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Week
4: Teaching
All American universities begin with teaching.
Research universities have a major commitment to the
exploration and development of knowledge, but almost all organize
their work from a base in teaching. The scale of the
teaching mission can range from the enrollment of a private
research university such as Cal Tech at perhaps
900 students to the student population of a large public
research university such as the University of Texas with over 45,000
students. The ratio between graduate students and undergraduates
and the balance of instructional programs between liberal arts and
applied disciplines and professions also differ dramatically from
campus to campus and from private to public institutions.
These characteristics of the teaching environment help establish
differences in campus culture and style. In almost all cases,
however, teaching matters in American universities.
Teaching is a subject near
and dear to everyone's heart. All observers of colleges believe
they understand teaching because most of them have experienced
teaching as students, teachers, or both. Academics and everyone
else believe they know the essential elements of good teaching and
most have firm opinions about the proper outcome of instruction.
Teaching is an accessible art and practice. People can see what
teachers do, observe the process, and experience its impact. This
leads to a wide range of opinion on the benefits, content,
characteristics, and outcomes of teaching. If these opinions
coincided, the work of the university would be much easier, but
they do not.
Every educational learning
fad finds its passionate adherents within and without the
university, advocates who believe that some particular technique,
approach, incentive, or behavior on the part of teachers or
students will bring about greatly enhanced learning. This
enthusiasm reflects the popular belief that university teaching
delivers great value and deserves careful attention.
Several themes recur in the endless
conversation about teaching. Some of these we'll deal with when we
discuss the productivity and quality of teaching. Here we think a
bit about the content of teaching.
As we would expect from the
pragmatic history of American colleges and universities, the
content and delivery of instruction has an academic perspective and
a practical delivery mechanism. Universities all adhere to a
general if not too precise standard notion of what constitutes a
"liberal" or arts-and-sciences education, and express this standard
through the structure of the undergraduate curriculum. This core
content, while the source of tremendous and often bitter
intellectual and cultural debate, is actually quite stable and
uniform throughout American higher education. Some will protest
that the curriculum ignores the classics (however defined); that it
ignores new authors and over or under emphasizes some cultural or
political perspective; that it does not do enough for foreign
languages or for math and the sciences; or that it neglects some other topic
of interest. Yet, in truth, the differences among universities
reflect mostly style and labeling rather than substance. The
readings offer a sampler of curricular descriptions taken from
widely different types of elite colleges and universities.
The reasons for the
uniformity of college curricula come from the twin power of
competition and regulation. Competition ensures that each college
and university offers much the same curriculum to a common marketplace of students
and parents. In competing for students, the institutions focus on minor forms of
product differentiation,
image, and presentation. Regulation reinforces this uniformity of content
through accreditation,
a process that encourages or coerces all colleges and universities to
deliver similar undergraduate programs.
This regulation is even more significant for applied and
professional programs whose accreditation often enforces
highly rigid content specifications.
We will consider the specific
issues of regulation and accreditation later on in this
course. The readings for this week include some commentary on the
state of the curriculum. Conrad and Duren discuss the impact
on college curricula of the debates over what students should learn
and what faculty should teach through a review of some of the more
visible attacks on the content of American college education.
The detailed discussion of college teaching in math, technology,
engineering, and the sciences published by the National Academy
Press offers a comprehensive look at the challenges facing those
who would improve on the American college curriculum.
Teaching, the individual practice of
instruction, receives much attention and study. Not all of this
helps except to tell academics what they already know. Academics
know that teaching is a handicraft activity in which someone who
knows something engages the students so the students will learn what they need
to know.
Good teaching delivers both informational content (names, dates,
facts, formulas) and methodological process (critical thinking;
analytical techniques; and information evaluation, validation,
and verification). Good teaching gives the student
methodological skills that
extend beyond the current validity of the informational content. Since
teaching is a joint handicraft art between an individual student and the teacher, the teaching process that works for
one teacher-student combination may not work equally well for
another combination. Successful teaching in large groups uses
different styles and techniques than teaching in small groups. No
single uniform methodology for teaching works for all subjects,
students, teachers, or classes. The Bess article provides a useful
perspective on the practice of teaching.
Because academics
know much about teaching, they often find the public conversation
about teaching and
learning frustrating. Some observers of the undergraduate experience,
unhappy with the results of college instruction, seek to shift the conversation
to something they called "learning" and place this notion outside the
process of teaching. Teaching, in this view, is simply a mechanical process,
learning, however, is the real thing, the product of teaching. Many
faculty believe that the two are the same thing, if we succeed in teaching,
the results of the course, as reflected in the grade, indicate the individual
student's
learning. Reformers, seeking to weaken the authority of the teacher,
set up an external measure of teaching effectiveness, and call that "learning."
Unfortunately, learning is no less individualized a product and no less dependent
on the perspective of the student than is the
teaching that produces the learning. The Kuh piece offers an
expansion of the notion of teaching to include the entire student experience at
college, a definition that focuses more on the student's sense of self than it
does on the content of the academic program.
For these reasons, most universities manage
undergraduate teaching through the specification of a structured
academic content that includes some standardized patterns. Almost
all colleges and universities identify two dimensions in the
undergraduate academic content: core requirements and a
major.
The core
requirements speak to the virtually universal commitment of
American higher education to providing students with a general
understanding of the content and analytical process of disciplines
in the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Often these
are called "General Education" or in student parlance "GenEd."
The major recognizes
the need to know what it means to be an expert, to understand the
full dimensions of a particular field of study, and to recognize
how experts in this field acquire and master knowledge. While no one expects the
information acquired in the major to remain current and useful for
a lifetime, everyone expects the skills learned in acquiring that
major to remain useful indefinitely and to serve the student as
lifetime tools of learning. The Lombardi piece serves
to highlight this time-honored structure of American college
education.
If we find consistent
structures for the curricula of most colleges and universities, the
actual organization and management of the delivery of instruction
varies greatly by size of institution. In small colleges, the
resident faculty deliver the curriculum in classes that may vary
from 5 to 20 students up to as many as 80 to 100 for survey
courses. The students and faculty often know each other well by the
end of the four-year experience. The curriculum, standardized for
all students with relatively few alternative paths to a degree,
nonetheless offers multiple opportunities for tailoring academic
programs for individual student interests. The value provided in
this structure is the personal and direct interaction of students
and faculty over time. This mode of instruction tends to be
expensive. If the college has national quality faculty,
students and their parents will see high tuition and other
costs. Most institutions delivering instruction in this format
exist in the private sector, and many have a historical or current
sectarian character. Colleges with this style have enrollments from
1,000 (the bare minimum for institutional survival in most cases)
to perhaps 5,000 (the transition point around which colleges become
too large to sustain the intimate style).
In larger institutions, now
almost always called universities whatever their academic
character, the faculty teach undergraduates in large and small
classes, but additional part-time, adjunct, or graduate student
teachers, some with sub-professorial credentials, take over parts
of the instructional and academic support functions. In large
institutions these non-tenure track faculty may teach survey
courses and beginning language or math courses. Class size in big
institutions range from 15-20 to 500 or more for some general
lecture survey courses. In these larger institutions, while
students lose the intimate and continuous academic interaction with
a small group of faculty, they gain a large pool of expert faculty
in an extensive array of specialties. Students have many alternative paths to their degrees
and many choices to enhance or customize their course of study.
The
management of enrollment and instruction at large universities,
particularly as the scale rises from the 5,000-10,000 undergraduate
to the 30,000-40,000 category, requires significant managerial and
technical skill to put students in the right classes at the right
time with the right instructor. Managing the teaching process of a
large institution takes time, attention, and expertise. The
Kellogg Commission reports include a number of items directed at
the issue of teaching and learning in ways that, while speaking to a
sense of crisis in teaching and learning, manage to
demonstrate multiple examples of successful programs from
universities whose representatives served on the commission. Kuh's article speaks to the larger issue in teaching and learning
that sees the student's entire campus experience as the unit of
analysis for evaluating successful undergraduate programs.
In all institutions, large
or small, technology serves to enhance and modify traditional forms
of instruction. Films and television provide alternative content
for some courses, substituting for books and lectures. Computer
mediated instruction and various forms of distance and continuing education
modify and enhance the instructional patterns in most universities
and colleges and promise to increase over the next decade, although considerable
controversy rages over the likely impact of this technology.
The Twigg and Carnevale articles speak to these issues and the
Morgan report provides an important reality check on the
relationship between costs and results.
Graduate instruction, an especially important
function in large research universities, has its own dimensions.
The first, graduate classroom instruction, mirrors
undergraduate teaching, although at a higher level of intensity and
a higher expectation of performance. The size of graduate classroom
instruction scales from 10 to 80 students per class, with most
classes near the lower end. The permanent faculty deliver large
parts of the MA/MS and professional graduate curricula in this
mode.
A second dimension includes
the seminars, colloquia, and thesis/dissertation activity
that focus on research. This second dimension particularly
characterizes Ph.D. preparation. Instruction in this mode involves
the faculty and students in groups ranging from 1 to 20. Regardless
of institutional size, most advanced graduate education falls to
the regular faculty or to distinguished fully-qualified visiting or
part-time faculty.
Clearly, then, scale of
operation has the most impact on undergraduate teaching and the least on
graduate instruction. Graduate teaching gains least in economies of
scale, either through labor costs or through the efficient use of
facilities. Undergraduate instruction gains the most from economies
of scale in all areas from labor through facilities. The fixed cost
of graduate education, especially at the post-Masters level,
responds hardly at all to issues of scale. Indeed, the principal
costs of advanced graduate education come from the support and
maintenance of the research enterprise within which graduate
education takes place, and because of this issue of
scale, both public and private research universities appear most
similar in their graduate and Ph.D. education and least similar in
their undergraduate programs.
A special set of
circumstances applies to graduate professional education in
the health sciences and other similar fields with clear
regulatory requirements. These programs often specify the resources
required for each student so rigidly that few economies of
scale apply.
Universities manage their
teaching responsibilities by attempting to meet the academic
standards demanded by the faculty; the learning expectations of
students, parents, and employers; and the cultural expectations of
the supporting public. Managing instruction provides one of the
university's principal challenges.
Among the many issues academics constantly
consider about teaching, the following can provide a start:
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