Testing what students have learned is necessary but not sufficient.  Analogy: people learning to bat in the game of baseball. Measuring their batting average, no matter how precisely, won't help them learn to hit better.  A very different kind of feedback is needed for that, e.g., slow motion video of how they swing at a pitch.  Faculty need to learn both how to provide two very different kinds of feedback for themselves and for their students: what the student has learned and how the student is learning.  Few faculty have received any training in the many ways in which these things have been done.  We can help with that.

3. Support faculty collaboration to improve learning.   I mean "faculty collaboration" in two different ways.

The first is illustrated by a research finding about composition courses.  In many evaluations of learning in composition, students are asked to write a composition at the beginning of the term and a second composition on a similar topic at the end of the term.  External graders then assess each paper without knowing when it was written.  The papers written at the beginning and at the end of the writing course often get similar grades. This does not mean that the students learned nothing about writing: over two or more courses, the essays do measurably improve.  The important lesson: the kinds of capabilities useful in life are often so complex and personal that one course often can't do not enough to create improvements large enough to measure.  As a senior once told me about something he'd learned, "I don't think I could have learned how to think that way in any one course, but, over the years, it gradually sank in."

That's why capstone courses and major projects in upper division courses can be so important: as sources of insight for faculty teaching lower division courses on where they're succeeding and where they need to improve.  

The second important kind of collaboration is between faculty and others, e.g.,  instructional designers, assessment experts, publishers and other materials developers outside the university.  I'll choose just one example: instructional designers in a number of departments at GW are currently testing ePortfolio products that faculty can use, individually and as teams, to gather and analyze evidence of student learning.

So those are my first three suggestions for where we should focus our support: learning-centered teaching, evidence-guided teaching, and collaboration to improve learning.

Over the next 5-10 years, what (additional) kinds of teaching improvement do you think that units like TLC should support?

Two answers to "What is Teaching?" and their implications for debating MOOCs

Years ago, I had a vigorous debate with a colleague about what good lectures could accomplish.  Frustrated, we paused and exchanged our definitions of 'lecture.'  It turned out we had entirely different things in mind. Once we understood our disagreement about that definition, it turned out we agreed on everything else.

Scholarly observation and empirical research agree: in many disciplines, faculty are split between two opposing views of what 'teaching' and 'learning' mean.

• Instruction-centric: Folks holding this view believe that knowledge exists independent of students or teachers. They think it's the teacher's job to organize and transmit it (and test it). The student's job is quite different: to learn it.  If a faculty member teaches and 10% of the students learn the material, that shows the faculty member was teaching successfully (otherwise no one would have learned).
• Learning-centric: Other faculty believe that learning is more like developing a physical capability (like learn to ride a bike) than it is like storing blocks of knowledge in a mental trunk.   For these folks, teaching means doing whatever it takes to encourage and help a student become mentally stronger in their field.  If a student doesn't learn, that means the faculty member didn't successfully teach.   

In my experience, faculty in each group believe the other group's definition is not in the best interests of most students. And they instinctively reject any 'evidence' advanced by the other group: experience shows that the other group is wrong so their evidence must be flawed.  (I'm not above that fight:  I  believe that decades of rigorous academic research demonstrates that learning-centric teaching produces far more capable students than the instruction-centric teaching does.)

We have no statistics about how common each point of view is but most faculty guesstimate that at least half their colleagues teach in an instruction-centric way.

MOOCs are built on the fault line between these two tectonic plates.

Imagine what each group of folks think about MOOCS that are essentially a sequence of video lectures, readings, some quiz questions, and an online opportunity for students to talk with each other about the course.

For instruction-centric folks, that MOOC design captures much of what's important about a college class -- the faculty member's inspiring, clarifying presentation -- and even improves upon the campus norm in at least one respect: the student can watch key parts of the lecture as many times as they need to.

In contrast, for learning-centered folks, that MOOC design ignores most of what could help large numbers of students become mentally skilled (e.g., carefully designed homework assignments that challenge and help students develop higher order thinking skills in their fields; coaching and discussion that power further improvements in what students are able to produce.)

Moral of the story: If two or more people are going to discuss MOOCs, each person ought to start by describing what great teaching looks like, and how it guides student learning.  Perhaps everyone will agree. More likely some participants will have strikingly different views than others. This quick exchange won't change anyone's mind about good teaching, of course.  But it should give each participant essential perspective for understanding other folks' assertions about MOOCs.