Change we must

Lately I have changed the way I think about the goals for my classes. Like many professors, I used to think my primary goal was to get my students to learn the content of my courses, and all of my efforts to refine my courses focused on this goal. But three nagging facts kept bothering me until I had to finally accept them all, and then accept that I had to change the ways I taught my classes. The first fact is the research on the long-term retention of college course material. While this scholarship is not extensive or without flaws, the consistent finding is depressing: after as little as 6 months students perform only slightly better on assessments of their knowledge than students who have not taken the class. The second fact is that students come to college because they believe that doing so will prepare them for a job and/or career. The third fact is that employers have long been telling us that skills are as important to them as knowledge, if not more so (this is sometimes called the skills gap). So if you put all three facts together it sounds like this: what we think we’re doing (teaching content), we’re not; and what our students and their future employers want, we’re not giving them. Here’s another fact to consider: decreases in state support mean we are more reliant on tuition. If we are not giving our students what they want and need for life after graduation potential students will look to cheaper and faster alternatives, threatening our very existence. I owe it to my students to make my courses as beneficial as possible.

Here’s what that means to me: I must design my courses with the goal of deep learning that will stay with my students for the rest of their life (not just the next exam), and I must move skills development from the periphery to the center of my courses. The long-term retention findings force me to use my expertise to curate the information and emphasize the most important ideas. This absolutely means that I cover less information in my courses, but the content I do cover has a better chance of changing the students. The skills gap forced me to use problem-based learning in one of my courses. Students work in small groups (teamwork, leadership) to solve problems (critical thinking/problem solving) and then present their work to the class (communication). We spend a considerable amount of course time addressing these skills, not because I tell them we have to, but because they are necessary to solve problems. They use the content of the course as the lens through which they see and understand the problems, and the source of solutions as well.

We cannot afford (literally) to approach our teaching the same way we always have in the academy. What our students want and need has changed, the economics and marketplace of higher education has changed, and the availability of information has changed. If we do not adapt to these changes we will maintain ourselves out of relevance and existence.