February 22, 2010
What Can Sustain Systemic Enhancement of Learning?
By Daniel Bernstein, University of Kansas
Many times a good teaching idea comes our way, and we are able to work it into the mix of strategies we include in our own teaching. But it is a greater challenge to promote adoption of good strategies in a more systemic way, so that the improvements in learning and teaching are not limited to a few individuals, but are employed in multiple courses and programs. With support from the Teagle and Spencer Foundations, a group of KU faculty members are using collaborative course design to enhance students' reading of scholarly research and their writing of integrative analyses of that research, and our work includes a plan to help the practices spread beyond a few faculty members.
The idea for collaborative course design came from a project at UC Berkeley, as described by the then Associate Librarian, Patricia Ianuzzi. Rather than waiting for some students to need help with writing or library research skills, the Berkeley teams designed staged assignments and feedback to scaffold those skills for all students. Jennifer Church-Duran of KU libraries was familiar with this model, and she led a pilot redesign program in which library and writing center colleagues worked with five professors to build staged assignments into their courses. The faculty members were delighted to see an immediate and noticeable jump in the quality of term papers developed through this collaboration, and we all wondered how we could spread this practice at KU.
We recognized immediately the challenge of scaling up the effort, for there simply would not be enough people in the library instruction and writing center programs to meet even a modest increase in requests to participate, especially in our large lower-division classes. When Bob Thompson from Duke University offered us a chance to be part of a cluster of grants on undergraduate writing and thinking (funded by the Teagle and Spencer Foundations), we initiated graduate student fellowships as a way to accomplish well-informed and collaborative course redesign on a larger scale. The Graduate Student Fellows (GSFs) are teaching assistants already assigned by their departments to work in courses with enrollments of 100 or more, so they bring knowledge of the specific goals and content of their courses. With added support from the grant, they spend time working with librarians and with writing consultants learning about the key skills those groups teach and about designing assignments that help students gradually acquire those skills.
After 18 months of this project, the initial results are very encouraging. The first two courses with GSF participation found that both synthesizing research and crafting written reports were done better than prior semesters, and they also showed some improvements in comparison with other courses in the same fields that did not have GSF design assistance. We continue to replicate that basic finding while adding a GSF program and support to four additional courses in each subsequent year of the grant. We are using the AACU Value Project meta-rubrics on written communication and critical thinking as guides for describing the quality of student work, and we also look at course-based grades and a standardized test of college level writing and thinking. Among other benefits of the project, our colleagues demonstrate continuous inquiry into the effectiveness of teaching based on the quality of understanding demonstrated in students' course projects.
While that glass is certainly half full (or filling steadily, anyway), it requires a lot of time and attention to promote even modest adoption of teaching approaches that demonstrably enhance important features of students' intellectual development. Why is it that higher education generally has not embraced many available evidence-based practices that would ramp up student retention and completion? At our center, I often point to our very small library and suggest that there are more good ideas in those few books, journals, and video reports than any of us could implement in a lifetime of teaching.
Many in higher education (and our critics) point out that academic values favor research over teaching, leading faculty members (even at smaller, teaching-oriented campuses) to cap their efforts in teaching to preserve time for continued discovery in their fields. While that may be true, legislating or altering the economic and intellectual forces that sustain those priorities is beyond any individual's power. Without deciding on the best mix of discovery and teaching, there is another aspect of our culture that may be easier to adjust: what do we mean by good teaching and how do we recognize it?
A consensus has emerged that "scholarship of teaching and learning" should be valued at all campuses, but that emphasis sometimes contributes to the problem. When well-meaning chairs, deans, and provosts call for their faculties to publish about their teaching, they inadvertently divert limited faculty time and energy from teaching into discovery. Many journals, funding sources, and professional societies prefer to support and present research about teaching, and give less attention to the challenges and accomplishments of implementing effective teaching. Often, promotion and tenure committees only recognize publicly visible excellence in promoting learning when it is presented as discovery scholarship.
If we want colleagues across the spectrum of our higher education system to learn about, use, and refine the best practices known to our profession, then visible evidence of excellence in generating learning must be recognized as the highest form of teaching, not as a weak version of discovery. If, for example, we define excellent teaching as publishing survey results about learning, then faculty members will spend their creative energy being amateur members of the faculty of education. We need instead to honor our colleagues' public inquiry into student success in their own courses as an achievement in its own right and the highest form of intellectual teaching.
Randy Bass (Georgetown University) and I shared in AAUP's Academe a dialogue we have had for years, working to find a balance among the benefits of shared discovery and shared success in the implementation of others' discoveries in challenging circumstances. I think our Teagle/Spencer project at KU attempts to make excellence in learning a visible and honored example of the finest in teaching. It is not research into principles of learning and motivation, but it is difficult and a very public intellectual work conducted without the carefully constructed conditions of a laboratory enterprise. I think we need to follow Boyer's lead and honor public treatments of such inquiry into learning as wonderfully scholarly teaching; only then will larger numbers of our colleagues give valuable time to learning about and incorporating known good practices into their own teaching.
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