Last semester I had a nearly full-time – or at least it certainly felt like full time to me! – teaching load at CSU Chico. At the same time, Eran had several classes as well, so we had many conversations over dinner about how we were approaching our material and methods.
At the same time, another episode of the eternal debate about what good teaching looks like broke out on the academic interwebs. As such squabbles go, this one seemed relatively minor, revolving around the question of whether we should criticize or prioritize (or some combination of the two) student evaluations. I can’t say I came out of the exchange with any clearer picture on the questions at hand.
This is sadly typical for me when it comes to questions of teaching. Years ago when I was getting my PhD, a debate broke out over the faculty and graduate student listserv about the lecture. Some claimed that research had convincingly shown that an over-reliance on lecturing is not an effective teaching method, and should only be combined with equal servings of group work and discussion. Since then I’ve run into these claims several more times.
And yet in every job I’ve had since getting my degree, the expectation has been clear that lecturing will make up the majority of what I do, and is the majority of what my colleagues do. Group work, at least among incoming freshmen, has such a bad reputation that attempts to implement it are accompanied by such descriptors as “disastrous.” I’ve used smaller group discussions and projects, and while they haven’t crashed and burned I can’t say that I’ve detected a huge uptick in comprehension or interest, either.
Much of this has to do with the material realities teachers at all college levels deal with today. We have so many students, and so many boxes to check off to fulfill this state or college requirement, and only so much time. If I only had 20-25 students per class in a classroom where they could easily move about to face one another, no doubt I would be able to incorporate more discussions and other strategies. If I wasn’t required to cover a huge swath of time in a mere 15 weeks, there would also be more time for such approaches that involved deep dives into documents and specific historical problems. These chronic and ever-worsening problems are irritatingly accompanied with discussions almost always focused on how to adjust, instead of – as we should be pouring our energy into – how to resist and refuse the implementation of such conditions in the first place.
But even granting the centrality of deteriorating conditions to these questions, I still feel like the discourse around teaching methods resembles that of the world of weight loss and dieting – every season a new fad, and then we inevitably find out that this strategy or that was based on limited research or, works but only if you have this number of students with this amount of prep coming into college or, was a bunch of baloney from the start. Take for example the long-cherished idea of “learning styles,” which I’ve heard has been thoroughly debunked yet so entered the public consciousness that my students frequently tell me what kind of learner they are. Sometimes it’s clear they’re even confused about what that means; how to respond to the student who asked if there would be more movies about the subject matter, because they are a “visual learner”?
But at least the idea about how to approach a “visual” or “auditory” learner is usually pretty straightforward – often, the discussion of educational methods is carried on with phrases and opaque proscriptions that do not, to me, clearly translate into any recommendations for what, exactly, I would be doing in classroom to fulfill these commands. For sure I need to be responsive and attentive to the circumstances and needs of my students, I completely agree – but can someone actually tell me what that means in practice?
Perhaps they can, but I suspect we avoid being so specific because once we are, the debate begins all over again about whether that specific strategy is correct or effective. This is made all the worse by the fact that one teacher can say “this has worked for me” while another responds, “really?, that has never worked for me.” I’ve had this exact conversation before. Making things even more confusing, there is the sticky background context of disagreement over what history teachers should be doing. Are we here to simply make sure our students Know the Things about history? Often we feel like we’re stuck with this first and most simple of jobs because our freshmen come to us with a very shallow historical body of knowledge. But then again, how important is it that they know the details of say, this presidential administration or that? Aren’t we here more fundamentally to teach them how to think historically, or critically about the past? If we tailor our classes to what we think will be interesting and relevant to our student population, is that being a thoughtful and responsive teacher or is it selling out the idea of learning about the “foreign country” of the past? These are the kind of debates I almost feel like are not worth having, because the reality of the situation is that teachers vary in what their priorities in this regard are, and there is very rarely any changing of minds about what the True Mission of the History Teacher is or should be. And in any case in the end we’ll just say “of course these things are not contradictory and can be combined” to mute any conflict and all go home feeling like we all won the argument.
And it gets worse. The mysteries of class dynamics makes nailing down any sure method or philosophy even more difficult. Every teacher experiences this – one class is alert, attentive, and engaged with the material. The next – supposedly drawn from the exact same student body population, and with the exact same number of students – sits passively and never makes a peep or does anything that indicates they could possibly give two shits about the material under discussion, let alone three. Yet the teacher is the same, the methods are the same, and the material is the same. What gives?
Finally – and most awkward of all to deal with or discuss – is the issue of the teacher themselves. All kinds of factors impact the dynamics between a teacher and their students. Gender and race are the most consequential of these – I’ve learned from personal experience that while the effect of an eccentric male professor is often to increase his aura of intelligence, when a female professor is eccentric it can work just as well to undermine her authority. We can adjust to these unjust differences of reception, but we can’t fundamentally change them semester to semester. And on top of gender and race, we have the much more difficult-to-pin-down question of plain personality. Students love charismatic lectures who waltz in front of the classroom with command and eloquence, lectures seemingly memorized and dramatic flourishes all on cue. But does this actually produce better learning results? It would seem a strange kind of cruel fate if it does; not everyone can be charismatic, even if in every other regard they do their absolute best to maximize their students’ learning. And doesn’t this speak to the problem of student evaluations, that as many critics have pointed out, can function a lot like popularity contests rather than providing useful information about the effectiveness of various teaching methods?
So help me out here – what, specifically, reliably and consistently makes for good teaching? Is there any formula that goes beyond what would be the advice for any human-centered endeavor – be patient, prepared to improvise, and don’t abuse your authority? I’m not so sure there is – but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
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Sadly, and maybe because I’m feeling particularly cynical today, what constitutes good teaching is mostly defined by others. First, whatever your department chair and peer classroom evaluators say makes good teaching. And of course they draw on their own personalized knowledge to make those judgments. Secondly, good teaching in an institutional setting is what draws students, or at least doesn’t repel them. So student satisfaction via enrollment demand drives who thinks you are, or are not, a “good” teacher.
For myself, because I most often teach survey courses that are conducted in the evening, I do two things. First, I emphasize good historical thinking, in terms of teaching theory and critical thinking. On the ground, I mix-and-match group work, short lectures, and documentary screenings. I emphasize my points about good historical thinking across all those activities. I lecture a bit more now than I did in the past, mostly because I like talking about some topics, and my passion for those topics draws some positive responses from students. -TL
In sum, there’s no one way to define good teaching. It’s a mix of factors. But you’ve touched on many of them above.
Yeah, you know, the only things I know I’m good at *for sure* is a) I don’t seem bored when I am lecturing and b) I articulate well. That’s it. But I feel like you’re right; beyond some really obvious stuff (like, talk loud enough so your students can hear you lol) there really doesn’t seem to be any way to define good teaching.
This is a really insightful and astute post, Robin. And totally awesome that you are in another CSU. I lived in Davis and Sacramento for my undergrad and master’s and now work as a lecturer at Cal Poly Pomona, another CSU. Our faculty union, the CFA, has brought some substantive gains to lecturers and tenured faculty over the past few years. And I am told that professors all across the country admire the contracts that the CFA is able to secure. With regard to the points in your post, I think you are totally right to emphasize the arbitrariness of what constitutes “good” teaching. My own experience is that a lot of what receives good student evaluations, which is weighted heavily, unfortunately, at many teaching-oriented schools, especially for the majority who are not on the tenure-track, is very much personality-based. As you wrote, one professor may adopt one pedagogical technique for one class while another adopts the same technique but it backfires. What made the difference? It could have been the class, but most likely the second professor didn’t have those intangible factors of personality. And yes, there are LOTS of studies showing that student evaluations are harsher on professors that are women and POC. Speaking of which, I did a five-part blog series on the relationship of student evaluations to grade inflation and the business model of the modern university. It links to a lot of the academic studies that reinforce much of what you’ve claimed here, so email me if you’d like to see them. I share your frustration about class size…I teach 500 students per year at two institutions so by necessity I lecture a fair amount. I agree completely that if universities really cared about the relationship between student and professor, they would reduce our class sizes to about 20-25. Not only is it easiest to lecture in large classes, but it’s also easy to recapitulate how we were taught as undergrads. A final point…I guess I’m somewhat of a fan of the “less is more” approach to lecture. When I taught my first class, at Yuba Community college, not too far from Chico, I had 27 lectures in a semester. I did nothing but lecture. Now I have 12. The lectures now cover more material, but I also use lecture to go in depth on a few points that the textbook cannot (I tell my students that the textbook is meant to cover everything, and I test them on it, while in lecture I make arguments on about 2-3 major points). This is going to sound bad, but I guess I’ve lowered my expectations a little bit over the years and not so much to dumb down my course, but more in response to student evaluations. While there is a case to be made that I am now meeting more of the students where they’re at, what can’t be left out of the discussion is that it’s not just administrators nowadays who think of students as customers; it is the students themselves, meaning that a non-tenured professor can only push so much.
In addition to all the other qualifications and tensions around teaching, there are gaps between disciplines that are frequently ignored by both pedagogy “experts” and administrators alike. I’ve gotten to the point that I tune out of any discussion of teaching that isn’t centered on history, because there are just no other disciplines that have the same mix of content, skills, sources, and myths. I’ve looked at all the fads and trends, including the ‘lecture is dead’, and there’s maybe one person in ten writing on this that even considers history, much less actually teaches in it.
And, to be completely honest, as a World/Asia specialist, I’ve started just skimming over the history pedagogy discussions that only involve US history. I know, it’s a lot to cover in two or three semesters, that whole 300 years or so, with all those sources in English, and as much as we complain about the lack of preparation on the part of our students, at least they know *something*…. It’s all very well to talk about ‘uncoverage’ (and most discussions of the coverage debate are disengenous, at best, anway, because nobody really tries to cover everything and we all make choices and skip stuff) when the basics of the narrative are part of the dominant culture, reinforced constantly by media and entertainment, but when most of what an incoming student knows about the field is just wrong, you have to work in a more integrated and cohesive manner.
Thank you for this great post, Robin Marie, and thanks to all the commenters.
Maybe good teaching is like obscenity — you know it when you see it.
More seriously, the concern for describing, quantifying and evaluating good teaching at the college level probably has two main sources: 1) the need for universities to respond to the student movements of the ’60s, to student demands for relevance, etc; 2) the de jure if not de facto transformation of job landscape of higher education in the wake of EEOC and class action challenges to hiring practices that excluded women / minorities from the tenure track, if they got jobs at all.
It’s when women and Black folks and Latinx scholars start joining the ranks of the tenure track that we see a lot of concern within the profession for identifying good teaching / evaluating teaching within academe. And that may track too with conversations in the wider culture about recognizing what makes a good professor. (And of course treating “professor” as an unmarked term, eliding the ways in which professor has meant straight and white and male, leads to the sorts of skewed evaluations that you mention, Robin Marie, and that peer reviewed studies have substantiated.)
I tend to believe that I’m a good professor — or at least a good teacher — and I’ve never been apologetic about using the lecture. I can’t imagine teaching the survey without it. That said, I’ve cut my lectures in half this semester; I have 14 scheduled lectures, one a week starting next week, and then the other 14 class meetings of the Tues/Thu. class are devoted to discussion of the primary sources I’ve assigned the students to analyze, as well as to a group project (!!!!!!!) that all my classes are collaborating on together.
I’ve never assigned a group project before. I hated group projects from elementary school to grad school. And I’ve never taught the survey as a primarily discussion-based class. So this is a grand experiment, and who knows how it will turn out. But I feel like if my students trust me, then the worst case scenario is that they’ll roll with it and we’ll all survive. But I think it will be better than all that.
Honestly, I think such trust / trustworthiness is maybe the most important aspect of good teaching. That makes it a bit harder for those of us who don’t match the google search image of a history professor, but those unconscious biases can be overcome, or at least rendered less influential. But “trust” and “trustworthiness” are not formulaically described or communicated, never mind formulaically achieved. Teaching is a deeply human and hopefully a deeply humane endeavor, and it’s very personal in the sense that our work is very much bound up with who we are at the core, and it can sometimes tread near who our students are at their core, and so we must proceed with care.
I think it’s really important to recognize how little teaching of *any* kind — good, bad, awful, outstanding — is valued in the overall prestige economy of higher education. It’s so typical of our neoliberal moment that the amount of industry-wide handwringing over and focus on how we teach is in direct inverse proportion to the financial security / professional stability of the vast majority of college teachers. There are these huge structural changes that are taking place, that have been taking place in higher education, and yet the focus is on the individual performance of individual professors, as if one or the other of us tweaking our syllabus or flipping the classroom here and there — or even en masse! — is the key to “solving” the crises in higher ed, which have their origins in the erosion of public support for higher education and the casualization of the academic labor force.
And yet, as you indicate here, those of us in the classroom still do manage to care about being good teachers, and want to be good teachers, and worry about how to be better teachers. Most of us do, I think — though we may be viewed as suckers or fools or “less than” those who prefer their primary or even sole job to be that of producing original research. I don’t know about you, but teaching undergrads — particularly the survey — keeps me grounded and humble. We’ve gotta stand and deliver, in season and out of season, and the measure of our success is not the approbation of our peers but the response of our students in real time during the class at each meeting and in their work over the course of the semester. If teaching won’t always keep us exhilarated or even satisfied, at the very least it keeps us honest.
Thanks for everyone contributing to this thread! Perhaps whenever we are feeling down on ourselves for not being Robin Williams from the Dead Poet’s Society we can return here to remind ourselves that it is bullshit ;).