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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 Ohio State University with over 50,000 students. The ratio between graduate students and undergraduates and the balance of instructional programs between the liberal arts and sciences and the applied disciplines and professions also differs significantly from campus to campus and from private to public institution. These characteristics of the teaching environment help establish differences in campus culture and style. In almost all cases, however, teaching matters in American colleges and 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 are part of the discussion about 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, instruction has an academic perspective and a practical delivery mechanism. Universities mostly 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 an undergraduate curriculum. This core content, while the source of tremendous and sometimes intense intellectual and cultural debate, is actually quite stable and relatively comparable 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, international, or political perspective; that it does not do enough for foreign languages or for math and the sciences; or that it neglects other critical topics. Yet, in truth, the differences among universities reflect mostly style and labeling rather than substance as a sampling from websites of the curricular offerings of quite different types of even elite colleges and universities will show. The curriculum is often a battle ground where proponents seek to institutionalize their current political, social, and cultural concerns. The mechanism involves introducing courses and instructors within the curriculum committed to promoting the ideas and topics their advocates propose. The result is often a proliferation of special topics and courses that speak to the current issues of the moment. Since rarely are any elements removed from the curriculum, the catalog of courses will often serve as testimony to controversies over the decades. The similarity 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. They respond to fads and current political, social, and cultural controversies. And they tend to respond in the same ways. Regulation reinforces this similarity of content through accreditation, a process that encourages or coerces all colleges and universities to deliver remarkably similar undergraduate programs. This regulation is even more significant for applied and professional programs whose external and professional accreditation groups often enforce detailed content and delivery specifications, frequently derived from real world market expectations. 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 an instructor engages students so the students will learn what the instructor knows they need to learn. Good teaching delivers both informational content (names, dates, facts, formulas) and methodological process (critical thinking and analytical techniques, as well as 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 a teacher, the instructional 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. Teaching online or with extensive laboratory assignments requires special techniques, materials, and equipment. No single uniform methodology for teaching works for all subjects, students, teachers, or classes. This provides a basis for a significant literature on the styles, techniques, and outcomes of teaching. Often teaching styles appear as universal fads that will improve all teaching for all subjects. Usually, the innovation will serve some students, some topics, and some instructors at some institutions, but these notions are rarely universally applicable. 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 call "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 an individual student's learning. Reformers, seeking to weaken the authority of the teacher, create external measures 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 American enthusiasm for self-realization and the individual's sense of well being leads many to focus on the student's beliefs about what they may have learned. We can ask a student, "Do you feel that you learned?" "How did your experiences outside the classroom or in service projects help you learn?" Because the actual learning that takes place is individualized, students learn for themselves and not for others, much evaluative emphasis is placed on the process of teaching as if by knowing the process we can certify the learning. In the more quantitative fields of the sciences, math, and technology, the learning is easily tested, but in the more cognitive fields of the social sciences and humanities, learning is much more individualized and much less accessible through testing. 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 requirements go under the name "General Education" or in student parlance "GenEd." The major recognizes the need to know what it means to be an expert, to understand the 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. A major is the key defining outcome of the college degree and the question put to most graduates by new acquaintances is "What was your degree in?" and the question put to most students by their friends and relatives is "What's your major?" This focus on the major reflects a recognition that while generalist knowledge is valuable, and while knowing how the world works is an asset, competition in today's marketplaces is driven by expertise. The major introduces students to the criteria and process for achieving expertise even if the major is usually not sufficient to create a true expert. If we find consistent structures for the curricula maintained by 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 and contingent 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 to 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 permanent faculty, students and their parents will see high tuition and other costs. Most instruction delivered in this format exists in the private sector, although public university honors colleges attempt to duplicate the process. Colleges with this style have undergraduate enrollments from 1,000 (the bare minimum for institutional survival in most cases) to perhaps 5,000 (the transition point around which colleges may 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, contingent, 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, as well as other more advanced courses depending on their qualifications. Class size in big institutions range from 15-20 to 500, or more for some general lecture survey courses. In these larger institutions, students lose the intimate and continuous academic interaction with a small group of faculty, but they gain a large pool of expert faculty in an extensive array of specialties. Students have many alternative paths to different degree specializations, and they find 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 undergraduates to the 30,000-50,000 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. Almost all large universities now have computerized student management systems that track the performance and progress of students, providing support and early warning when students stray off course or encounter academic difficulties. In all institutions, large or small, technology serves to enhance and modify traditional forms of instruction. Films and television have long provided alternative content for some courses, substituting for books and lectures. But today, more and more computer mediated instruction and various forms of Internet based interactive content enhance and instruction. As these techniques modify and enhance the instructional patterns in most universities and colleges, they are almost certain to increase over the next decades, although considerable controversy rages over the likely impact and value these technological innovations. Technology will indeed be a significant driver of higher education forms and function but the balance between cost and effectiveness is still unclear. Under some circumstances, Internet or computer based education functions effectively, but not under all. Computerized instructional support systems have great promise but also carry high costs and considerable training requirements for effective use. As the technology becomes more stable and standardized, adoption across the industry is likely to increase. Textbooks also appear to be in transition as the high cost of physical books creates a market for Internet delivered media, extensive used book secondary markets, and other commercial readjustments to the book business. Students, of course, adopt new technology faster than their faculty, and the use of Twitter, Facebook, email, text messaging, and Internet-based research creates a host of challenges and opportunities for new instructional approaches. However, as all seasoned administrators know, new technology generally has great promise but also always requires high transition costs. The best advice is usually to let rich institutions experiment with new modes of instruction, adopting later on what becomes well established and supported. Graduate classroom instruction, an especially important function in large research universities, has its own characteristics. 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 most of the MA/MS and professional graduate curricula in this mode. Seminars, colloquia, and thesis/dissertation activity focus on research and are a critical component of some masters level and professional curricula, and an essential part of Ph.D. and other doctoral programs. 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. Often observers greatly underestimate the time and attention required to produce a Ph.D. and other doctoral student in many fields. In the sciences, the attention devoted to Ph.D. instruction is individualized and intense over a long period. Students require equipment and laboratories, they require the support and funding that an established faculty member's laboratory and projects can provide. Students also require close attention in the humanities and social sciences to ensure that projects are well designed, the materials required are accessible, and the final product will be publishable. All of this is handicraft labor, and so far there are no technological or other mechanisms to create economies of scale. Clearly, then, scale of operation has the most impact on undergraduate teaching and the least on graduate instruction. Graduate teaching gains least from economies of scale, either through reduced labor costs or through the efficient use of facilities or technology. Undergraduate instruction gains the most from economies of scale in all areas from labor through facilities and technology. 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. Special circumstances apply to graduate professional education in the health sciences and other similar fields with clear regulatory requirements. External accreditation agencies for these programs often specify the resources required for each student so that few economies of scale are possible. Indeed, institutions must have the money to purchase the minimum requirements to offer these degrees and sustain these programs. Absent the funds to buy equipment, hire the required number of faculty, and provide the other resources specified by the accreditation agency, the university cannot offer the program. 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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