Model Teaching Criteria: A bit longer post...

I read an article that just came out in Teaching of Psychology by Richmond, Boyse, Gurung, Tazeau, Meyers, and Sciutto (2014). Here's the link, although it's behind a subscription pay-wall. The article is about Model Teaching Criteria (MTC), or the ideal qualities and abilities of teachers in psychology, in their opinion. These authors are seen as experts in this area and were part of an APA presidential task force about this topic.

I will summarize and comment on the set of criteria they propose.

The first criteria is that model teachers are well trained. This means they are up to date in both the content of psychology, but also up on the latest pedagogy. These are two very different criteria, in my opinion. Staying up on the latest research in psychology seems like an obvious requirement, but I think there are some assumptions underlying this recommendation that need exploring.

One is that any one person can be an expert in any substantial area of psychology. Everyone with a PhD knows this to be folly. In my own area of social psychology I am an expert on a very small range of topics, like maybe one or two out of a possible list of 40 or 50 (or more). Am I qualified to teach a social psychology course? Sure, but even in that class I lecture about some topics with not much more knowledge than exists in the textbook. I think the same could be said of most professors in my area, no matter their type of institution (R1 to community college) or experience. I remember one person from graduate school (Mark Zanna) who know about nearly every area of social psychology, but he's exceptional in every sense. APA guidelines suggest that it might be unethical to teach outside of one's area of expertise. Again, that sounds reasonable and prudent, but I admit that I have often violated this principle, without, I believe, disastrous consequences. I would never attempt to teach physics, or even physiological psychology, but I have taught psychology and law, and political psychology, with only my interest and enthusiasm and not much graduate training in the areas. Not to mention interdisciplinary courses team-taught with members of other departments. These were learning experiences for me as much as for the students, and I think that's ok.

Another assumption is that professors are the source of knowledge and the students the receptacles into which professor pour that knowledge. The sage-on-the-stage model. I agree that this is (more) true in lower level courses like Intro, but even there I think this assumption can lead to student disengagement. The best courses are the ones where I feel that I and the students collaborate on covering the material. This requires a certain letting-go, which comes to me with difficulty, I admit. Giving the students control of the course in this way requires that I not get upset if we don't get to or emphasize what I think is important. But it also turns the students into active participants in the learning, and I think that outweighs my anxieties.

Another assumption is that the content of psychology is static, and that the current state of knowledge is the most important thing to get across to the students. Of course today's cutting edge takes on a patina with age, and the cutting edge of tomorrow never arrives. This is not to say that content is irrelevant -- of course it's vital to teach something. But remember that our future selves and academic descendants will view our content the same way we view Wundt or Jung today: interesting history, and perhaps a foundation for later work, but not what we believe is true today. Our discipline is a science, and I tell my students that that means we don't know everything yet, that we are constantly increasing our knowledge. To then act as if our knowledge of today's content is essential seems to ignore the true nature of a science as on-going. Wouldn't it be better to approach the content of our courses as a scientist, an explorer, and pull along the students on our voyage into the dark mysteries of the mind?

The second part of this criteria is that model teachers know about pedagogical practice and theory and I think they are on more solid ground here. I love the idea of the scientist-educator. This idea requires instructors to know about what our science tells us about how the human mind stores, retains, and recalls information. What could be more appropriate? There now many articles and books on the topic. Right now I'm reading Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014). Good stuff. In addition, model teachers should know about effective pedagogical practices. Like any area of research there have been numerous dead ends, like learning styles. But there are also promising avenues like the flipped class (pay wall) or the jigsaw classroom that deserve our attention.

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The next criteria address what teachers do in class.  Here they emphasize teaching methods that engage students, and I think they are on-target here. It certainly helps that they cite several studies (including meta-analyses) that support students engagement as the royal road to student learning. They also talk about many of the qualities of excellent teachers that many people think of first when reminiscing about their favorite professors -- enthusiasm, public speaking, organization. They also throw in competence in technology, but it seems like a throw-away addition. This is a mistake, in my opinion. Our students are digital natives, and ignoring this universe is a luxury we can no longer afford. It's not that technology for it's own sake deserves our attention, but rather that the opportunities that now exist to enhance our teaching are too good to ignore. Just as Socrates resisted the technology of his day (the written word, hat tip to William Power's Hamlet's Blackberry), those that resist digital technology today will be be seen as mistaken years hence. Our students live in a digital world, and we have to join them or they will find someone somewhere else who does.


I've just covered the first two of six criteria they propose and this post is already much longer than I thought it would be (congrats on getting this far!). So I'll leave it here and come back to the other four criteria in another post.

A new find

I just found this blog (Pedagogy Unbound), and it's full of gems. Here's a list of the tips I've learned so far from reading just the most recent posts (as of Oct. 2014):

1. Rubrics can be helpful, but mainly for forcing instructors to clarify their goals for an assignment. Vague language on a rubric doesn't help students.
2. Of course the students haven't done the reading before class. Again. That's because they prioritize their duties (just like the rest of us) and can cleverly discern which readings are really required, and which are actually optional (hint: something bad happens to them if they don't read the required ones). But quizzes can be punitive devices to force students to read. Better is to structure class time so that doing the reading is actually helpful (to them) in class. You could also ask the students what they want you to cover about a reading -- what an idea, put the onus on them by asking for their preferences!
3. Teach the last day of class on the first day of class. Sounds odd, but I think it could really work.

Lots more there, and I plan on mining it. The author is David Gooblar (@dgooblar) and the blog is part of the Chronicle of Higher Education website. Actually, the blog is on the Chronicle's Vitae website. I just created an account there. It looks to be a LinkedIn for academics. I'll see what that does for me.

The sad situation of adjuncts

This adjunct situation is a real disgrace. I just read this piece in Salon.com, and it made my stomach turn. These are people who often have the same training and qualifications as full-time faculty at their same university, and yet they are paid a fraction of full-time salary. 
No tenure-track faculty would accept the frequent working conditions that adjuncts endure: not knowing which or how many classes they will teach, being dropped into courses at the last minute, zero or little support for professional development from their institutions, teaching the odd-meeting time courses only (weekends, nights). I would be howling about those conditions. At least I would be getting paid a reasonable wage for it.
Part of my displeasure about this is the real feeling that I easily could have been in their situation. I was lucky to get a tenure-track job, but it wasn't like I had multiple offers. Jobs in my area are scarce and there are too many PhDs out there looking for them. I am so thankful that I have my job (and tenure). I worked hard to get it and to keep it; but it's not clear to me how I am that much different from many of the adjuncts we employ. Or at least I wasn't that different when I just got out of grad school.
This seems analogous to the minimum wage. Before then employers could get workers for a seriously low wage. Those people didn't have to take those low-paying jobs, they chose to. But at some point we as a society decided it wasn't right to pay workers so poorly, and decided that we would set a minimum wage. Whatever you think about where the minimum wage is now (too low, too high), the idea was that even if you could get people to work for a lower wage, it wasn't acceptable to do so. Might we need a minimum wage for adjuncts? How much do we value the job they are doing? Maybe we get what we pay for. This reminds me of descriptions of teachers in Finland -- their pay is higher, and they have lots of competition for teaching jobs, meaning they get great teachers. I don't mean to denigrate adjuncts, because they are typically dedicated and good at what they do. But what if the adjunct wage was higher? Would we or could we get higher quality instruction from them?
Of course this comes back to money, always money. Universities don't have the money to pay faculty what they deserve, much less the adjuncts. As long as money is as tight as it is, we'll have to use adjuncts because we don't have the money for additional faculty jobs, and as long as we can find people willing to take the job for these low wages we will do it. We don't have a lot of choice, I guess.
Maybe adjuncts should form a union.

More about Professional Development

We just had an Assurance of Learning (C) (just kidding, that's not copyrighted) day at my institution. It's a day when the university cancels all classes and instructs every academic department to congregate and then pay attention to the learning taking place in their classes. In the past we've looked at assessments of learning on a department level, and the data that come from them. This time I got the first hour of the day to talk about several trends in higher ed and explain my new role as Teaching Enhancement Coordinator (TEC). The trends I talked about were the reduction in government support/increased reliance on tuition (not sustainable), increased competition for students from schools and private business offering new and different models, and the increasing saturation of technology in society, including higher ed. In my mind the response to all of these substantial pressures is to redouble our focus on the quality of instruction. Governments will continue to fund us, and students will want to come to us, if we have the best instruction in the state/region. We can set ourselves apart from our competitors if we can demonstrate that our instruction is better than theirs. And infusing our instruction with technology like it is infused in the rest of our lives will make us relevant to the digital- and mobile-natives that will show up in our classes from now on (they're already there). 

To me this means that my institution needs to put some resources behind the effort to improve instruction. Faculty needs accessible pedagogical resources, like webinars, workshops, professional learning communities, and more. And they also need to see that promotion and raises are tied to pedagogical improvement; professional development needs to be baked into our promotion and tenure policies and annual review policies. Plus, faculty need to see that this is not just another added thing to do on top of their existing duties. You're less likely to hear complaints about the government than to hear faculty complaints about being too busy. Perhaps the answer here is release time (which is highly sought-after), or a class schedule that leaves more regular time for these activities. Something.

It's an interesting time in higher ed, with big changes around the corner. How we deal with these changes will determine if the university exists 15-20 years from now. Universities have been around for centuries, but there's not law of nature that says they have to exist. Technology, population increase, income inequality: these are forces that have swept away or altered large sectors of society. I hope we can adapt to these changes, not go extinct.

So many conferences...

I recently saw this page. I am familiar with the more established SXSW music festival -- I even went to an event or two (or tried, one was sold out) -- but I had only heard a vague reference to the education-focused event. And I really didn't know what that meant at the time. But upon further exploration of the event page, I can see that it is relatively new (started in 2011), used to be focused on k-12 in Texas, but has since expanded to be international and span all levels of education. It seems like the spirit of SXSW has seeped into SXSWedu, with lots of demonstrations, creativity, technology, even a playspace. I must say, I'm dying to go. Austin is a delightful city, especially in the spring. Like many red states (and my wife insists that TX will turn purple soon), there are 'urban islands' of progressive politics and lively entertainment surrounded by rural conservatism. A perfect spot for a festival about the future of education.

Of course there are many other teaching conferences to consider. I've twice been to the excellent Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning put on by UW - Madison. This last year was the 30th annual conference, so they have a rich history -- going back to days of delivering reel-to-reel tapes to people! I've learned much from my attendance at this conference (I even presented there this past August), but I have been even more inspired by the passion of the people there. These people really make distance education their focus and apply every bit as much rigor to it as anyone in my discipline does. I'm worried that the next social psychology conference I go to will pale in comparison. Plus, Madison in August is stunning, and the restaurants near the capitol and university are exceptional.

I've never been to the Lilly Conference, but it has a great reputation. NITOP is a discipline-focused conference for teaching of psychology. Many other conferences can be found here.

I'm excited to get more involved in these types of conferences.

Flip the first day of class

This is a great idea. The idea is to provide your students with an engaging preview of the course without boring them a thorough reading of the syllabus (snooze). I haven't tried it, and it seems like it might be hard to keep up the ruse but I bet it would be fun. The looks on the students' faces might be enough motivation.

Faculty desire for professional development..and a scheme emerges

I'm facilitating a Professional Learning Community (PLC) on the flipped classroom. One of the most obvious impressions of this group of faculty is that they are excited about learning a new teaching technique, and hungry for practical information about technology in teaching. It's not enough to present ideas and resources, they want a demonstration of the technique/resource. No wonder: these are busy people who have carved out an hour a week to come to the PLC. They really want a significant ROI.
To me this means that there is much more demand for professional development (PD) than there is demand. Granted, this is a tiny sample that is clearly biased in favor of improving their teaching. I wonder how many other faculty want to improve their teaching but feel too overwhelmed to join a PLC. This seems like an important question to find the answer to. I am developing a survey for the faculty in my Department (using Google form -- cool resource that is new to me) about what they want from me in my new position (more on that in another post). Perhaps a more general interest survey could be made for the entire faculty at my institution. This might provide the administration with the impetus to substantially increase our investment in PD. Perhaps I'll pursue this.