Professional College Teaching
This week there was an Inside Higher Ed article entitled, "Amateur Hour in the College Classroom" by Mintz that seems to resonate with several conversations that I have had over the past several months. The author shares ideas from Zimmerman's recent book, "The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America." He reminds us that "Every era in the 20th century witnessed its own batch of teaching reforms: seminars, tutorials, honors, televised classes (1950s), and computer-assisted instruction (1970s)[even in the 1920s, Rollins College adopted a “conference plan,” which transformed classrooms into collaborative intellectual salons]." The author shares several conclusions:
Teaching remains today what it was in the past: an amateur enterprise, without uniform training and ongoing professional development; or widely accepted modes of evaluation.
The adoption of interactive, student-centered pedagogies remains limited-- partly because of worsening student-faculty ratios, increased reliance on adjuncts and the emphasis on scholarly research at the expense of teaching.
Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) treat teaching as a popularity contest, in which entertainment matters more than learning, while reinforcing deep cultural biases and contributing to grade inflation and a reduction in rigor, reading and writing.
Teaching, despite proliferating lip service to its value, remains devalued in language (we speak of teaching “loads”) and is inversely correlated with faculty salary.
Zimmerman connects his research to the recent inquiry of the effect of the pandemic on college teaching. He states, "It seems likely that the pandemic will worsen the quality of teaching, by increasing class size and moving more courses online with only limited substantive interaction with or feedback from a scholar-teacher."
Mintz believes that to professionalize teaching, we "need to insist on formal instruction in pedagogy and assessment for graduate students and make ongoing professional development in teaching methods more of a norm - in particular, a need to encourage serious research into teaching and learning. Ultimately, we need to design courses with explicit, measurable learning outcomes, and activities and assessments aligned with those outcomes."
References
Zimmerman, J. (2020). The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN: 1421439093.
