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"We’re finishing the first quarter of the school year this week.
I’ll be having students complete anonymous evaluations of each class (see Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers)), and post those results and my reactions to them.
Today, though, I thought it would be a useful exercise for me – and, perhaps, readers – if I took some time to do my own assessment of the year so far.
So, here goes:
What I Think Is Working1.Peer tutors working in my ELL classes (see ARE SCHOOLS OVERLOOKING AN OBVIOUS STRATEGY THEY CAN IMPLEMENT IMMEDIATELY TO ACCELERATE LEARNING? PEER TUTORS!). I’ve always had one-or-two, but having six-to-ten changes the whole ballgame, and is a very realistic way to accelerate learning (see The Best Resources About Accelerated Learning). In fact, it’s been so effective that our school has already decided to continue it next year and open it up to potential volunteers from the entire student body (right now, tutors are only advanced ELLs from my previous classes, and my previous IB Theory of Knowledge students).
2. Peer mentors assisting ninth-graders. Every year students from my IB Theory of Knowledge class act as mentors to classes of ninth-graders (see Being A Mentor At Our School May Have Resulted In Improved Grades For The…Mentors). Last year, of course, we weren’t able to do it. We began it earlier this month, and it seems to be going very well.
3. The websites and materials I’m using in classes. I think I’ve made good choices for them (see THESE ARE THE PRIMARY TEXTS, ONLINE SITES & OTHER RESOURCES I’M USING IN MY CLASSES THIS YEAR).
4. Weekly student check-ins via Google Forms. During remote teaching, I had students complete simple weekly forms letting me know how they were doing, and found the information was invaluable. I’ve continued the practice with similar results.
5. My overall teaching and the level of emotional support I’ve been providing to students. I usually am a very active teacher in the classroom, and generally work hard at being personally supportive of students. I have doing the same this year, and have also, I think, been successful at hiding the exhaustion doing these two things well have contributed to…Unfortunately, I’m not sure how sustainable this is for the rest of the year (see the “What’s Not Working &/Or What Needs To Change”).
6. I’m pleased with the generally positive student attitude, including compliance with the mask mandate. Students seem genuinely happy to be back, and I have less-than-a-handful of students who I have to regularly remind to keep their noses covered. Students know they have permission to step outside of the classroom at any time if they feel like they want to move it off their nose for a moment, but practically no one has done so – knowing they can, though, I believe makes a big difference. Our district has a student vaccination mandate going into effect on November 30th, but I doubt that will impact the mask mandate because I believe it will be relatively easy to get personal exemptions (though that means those students will have to get regularly tested).
What’s Not Working &/Or What Needs To Change
1. My typical level of very active teaching and being very present to support students’ emotional needs is probably not sustainable. I typically – and voluntarily – teach many different classes during a school year, and pandemic exhaustion and my age is probably catching up to me. Having the large number of peer tutors in each class is a tremendous asset to students, but I underestimated the additional time and effort it would take for me to plan for – and support – them. My ELL students do a fair number of presentations, and I think I need to intentionally build in a day each week when they spend the bulk of a period preparing one, with peer tutors having the primary responsibility to support them while I can spend time planning and assessing student work, along with assisting last year’s TOK students with their IB Essays, at my desk (in past years, we’d get subs to give me time for that last task, but they’re not available this year). I just can’t continue to spend so much of my time at home doing class work. Fortunately, beginning this week and then every two months afterwards, I should be able to have a week in my IB Theory of Knowledge classes where I can do planning while students are preparing their “TOK Exhibitions” – initially practice ones, leading up to the official assessment.
Over the longer-term, I have informed our school leadership that beginning next year the number of different classes that I can teach must approach a more “normal” load. Again, there has never been any pressure on me to teach as many different classes as I do – it’s always been voluntary on my part.
2. Nearly twenty percent of my students seem to have a substantial self-control problem related to cellphone use. There have always be some students with cellphone issues, but it seems like the pandemic has increased their number and the level of their “addiction” to it. I don’t have a blanket “no cellphone policy” – if there is a family or work issue, or if they are using it for class, it’s fine, and eighty percent of students respect that rule. After gradually increasing consequences, last week I announced that I would take cellphones the first time I saw them and return them at the end of class. I will reiterate that new rule and consequence, but also teach about The Marshmallow Test and the value of self control. I’ve written many posts over the years about how I have helped students (sometimes) develop greater self-control. The first one was titled “I Like This Lesson Because It Make Me Have a Longer Temper” and you can see all the rest at The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control. They all have varying degrees of success, but it’s worth a shot.
3. I need to institute Student Leadership Teams in each class very soon. I’ve written about the Student Leadership Teams I created in all my classes last year. I have been meaning to do the same this year, but have found the required time and energy has been “a bridge too far.” I just haven’t had “mental bandwidth” to work on it. This week, however, I’m starting to create them in my TOK classes and they will gradually expand to my ELL classes. They should make the classes go more smoothly, and make me a better teacher.
Here’s my regular round-up of new “The Best…” lists I posted this month (you can see all 2,273 of them categorized here – you might also want to check out THREE ACCESSIBLE WAYS TO SEARCH FOR & FIND MY “BEST” LISTS).
This new school year has been hectic for all of us, and I only posted one new list this month. My annual end-of-the-year “Best” lists will also be late – I don’t expect to get to them until Winter Break.
Here’s the list from this month:
THE BEST ONLINE TOOLS TO SEE NEWSPAPERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
"Why poems? Because in writing posts for this blog and for books I have written over the past half-century, I have used expository writing. I describe, analyze, and try to capture school reform, policy-making, and the practice of teaching using facts, evidence, and explanation. I aim at the brain, not the heart.
Yet art, dance, drama, short stories, novels, and poetry–even cartoons–can capture features of teaching and learning, particularly what teachers and students feel in ways that exposition cannot.
I am neither a poet nor an aspiring one. I offer these as ones that stirred me, that captured in vivid language what teachers and students feel and do.:
The Hand
Mary Ruefle, 1996
"The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority, but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch, a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air."
Author(s): T. Jameson Brewer, Kathleen deMarrais, & Kelly L. McFaden
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing, New York
ISBN: 1433172127, Pages: 151, Year: 2020
Search for book at Amazon.com
"Teach for All Counter-Narratives. International Perspectives on a Global Reform Movement addresses an increasingly global and critical issue in teacher education. Drawing on contributions from nine countries, this volume explores the rationale and modus operandi of the Teach for All organization viewed through the eyes and voices of authors who have been directly and indirectly linked to the organization or who have examined its aims and rationale. The rapid and consistent growth of the organization at an international level is analyzed with implications for teacher preparation and the teaching profession.
In the Introduction, the editors set the scene of the global reform movement and provide the reader with the background of the book. It is argued that “iterations of TFAll across the globe consistently ignore cultural and contextual factors in their delivery of pedagogy” (p. 3). The international counter-narratives are illustrative of a global movement towards the pro-privatization and standardization reforms. The valorization of the work of alumni focusing on policy decisions or leadership positions in detriment to the work of teaching is aligned with the idea of promoting “agendas favorable to TFAll and the Global Education Reform Movement.” The attractiveness of the language inherent to the TFAll organization is argued, as well as the role that counter-narratives play in unveiling and making public given narratives and in transforming the stakeholders. The book includes stories from a diversity of jurisdictions across the globe based upon firsthand experience and research-based accounts of the TFAll network in India, Sweden, the United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand, China, Argentina, and Latvia. Such narratives point to consistent themes that emerge regardless of the context.
For nearly a half century, a narrative turn has been underway in the humanities and social sciences, most especially in education (Goodson & Gill, 2011). While the nature of the narrative turn is disputed, other understandings about narrative remain uncontested. One point of agreement is that stories can do and undo things. They can “emancipate” or “paralyze” (Kearney & Taylor, 2005, p. 21). They can “form” or they [can] “malform” (Strauss, 2016, p. 195). In short, stories can be dangerous things (King, 2003). Enter Teach For All Counter-Narratives: International Perspectives on a Global Reform Movement, a volume which tells the story of Teach for America’s spread to 48 countries since its U.S. inception in 1989 (see Introduction). This 2020 volume is a sequel to Brewer and deMarrais’s 2015 book, Teach For America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak up and Speak Out. The latter’s extensive reach through multiple media channels contributed to some of Teach for America’s undoing. What was touted in 2015 as a panacea to the failure of public education and conventional teacher certification became exposed for the ruse it appeared to be: a neo-liberal attempt to destroy the teaching profession through the “manufactured expertise” (Brewer, 2016) of alternately certificated teachers who would move on to jobs more commensurate with their highbrow educations. As for the current book, it focuses on how Teach for America’s homegrown story affected the world. As “new wine in an old bottle,” Teach For All Counter-Narratives offers firsthand accounts from those alternately certified by the program and their awakenings to its “colonizing nature” (back cover comment). When particular facets of the Teach for All program are peeled back, its privatization agenda, stemming from the neo-liberal ideology, appears to lay bare what lies at the core of global education reform.
Along with the book’s introduction, which sets the backdrop for the counter-narrative, two sections organize the chapters thematically. Section 1 addresses colonialism, social justice, inequality, and deficit ideologies (four chapters) while Section 2 takes up the emphasis on leadership cultivation over teaching (five chapters). Each chapter will now be surveyed with emphasis placed on key points.
The first section, “Colonialism, Social Justice, Inequality, and Deficit Ideologies,” comprises four chapters. In the first chapter “The Non-Project,” Jenny Elliot, from the UK, reports on Edith’s story and her struggle to develop a collaborative project in South Africa which ended up to be a rather challenging and stressful experience. The author discusses issues of power and colonialism and argues that “TFAll is better understood as a neo-colonial vehicle for spreading a particular Western message about teaching and learning.” The second chapter, “A Tale from the Tail of the Fish” by Nickie Muir, from New Zealand, includes a personal and vivid account of experiencing TFNZ. Muir’s chapter describes how the “faux elitism of being recruited as ‘quality candidates’” outside the communities and the focus on leadership (“quality leaders”) rather than on teaching contributes to the undervaluing and de-professionalization of the teaching profession (only six weeks teaching practice). Such contradictory messages, the author argued, mitigate against the idea of equity and social justice as well as issues of voice and participation, as the “discourse within the organization was not robust enough to encompass sufficient dissent or to listen carefully enough to those in the field.” In a similar vein, Yue Melody Yin and Hilary Hughes, in their chapter “Disparities Between Expectations and Impact in Fellows’ Experience of an Alternative Teaching Program in China,” report on a study of the transition of 14 graduates from prestigious Chinese universities into teaching fellows in disadvantaged schools through a program titled “Exceptional Graduates as Rural Teachers” (EGRT). The authors conclude that the program is aligned with the international movement’s purported vision that “every child deserves a good education” and “teaching as a form of leadership.” A mismatch between the fellows’ expectations and perceived impacts of their teaching through the EGRT program in disadvantaged rural schools, however, was found as well as negative emotions associated with their experiences. Such findings were related to the “pervasive deficit discourse about social conditions and inhabitants of rural communities, especially in the EGRT marketing, recruitment, and training materials.” The first section then ends with the chapter “Teach First Ask Questions Later: Experiencing a Policy Entrepreneur in New Zealand,” by Sam Oldham. A personal reflection on a firsthand experience in TFNZ led Oldham to question “the sophistication of its marketing, communications, and specific aspects of its training” and “the gulf between what it claims to be and the reality of what it is.” He highlights the survival logic of the organization “over the interests of students and teachers,” and is critical of its claims to reduce educational inequality by appointing unqualified, inexperienced trainees to low-income schools.
The second section of the book, “Leadership Cultivation Over Teaching,” spans five chapters. Sara G. Lam, Tongji Philip Qian, and Fan Ada Wang, in their chapter “Leaders in the Community or Educators in the Classroom? Problematic Dual Roles of Fellows at Teach For China,” focus on the relationship between leadership and teaching. The authors discuss the development of projects for community change and the focus on research and communication skills within TFC. They highlight the tensions between the dual goal of cultivating teachers and leaders, and question the pedagogical expertise acquired by the TFC fellows in the program. These authors also issue warnings about the de-professionalization of the teaching profession. A similar view is held by Elīna Bogusa and Leva Bērzina. In their chapter “Teach For All in Latvia: A Case Study and Warning to the World,” the authors make the case that the focus of the program is not on developing quality teachers, but on the organization itself. This emphasis is linked to the goal of moving teachers out of the classroom to assume leadership and policy-making positions aligned within the idea of standardization of education and deregulation of teacher preparation. In the chapter “Meritocracy and Leadership: The Keys to Social and Educational Change According to Enseñá por Argentina,” Victoria Matozo and Adriana Saavedra report on a firsthand experience in the organization and highlight the seductive language around transforming students’ lives through leadership. They draw attention to the lack of subject and pedagogy knowledge, as “teaching seemed to be an ‘accessory’ on our leadership career.” This view is corroborated by Vidya K. Subramanian in “‘We aren’t teachers, we are leaders’: Situating the Teach For India programme.” In this chapter, Subramanian reports findings from in-depth interview research with two cohorts of TFI Fellows. Subramanian examines the “discourses of leadership” which entail a rather simplistic approach “to poorly trained teachers in a segment of under resourced urban public schools catering to underprivileged children.” In the final chapter, “Sign of the Times: Teach For Sweden and the Broken Swedish Education System,” P.S. Myers looks at the “cultivated official narrative” based on governmental documents, news publications, organizational websites, and other promotional material. The author questions TFS’s savior narratives and deficit ideology, as well as its emphasis on “producing school leaders to replicate their ideology from empowered positions to increasing numbers of students.” The argument focuses on the role of well-positioned TFS alumni to “affect larger numbers of students and continue to shape the narratives around what teachers can and cannot do—in all likelihood, a set of solutions that not only persists in misidentifying the problem but stands to make it worse.”
SYNTHESIS AND CLOSING WORDS
Global movement, seductive language, focus on leadership rather than teaching, international perspectives—these are key features of this book which contribute to understanding the dynamics and multilayered TFAll organization in its dominant discourses amid its global and local realities. Such perspectives are critical to discussing what can be seen as an overall move towards the de-professionalization and deskilling of teachers through stymying teacher professionalism and consistent, in-depth teacher preparation. Such is the contribution of this book to the international understanding of alternate modes of teacher education and the widespread discussion of a contradictory trend in international teacher education: the editors’ and authors’ counter-narrative of TFAll, which avers that the story that global TFAll is attempting to overthrow is not a better solution than the one it is dislodging. Those interested in teacher education will find good reasons to read this book in order to deeply understand its international and local dimensions. In particular, reading this volume implies the careful examination of what can be seen as a global movement with critical implications for the reconfiguration of teacher education and the future of the teaching profession."
References
Brewer, T. J. (2016). Purposeful and lasting effects: An examination of Teach for America’s impact on the teaching profession, hiring practices, and educational leadership [Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90541
Brock, R., Dillard, C. B., Johnson III, R. G., Brewer, J. T., & deMarrais, K. (Eds.). (2015). Teach For America counter-narratives: Alumni speak up and speak out. Peter Lang.
Goodson, I., & Gill, S. (2011). The narrative turn in social research. In Narrative Pedagogy: Life history and learning. Peter Lang.
Kearney, R., & Taylor, V. E. (2005). A conversation with Richard Kearney. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 6(2), 17–26.
King, T. (2003). The truth about stories. Anansi Press.
Strauss, D. (2016). Darin Strauss. In M. Meran (Ed.) Why we write about ourselves (pp. 195–203). Plume.
Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: November 01, 2021
https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 23892, Date Accessed: 11/2/2021 3:23:13 PM
Teachers College Record
Gary Natriello
Content and resources for the education researcher
BY: MIKE ELK NOVEMBER 2, 2021
"Over 800 teachers in the Scranton School District are set to strike tomorrow in one of the largest teacher strikes this year.
Ever since the previous teachers’ union contract in Scranton expired five years ago and the school district was placed under state financial oversight in 2017, teachers have been working without a union contract.
Teachers are now set to strike beginning tomorrow to demand higher pay and put an end to concessions.
But while teachers in Scranton prepare to strike, they’re hoping Scranton native President Joe Biden will get involved in their labor struggle.
So far they’ve only felt frustration in their pleas.
Teachers in the Scranton School District are among some of the lowest paid in Pennsylvania. While the school district has been under state emergency financial management since 2017, the state’s appointed financial oversight manager has been criticized for making conditions for teachers in the Scranton School District worse.
Scranton teachers haven’t received a raise in five years while simultaneously having their health care benefits cut in the midst of the pandemic. In the last two years alone, 113 educators, or about one-eighth of all teachers and paraprofessionals in the school district, have left.
Scranton Federation of Teachers President Rosemary Boland said she’s had enough.
“Scranton’s public schools are in crisis, and instead of fixing it fairly—using the new, available funds from the federal rescue and recovery packages—the district and the state-appointed financial manager just want teachers to keep sacrificing,” Boland told Payday Report. “See us on the picket lines. Scranton educators, parents, and students have sacrificed and sacrificed, and we are tired of holding the bag for district mismanagement.”
For 24-year-old middle school teacher Kathleen Beckwith, it’s also disappointing to see that President Biden, who grew up in Scranton, hasn’t gotten involved yet in the contract dispute.
“We were hoping that we would get some attention with it being President Biden’s hometown, but it doesn’t seem like that’s been much help, he really hasn’t reached out yet to help us,” Beckwith told Payday. “So it’s a little disappointing.”
Many teachers have said they felt strongly about the city. Some teachers, like Adam McMorick, have resorted to taking on second jobs in retail just to make ends meet.
“I had a teaching job in another district that is currently in a much better, long-term union contract and I came back to Scranton because this is where I’m from,” said McCormick. “I just think there’s value to living in the community and shaping the priority and education of the kids in the community where I live.”
The decision by McMorick and others to strike didn’t come easily as many teachers were already worried about how several children lost learning time during the pandemic. However, they felt the need to strike to improve the school system in Scranton for the long term.
Indeed, many Scranton teachers who are struggling to get by, will be hurt financially by the strike. Already, the school district has informed teachers they will immediately shut off healthcare for all striking teachers when teachers go on strike Wednesday.
“We have people in our membership who are going to be hurting because of the strike, but it is something that we feel needs to be done,” said Beckwith. “We have a staffing crisis, nobody wants to work in Scranton, because of the lack of money and working conditions.”
Teachers in Scranton are still hoping that President Biden gets involved in the teachers’ strike in his hometown to push back against the attacks on teachers in his hometown.
“I certainly hope that President Biden and Senator Casey, who’s also from the area, I hope they do have an eye on it,” said McCormick. “I hope they get involved, participate, and recognize the value that we bring to the city.”
"About a month into another school year marred by the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and families are facing renewed anxiety over “learning loss” — the idea that time away from in-person schooling will leave young people behind, with dire consequences. This anxiety is understandable: Remote learning has been gravely unequal across communities, and for students, lower educational attainment is associated with an array of challenges down the road, including reduced lifetime earnings.
Hand-wringing over learning loss is often based on the premise that, in an era of skyrocketing inequality, schooling can level the playing field. This, of course, is nothing new: Horace Mann, a public school champion in the 1800s, called education the “great equalizer.” Today, the view informs President Biden’s priorities: the largest spending increase of his proposed 2022 budget would go toward education.
Schools, certainly, are a public good worthy of investment. In addition to fostering critical academic skills, they are, at their best, spaces for developing curiosity, creativity, and collaboration with others. And education level is undeniably linked to economic outcomes: While the real wages of those without a high school diploma have been declining since the 1970s, those of college graduates have been rising.
Despite this, however, the reality is that education is no panacea for inequality. As an historian, I’ve spent years researching education systems in Boston and found that, even as schools offer social benefits for many, schooling can also help entrench the divide between rich and poor. A focus on education as a policy fix can take attention away from policies actually responsible for rising inequality today.
Case in point is early 20th-century Boston, when public high schools boomed and new demographics of students, especially white women and second-generation immigrants, used schools to enter growing sectors of white-collar work. Through alumni networks and university placement services, “Boston Brahmin” elites forged new relationships with New England universities to use advanced degrees to control access to the best-paying jobs in business, engineering, and law. In 1880, most businessmen or engineers had not attended college, and lawyers rarely attended professional school. Just a few decades later, these business and professional elites were creating new pathways from bachelor’s and master’s degrees to management positions, and from law schools into corporate law. Today, we see similar forms of “opportunity hoarding” by the wealthy,
Another historical lesson is that schooling has often served employers’ interests at the expense of workers. In the early-20th century, Boston manufacturers were eager to circumvent strong craft union apprenticeship regulations around pay and length of training. These rules allowed unions to control entry into the trades and ensured that youth workers received quality training and were not exploited. For employers, however, these regulations hampered their power and flexibility. One solution for employers was “industrial education” regimes in schools, which were free to employers and came without the ideological influence of unions.
While Boston’s craft unions were powerful enough to limit the expansion of industrial education, employers ultimately shifted their workforces away from expensive, unionized craftworkers and toward nonunionized machine operators and clerical staff who received academic educations in schools. Today, this lesson should raise questions about the continued role of schools in workforce training. Discussions of career preparation usually focus on skills that make students more attractive to employers, and very little on skills that might prepare students to fight for workplace justice.
The 20th century showed us that when it comes to equality, what matters most is not education, but the power of workers on the job. Levels of education and social inequality rose simultaneously through the 1920s, but between 1940 and 1970, social inequality fell. Many have attributed this decline primarily to the expansion of public education. However, other factors played an essential role. In particular, powerful industrial unions organized workers across skill level, race, ethnicity, and gender to push employers to pay living wages and offer good working conditions. These workers provided the base of political support for federal social programs and the taxation necessary to fund them. The decline of income inequality in this period tracks almost perfectly with the rise of mass union membership. Likewise, the rise of income inequality since the 1970s tracks with the erosion of unions across the private sector.
Education policy cannot fix inequality alone, but schools can play a key role in structural reforms. While Biden’s education policies are typically couched in the language of human capital — the concept that increased skills and knowledge translate into higher future earnings — components of his American Families Plan would have direct labor market consequences. Expanding early childhood education, for example, would serve as essential child care, giving a special lift to women who have taken on the burden of unpaid care work during the pandemic. The plan would also invest in teachers, who have themselves been at the forefront of labor organizing during the pandemic and are helping rebuild workers’ collective power across the country. Meanwhile, policy makers should focus on structural reforms that tackle social inequality head on, such as shoring up labor rights, implementing universal basic income and paid family and sick leave, launching public jobs programs, and taxing the rich.
Emily Stewart
What the debate about paying for infrastructure misses.
"Viji Sathy started her first teaching job after graduate school feeling fairly well prepared. Her doctoral program had included a one-credit class on teaching. She had been a teaching assistant several times over. And she had squeezed into her busy schedule as many of the university teaching center’s workshops as she could.
So when the first student evaluations rolled in after her research methods course ended in the fall of 2008, she was shocked. Some students complained about tricky questions on the exams. A couple intensely disliked her. “The feedback,” she recalls, “was just devastating. I thought I had made the wrong career move.”
Sathy understands now how misguided some of her notions about effective teaching were. For one, she thought her job was to cover the content. Only later did she realize that she wasn’t so much teaching as dumping a bunch of information onto her students, leaving no time for discussion or practice. It wasn’t uncommon for her to whip through 70 or more slides in 75 minutes. She remembers, too, feeling appalled and frustrated when students flubbed exam questions even though she had pulled them, word for word, from those same slides. She expected them not just to remember the concepts but to apply them. “How could they not get it?” she wondered at the time.
“I cringe now,” she says, “to think how little I understood about how learning actually worked in this course.”
The mistaken ideas about teaching that Sathy had early in her career are widespread — and not only among new instructors. Good teaching is often seen as a natural talent when really it’s a skill, one that can be learned and refined.
Fast forward 13 years and Sathy is known by many of her peers and former students as a phenomenal teacher. She has won a slew of awards at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is a professor of the practice of psychology and neuroscience. And she is nationally known for her innovative approach to teaching large lecture courses, which has led to a significant improvement in her students’ academic performance.
Thinking back to those early days, though, Sathy sees how that first stumble could have led her in a different direction. If it weren’t for a “big lightbulb moment” that enabled her to quickly understand her mistakes, a fierce determination to become a better teacher, and an openness to seeing her role not as the expert who commands a room, but as a partner in students’ learning, she could have been yet another hapless instructor wondering how to get through the semester without too many punishing evaluations.
“I’m glad I had the courage to keep getting back into the ring,” she says.
What makes a good teacher? For decades, if not centuries, the myth of the natural teacher has held sway over academe. In this fable, the star professor can be many things: a commanding presence inspiring students with his brilliance, a raconteur enrapturing undergraduates with funny stories, a nurturing figure pushing her students over the finish line fueled by a bottomless well of compassion.
A thread that runs throughout the narratives is that you either have “it” — brilliance, charisma, empathy — or you’re out of luck. No amount of training or oversight can change who you are and how you connect with students. Good teachers, in short, are born and not made.
Yet plenty of evidence contradicts the idea that being a leading scholar in your field or having a magnetic personality are necessary ingredients for good teaching. While some people may be naturally gifted at conveying ideas or generating excitement, experts on pedagogy can point to the many ways in which listening to a brilliant lecture doesn’t make you smarter.
Instead, research has long shown that a handful of evidence-based approaches — all of which can be learned and refined — can dramatically improve how well students perform. That includes techniques like crafting a clear and detailed syllabus so students have a roadmap of where they are expected to go; putting students in the driver’s seat so they are actively working their way through material and not just listening to lectures; and allowing plenty of room for practice and feedback from the instructor.
Becoming an effective teacher, in short, takes time, experimentation, reflection, and coaching. Certainly that’s assumed in K-12 education, where a great deal of classroom training and learning about pedagogy is built into the process of becoming a teacher.
So why isn’t that happening in higher education?
Colleges everywhere say that teaching is central to their mission. Yet anyone surveying the landscape in search of the systems necessary to foster effective teaching, and the incentives to pursue it, would find a disparate collection of projects, funders, and evangelists. As Sathy’s experience illustrates, that leaves many new faculty members vulnerable in the classroom and reliant on their own initiative to seek help.
That disjunction has many roots. Doctoral programs continue to place more emphasis on turning out strong scholars than on building strong teachers, even as the percentage of graduates who secure tenure-track positions at research-intensive universities continues to shrink.
Once they arrive on campus, faculty members are expected to learn through trial and error, often in the kinds of large introductory courses that are among the most challenging to teach. Campus teaching centers are frequently underfunded and their services optional. Faculty members whose primary responsibility is to instruct — namely, contingent faculty — are given less authority and pay than their tenured peers, signaling the second-rung status of teaching.
Perhaps most significantly, the narrow and flawed ways in which teaching is measured — typically through student course evaluations — send a clear message to faculty members about how the administration views that part of their job. Research comes with rigorous peer review and public scrutiny; teaching does not.
“Most of us were thrown into the classroom with little or no training. And yet we’re called professors,” says Ginger Clark, associate vice provost for academic and faculty affairs at the University of Southern California, who has been working to change the teaching culture on her campus. “We spend our careers trying to figure out how to do this. We don’t really get any help. We can’t really admit we don’t know how to do this effectively. We figure out how to work within the system, which usually means getting good student evaluations. Then someone comes along and says, Hey, you know the research says that student evaluations aren’t really valid measures of good teaching.”
The pandemic, in fact, sparked conversations that were the first some professors had ever had with their peers about what happens in the classroom. Collectively they asked themselves and each other: How do I help my students care about this subject? If I need to pare down my class, what are the most important things they need to know or be able to do? How will I know that they learned anything?
It’s no wonder that, in the face of this confusion, the myth of the natural teacher lives on.
In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), Jonathan Zimmerman pores over decades of material from university archives to show, among other things, how colleges have often viewed good teaching as a personal matter, dependent on ability, not training — a collection of “god given” talents, as one Princeton dean wrote in the 1950s.
While that rhetoric has shifted in recent decades, Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, points out an obvious paradox: Even as universities have become more bureaucratic and centrally controlled, teaching continues to operate largely independent of oversight. Part of that is tied up with the concept of academic freedom. Professors believe that they should have full control not only of what they teach but of how they teach it.
The public, however, isn’t so sure, Zimmerman and others have noted. The last decade or so has seen a wave of books and op-eds decrying how little some students learn in college and questioning the worth of a degree. As public mistrust grows, so does an apparent mismatch of values: Universities see themselves as generators of knowledge and scholarship, operating, in effect, “a prestige economy.” The public sees their most important function as teaching.
For their new book What’s Public About Public Higher Ed? (Hopkins), Stephen Gavazzi, a professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University, and E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, surveyed nearly 6,000 people about their perceptions of college. One thought exercise was to ask how they would spend $100 of public money on higher education. Respondents generally said they would put about half of that toward teaching and $25 each toward research and service.
“That really represents a contradiction in how universities like to position themselves,” Gavazzi told the nonprofit news organization Open Campus.
But lately, demographics and data are pushing back against this myth. As enrollments of first-generation and low-income students expand, effective teaching has become key to colleges’ survival, as well as to their commitment to equity. Students who struggled can no longer be dismissed as “not college material.” Poorly designed or taught courses can disproportionately hurt those from less privileged backgrounds. This is happening most notably in gateway courses that might determine students’ majors — or whether they stay in college at all.
David Laude is a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the many evangelists on campuses throughout the country preaching the importance of teaching reform.
Laude, who began teaching in the late 1980s, says he fell into the trap of thinking that one of his responsibilities in introductory courses was to weed out those who didn’t belong. It was, after all, what he had experienced as a student himself. So he graded on a curve, flunking, he estimates, about 20 percent of his students over the years. “My expectation was that the smart kids would get the A’s, others would get C’s and D’s,” he says. “It wasn’t like I didn’t care, but I didn’t see them as individuals.”
“How could I have been so clueless?” he asks now.
He sees a direct connection between his early missteps and how faculty members have been acculturated. They are still trained, in short, to be teachers of course content, not teachers of students. “If all I’m asked to do is stand up in front of students and present an excellent lecture on a topic and close my book and leave,” Laude says, “I have done nothing to address the fact that there may be students in the classroom who do not understand what I taught.”
Laude’s transformation was so significant, he says, that he no longer thinks of himself as a teacher, but as a facilitator and a motivator. And his work at UT-Austin in restructuring gateway courses and designing other interventions for at-risk students has helped the university substantially raise four-year graduation rates.
Other teaching evangelists tell similar stories. Like Laude, they may have had an epiphany in the classroom. Then they spent years of hard work reconsidering the role of the instructor and redefining their interactions with students. Often they forged ahead despite cautions from colleagues that spending too much time on teaching wasn’t going to help with promotion and tenure review.
To change that way of thinking, you have to change the ecosystem, reformers say. And that’s a heavy lift. It means reforming graduate education. It means choosing leaders who care about raising graduation rates and closing equity gaps, like Laude and his colleagues did at UT-Austin.
It also means incorporating training and a rewards structure into academic life, so that faculty members can learn new ways of teaching without feeling as if that work is invisible, or that it comes at the expense of what’s really valued: their scholarship.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky, an associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has thought a lot about these issues over the years. On the one hand, she says, humanities professors tend to see teaching as a vocation, and they may be less likely than STEM professors to fall into the weed-out way of thinking. Freshman composition, one of the standard gateway courses on many campuses, for example, is taught in small groups and focused on preparing students to succeed in college.
“The humanities is a space where pedagogy is important and innovation is happening,” she says. The problem is that at an institutional level it is rarely encouraged or rewarded.
Szwydky finds it striking that when she was a college administrator, before becoming a professor, she was expected to spend two to four hours a week on professional development. It was written into her job description. Her training as a faculty member, by contrast, “has all been self directed, self led, things I want to do. It’s never been part of my annual evaluation.”
It doesn’t matter how many teaching awards you may have earned, she says. “If your institution prioritizes research, that’s what’s going to make or break your tenure file.”
Academe also continues to struggle with how it values research about teaching. Professors interested in discipline-based education research, such as how students learn what chemistry is and how it works, often say that it is perceived as less rigorous than other forms of scholarship. “At most research universities if you were publishing in pedagogy journals they would not be counted or weighted as heavily as if you were publishing in a traditional journal.” Szwydky says.
So how do you change the culture around teaching?
That’s a question Diane O’Dowd has been wrestling with for over a decade. As vice provost for academic personnel at the University of California at Irvine, she has used her administrative position to make changes on several fronts, inspired by her own experiences as an instructor and researcher in neuroscience.
O’Dowd considered herself a good teacher, a view she says was backed up by her student course evaluations. She had mastered the sage-on-the-stage model, had a well-organized syllabus, and liked to ask provocative questions in class.
But when her children were old enough to start applying to colleges, she began thinking about whether they would enjoy her classes. The answer, she realized with a bit of a shock, was “emphatically, No.”
“At home, we have vibrant dialogues. We solve problems together. That’s not what I was doing in my classroom,” she recalls. That kid in the back, feet up on the chair, hoodie pulled down over his face, reading a comic book? “That would have been my son.”
O’Dowd began to see how superficial her teaching evaluations were. Yes, some students called her inspiring, but they didn’t point to anything specific about her teaching style. She also reflected on the fact that her own excitement came from research, which involved exploration, experimentation, and discovery. How, she began wondering, could she create that kind of energy in her classroom?
Her quest led her to join a summer teaching institute on active learning, which led her to revamp her department’s introductory biology course. That led her to a position as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor, where she began helping colleagues in STEM consider different ways of teaching their undergraduate courses.
The chancellor tapped her for her current position, she says, to help elevate teaching across campus. One of the first things she did was to enforce a longstanding but little used University of California system policy that teaching must be evaluated using two forms of evidence, not just student course evaluations. A professor might include a reflective teaching statement, or their syllabus. That simple shift, she says, helped discussions about teaching “spread like wildfire.”
The other change she made is a requirement that no faculty member can move more quickly up the ladder — called an acceleration — unless they are outstanding in two areas, not just research. If your teaching or service isn’t also excellent, she says, “I don’t care if you just published four books.”
UC-Irvine has also signaled an increased emphasis on pedagogy by creating a position called professor of teaching. Faculty members in these positions have rights and benefits similar to tenure-track faculty, including Academic Senate membership. They are given start-up funds to conduct research — most do pedagogical research — which allows them to hire graduate students, for example, to help with that work.
Although there aren’t many of them on campus, about 100 out of some 1,400 faculty members, professors of teaching are embedded in many different departments, which makes it easy for them to share their pedagogical ideas with colleagues. “It does not require me, as a professor of neuroscience, to go to the teaching and learning center to learn new things,” says O’Dowd. “I can just walk across the hall to my colleague.”
Other universities have adopted similar strategies to spark deeper discussions within schools and departments about effective teaching.
At the University of Southern California, change began with a report out of the faculty senate outlining how unhappy professors were with student course evaluations as a measure of teaching effectiveness, says Clark, the associate vice provost for academic and faculty affairs. Research has long shown that such evaluations can be biased against women and people of color. And they don’t capture the behind-the-scenes work many professors do to improve their teaching, such as experiment with new coursework or participate in such things as faculty learning communities.
Some of the most effective instructors, Clark says, are also not getting the best evaluations, pointing to a well-known study out of Harvard University to explain why: Innovative teaching strategies, such as active-learning classrooms, don’t always sit well with students. They may feel as if they’re learning more in a traditional lecture, even if evidence shows they perform worse on tests.
Through its Excellence in Teaching Initiative, USC has begun changing the way in which teaching is supported, assessed, and rewarded. It is in the process of asking schools to devise teaching-excellence plans.
The idea, says Clark, is that asking professors in the same discipline to define good teaching will get them thinking about their collective goals. What do they want students to learn in introductory courses? What kinds of professional development should department members engage in? What evidence-based teaching practices will instructors be encouraged to use?
That bottom-up approach is critical, Clark says. “Universities have to be very thoughtful about how they approach the teaching culture, so they’re not implying that faculty aren’t already doing a good job. What they want to do is say, ‘Hey, let’s have an honest conversation about how well we’re really prepared for it.’ You change the system not by evaluating faculty differently, but by asking professors whether teaching matters.”
Valencia College, a community college in Central Florida that relies heavily on part-time instructors, encourages them to improve their teaching by offering certificates and pay increases for participating in 60 hours of professional development.
That emphasis on strong teaching begins before the college even brings anyone on board, says Isis Artze-Vega, provost and vice president for academic affairs. Discussions of teaching start with the hiring process, continue as faculty members start work, and are expanded as they go through a detailed teaching-evaluation process.
But at a research university, Clark notes, those discussions also open a trickier conversation about balancing teaching with other priorities. Some professors have complained that the increased emphasis on teaching excellence might hurt USC’s ability to recruit top researchers. She counters that the shift is part of a tidal wave.
“I don’t think in 10 years there will be many universities left that haven’t changed the way they think about teaching, changed the way they evaluate it and reward it,” she says, adding that higher education ignores the research about pedagogy at its peril. “If we want to live our values and create a more diverse, educated citizenry, then we need to recognize that asking students to fit themselves into our model, as opposed to adjusting our model to fit our students, is not going to work.”
Some of the most notable reform efforts are coming from external funders and academic associations. The National Science Foundation, the Association of American Universities, the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, the American Historical Association, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and others have sponsored research and projects on teaching reform, including work on how to advance discipline-based education research.
In recent years funders have moved from supporting individual faculty members toward sponsoring institutional changes they think are necessary for reforms to stick.
The Association of American Universities, for example, recently began a project to help departments find better ways to evaluate teaching. It’s part of a decade-old undergraduate STEM teaching initiative,
More early career faculty members are coming into research universities committed to effective teaching, Miller says. “What we really need to do is work on the larger system of how it gets valued and recognized and rewarded.”
The problem isn’t that universities can’t pull together evidence of good teaching, says Andrea Follmer, who heads the campus teaching center at the University of Kansas. It’s that they lack consensus on what they’re looking for in that material. As a result, when promotion and tenure committees are debating whether someone is an effective teacher, “it becomes easy to look at student ratings.”
Follmer is leading a pilot program at Kansas to reinvent the evaluation process, as part of a multi-campus project called TEval. The new process, she says, considers seven benchmarks, including course planning, class climate, and evidence of student learning. Teaching reviews consider, for example, how well course content is aligned with the curriculum, whether a faculty member is involved in scholarship about pedagogy, and how much time they spend advising and mentoring students. Departments are also encouraged to develop “peer triads,” in which small groups of faculty members whose coursework is related meet regularly to talk about their teaching and course design.
The chemical and petroleum engineering department has agreed to use the benchmarks in their promotion and tenure criteria. The chair, Susan Stagg-Williams, expects the new measures will get committees to move beyond a common, and ultimately fruitless, debate: Is a professor getting good evaluations because they give out a lot of A’s, or are they giving out a lot of A’s because they’re a good teacher? Student evaluations simply can’t tell you what you need to know.
Stagg-Williams was somewhat surprised that faculty members agreed to move to the new model, but she thinks that’s because it was presented as a way for professors to support one another’s work and create a “safe space” in which to discuss their challenges. “It kind of takes away a little bit of the scariness of the evaluations,” she says.
Prajnaparamita Dhar, a professor in the department, is leading the charge. As part of the reform effort, she has put her own teaching in the spotlight by inviting another faculty member to observe her class regularly in the hope that it will lead to routine discussions about what is and isn’t working. “What we’re hoping this will highlight is that the faculty member is not there just to look for your mistakes,” she says. “If you’re doing things every day you can showcase all the unique ways you are handling student interactions.”
Stagg-Williams has drawn from her own experience, as an athlete and a coach, to throw her support behind the changes. “One of the things I’ve really been advocating for on our campus is to look at our faculty as a team,” she says. “I have people in my department who are exceptional researchers, and I’ve got faculty who are outstanding teachers. And I’ve got faculty who do really well doing both. As chairs, we should be able to identify the strengths of all the faculty and help them be successful in those areas.”
Which professors do colleges value most? If you judge by pay and status, it’s usually not the teaching faculty. Lecturers, teaching professors, and others who carry the heaviest teaching loads are typically lower on the totem pole than tenure-track faculty. Depending on their pay structure, they may not even be given the same incentives to participate in professional development as their tenured colleagues, despite the relevance to their work.
Even faculty members whose teaching expertise is highly sought after can feel like second-class citizens. That’s how Destin Heilman began to view his role after spending more than a decade at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a non-tenure-track teaching professor.
Heilman never expected to pursue a teaching career. “I was all about lab research,” he recalls of his graduate experience at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
But after winning praise for his teaching and mentoring work, and seeing the drawbacks of a traditional tenure-track job — like the never-ending pursuit of research grants — Heilman decided to pursue a more teaching-focused career.
“I took a big risk,” he recalls. “I had a lot of people whispering in my ear: ‘If you’re going to do this, don’t do it too long, because if you’re in that rut it’s going to be too difficult to get back in.”
In 2006 he accepted a visiting faculty position at Worcester Polytechnic. It came without a path to promotion but he loved the work and the institute’s commitment to project-based learning.
Worcester Polytechnic eventually created a promotion system for contingent faculty, and Heilman became an associate teaching professor. He and his peers were heavily involved in pedagogical innovation on campus, including the Center for Project Based Learning and discipline-based education research. And yet they lacked the job security their tenure-track colleagues enjoyed. Nor could they participate in faculty governance.
That began to weigh on Heilman. “We felt that disparity, that mismatch,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if I could swallow this pill year after year if I was not given the same rights.”
That changed this summer, after three years of campuswide conversations involving teaching faculty and traditional tenure-track faculty led Worcester Polytechnic to create a path
It also, he says, recognizes and rewards the kinds of research they do on teaching. “It changed the tone on campus for the teaching faculty, such that we feel included. We have been formally valued by the institution.”
While Worcester Polytechnic may still be an exception, more campuses are elevating the position of teaching faculty.
Sathy, the Chapel Hill professor, is director of a new program on campus to promote education research, and she’s talking to faculty members about how they can conduct research on teaching. It’s part of her longstanding effort to amplify that kind of scholarship and dismantle some of the more destructive myths around what makes a professor effective. “We let evidence drive us in so many ways, except in teaching,” she says of higher education. “That’s ‘magic.’”
She remembers what it felt like as a novice teacher, and a self-described introvert, to wrestle with the idea that you need to have a big voice and loads of charisma. “It was so hard for me because I know I’m not that person,” she says. “I can’t tell a story to save my life. But I just knew that’s not what good teaching is. ... I know how to get people to the finish line, and none of that has to do with how funny I am.”
Sathy says she still receives the occasional negative student evaluation, but she doesn’t focus on those too much.
The mark of a good teacher, Sathy knows, isn’t being liked in the moment. It isn’t charm or brilliance or even empathy. It comes about with practice and research, and it’s ultimately about giving students the tools, the space, and the guidance they need to learn — even when they are no longer in your classroom."
