The Art and Craft of College Teaching

A Guide for New Professors and Graduate Students

Robert Rotenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315418995
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The second edition of Rotenberg's popular guide to college teaching includes additional material on teaching in a digital environment, universal design, and teaching diverse students. As in the first edition, the book provides a hands-on, quick-start guide to the complexities of the college classroom for instructors in their first five years of teaching independently. The chapters survey the existing literature on how to effectively teach young adults, offering specific solutions to the most commonly faced classroom dilemmas. The author, a former department chair and award-winning instructor, encourages the new teacher to support their students as individual learners who are engaged in a program of study beyond their individual class. A focus on the choices made during the design of the course helps the instructor coordinate their class with a department or college curriculum. An extensive discussion of the relationship between classroom design and class size, as well as tips of assessment and grading, enable the new instructor to better handle the challenges of contemporary college classrooms.

PART 1

Teaching as an Art and Teaching as a Craft

If I have imagined my audience accurately, most of you will spend your careers in institutions that value research above teaching. Personnel committees say that they evaluate our performance according to our accomplishments in teaching, research, and service. In annual reviews and evaluations leading to tenure and promotion, we often treat these as isolated activities, with research the only one that “really counts.” The idea that teaching and research would be evaluated for the influence they have on each other is unfathomable in most departments. Some faculty might even consider it offensive. Service and research might influence each other, especially as service is usually defined. That is, as work on university committees. I have been fortunate to work in a college that is among the increasing number nationally that evaluate teaching, research, and service holistically, seeking the connections between them as a measure of a professor’s effectiveness. I admit that this experience is unusual. Even if your department, college, or university works from the older, more common tradition, you can profit as a researcher, a teacher, and a community member by increasingly integrating your efforts over time. Doing so provides greater job satisfaction, a coherent research agenda, a more enticing, burnout-free teaching career, and an effective service orientation.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. The most neglected aspect of teaching is the general improvement in the teacher’s own reasoning skills. When we teach our students to consistently challenge their thinking habits, developing problem-solving patterns and processes that are ever more effective, we cannot help but reflect on our own habits. As we instruct our students in ferreting out contradictions and fallacies in the work of others, we see how these might creep into our own arguments. As we attempt to model the traits of critical thinking in the classroom, these carry over into our collaborations with graduate students, colleagues, and research partners. In short, teaching with a methodology makes us better methodologists.

One short book is not going to resolve all the issues surrounding university teaching. Urging young professors to think of teaching as part of the realm of scholarship is a first step. I want to convince you, as I have been convinced, that the classroom inspires research. I hope this book will encourage colleagues at all stages of their career to discuss our classroom experience in an informed manner, accurately distinguishing between undergraduate and graduate teaching.

We now know something about how college students learn and what effective teaching looks like. Other than the legitimate complaint about the amount of time it takes to read the research and pull the information together, there is no excuse for college teachers not knowing how to be good at what they do. My aim here is to do a lot of that time-consuming assembling for the new professor or those wanting to become instructors. The perspective I support in forging an effective classroom practice grew out of my reading of this research, especially the idea that intellectual development continues throughout adulthood at different rates for different people, depending on how they are stimulated.

Our students are individuals, each with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. For some those strengths are prodigious. There are entering students who have the reasoning skills of graduate students. There are graduate students who still reason like the typical entering college student. The differences for all these students between their experiences in high school, in college and in graduate school lie in the expectations that we, their teachers, set for them.

When students come to college, we expect them to struggle with ambiguities of inference and interpretation. At the same time, we expect them to be open to the difference between evidence and opinion in an argument. When students come to graduate school, we expect them to construct well-supported arguments that prioritize among alternative perspectives according to contemporary disciplinary prerogatives and paradigms.

Our few selective colleges and graduate schools admit students with similar levels of preparation. One of my colleagues calls this making a silk purse out of silk. However, the vast majority of university teachers work in schools where the level of preparation for both undergraduate and graduate students is mixed. Here, then, is the compelling intellectual puzzle of post-secondary teaching: how do we deal with the variety of preparations and rates of development in our students while moving all of them toward greater scholarly success?

When we view teaching as a form of scholarship, every classroom presents itself as a new and equal challenge. Each course in the curriculum finds an equal footing with every other course. Faculty judge their worth as teachers not by the proportion of higher-level courses their colleagues entrust to them but by the transformational possibilities of all their classrooms.

The following chapters cull the best ideas from the existing literature on college teaching and offer insights from my own experience. I tell my students that a book is a tool for thinking. I offer this book as a tool to help you think about teaching. It is not merely a how-to manual. It is a program for developing a successful career as a professor.

I expect that this book will stir debate about teaching effectiveness, the assessment of curriculum design, and the mentoring of new professors. At least I hope that the perspective I offer here will breathe new air into these perennial discussions. I do not claim to have all the answers. I have not invented the ultimate evaluation form. Nor have I found the magic words that will help struggling assistant professors find their inner teacher.

Some of the ideas I present here may annoy experienced colleagues as too prescriptive: “That’s not how I do it, and I’ve won teaching awards.” I do not intend this work to be exhaustive or encyclopedic. I am sure that I have missed some important questions, research findings, and techniques. I am also certain that readers will discover inadvertent mistakes. I accept responsibility for all these errors, omissions, and oversights and commit myself to correcting them in future editions. I want to thank ahead of time those colleagues who read this book in detail and send me their thoughts on how it can be more useful to them.

The Learning Curve of the College Teacher

CHAPTER 1

Researchers on teaching agree that instructors see their classrooms in one of two ways: as teacher focused or as student focused (Biggs 1999, 57–75; Martin and Balla 1991, 298–304; Prosser and Trigwell 1998; Samuelowicz and Bain 1992, 93–112). Teacher-focused classrooms are ones in which knowledge is transmitted by an expert teacher to a novice student. If the teacher communicates clearly and effectively, the student moves closer to becoming an expert. At the lower levels of the curriculum, this knowledge is primarily definitions of key concepts, elementary algorithms for transforming data, incidents in a historical narrative, and similar lists within categories. At the higher levels of the curriculum, the knowledge takes the form of important concepts necessary for understanding the more subtle research issues in the discipline. The intended outcomes for the student include the ability to reproduce the information and analytical processes.

Student-focused classrooms permanently transform the student’s view of the world in a way that leads the student to continuously learn. Student-centered classrooms emphasize independent learning that will shape the student’s attitudes and accomplishments throughout life, including their increasing expertise in a discipline. What the student does in the classroom affects this transformation far more directly than what the teacher does in the classroom. Faculty do not set out to specifically create one or the other of these transformations. Rather, the students’ experience results from challenges that instructors create for them.

The outcomes of teaching vary. They depend on variables that instructors can never control, as well as ones they can sometimes control. The range of student abilities and the constraints of the curriculum are beyond the instructor’s control. Classroom design and assessment are within the instructor’s control. Instructors make these choices differently, depending on their experience and reflectiveness. According to Biggs (1999, 57–75), each of these choices determines whether the classroom will end up being student focused or teacher focused.

Beginning instructors realize that there are some students who respond to their efforts and others who resist. They believe that it is the students’ responsibility to bring the desire to learn to the class. Teachers in this predicament reason that the best that one can do is to hold the line on standards and allow the variation in the students to emerge as a grade distribution. Biggs calls this practice one that focuses on “what the student is.” When students perform poorly, as some of them will in such situations, it is because something in them is deficient: skills, motivation, ability, attitude, or cultural background (Samuelowicz 1987, 121–34).

More experienced faculty will grow tired of this situation. They begin to examine how they might be complicit in their students’ achievements. Biggs calls this practice one that focuses on “what the teacher does.” They seek out more classroom management skills, collect books on teaching, and cultivate techniques to increase student engagement and motivation to learn. While good management is essential for setting the stage for learning, it does not guarantee student learning. When students continue to perform poorly, as they will even in the most carefully managed of classrooms, it is because something in the teacher is deficient. Teaching becomes a collection of competencies. The more of them that you control, the better teacher you are. This view of teaching often underlies the administrative evaluation of the teaching experience. Departments and colleges make personnel decisions based on claims of teacher effectiveness that essentially measure classroom management skills, rather than student learning.

The most effective teachers realize that they can embody all the possible competencies and some portion of students still will not learn. They begin to ask themselves, “What does it actually mean when students understand a concept? How does it change their thinking or behavior in some demonstrable way? What activities are necessary for this understanding to take place for the student?” These questions begin to shift the focus away from what teachers do and toward what students are doing:

If students are to learn desired outcomes in a reasonably effective manner, then the teacher’s fundamental task is to get students to reengage in learning activities that are likely to result in their achieving those outcomes…. It is helpful to remember that what the student does is actually more important in determining what is learned than what the teacher does. (Shuell 1986, 411–36)

Many faculty will say that they embrace the student-focused classroom, but this is much harder to put into practice than most are willing admit. In general, student-focused classrooms require us to develop three specific areas of the class that are not part of traditional teaching: specific statements about desired outcomes that can be learned in a reasonably effective manner, a set of assessment tasks keyed to these outcomes, and a set of learning (as opposed to teaching) activities where the outcomes have a reasonable chance of being achieved.

If one can skip a stage, it is not really a stage. The same holds for stages in developing teaching. I would not encourage colleagues who have never taught before to jump directly to the student-centered classroom unless that was the basis of the education they received, and they understand its principles. New instructors cannot help but begin with trying to understand the variety of students they meet. This stage can help you learn to articulate the basic principles of your discipline in ways that communicate to the broadest audience. This stage truly acquaints you with the students in your college. You learn how better to manage classrooms. This stage unfolds over at least two years of full-time teaching.

Once you have come to grips with the variation in learners, you begin to search for techniques. There is so much good information out there about classroom design and management that it is almost a malpractice not to seek it out. The administration of your school will expect you to develop ever-greater competencies. Several years of trying out different techniques provides a basis on which student-focused teaching can be built.

The instructor’s embrace of student-centered classrooms is not an inevitable one. We all know colleagues who have taught their entire careers in stage 1 and can point to hundreds of students who went on to be successful learners. Stage 2 teachers are the ones who tend to win awards. Their classrooms provide the kind of novelty that holds student interest and generates outstanding evaluations. Their students see them as showing greater concern. These colleagues, too, can point to hundreds of successful learners emerging from their classrooms. Many instructors at this stage hold back from developing further. They do not see their teaching as broken, so why fix it. Stage 3 teachers, therefore, are quite rare at the undergraduate level. Such teaching is more often directed at advanced graduate students. The closer they get to becoming experts, the more they will learn independently. Bringing that attitude into undergraduate practice sets the advanced instructor apart from her peers.

Every school has some faculty who practice these techniques among undergraduates, but it is not a mainstream practice. Each can be effective in meeting some of the desired outcomes. The university will always have classrooms designed by instructors at all three stages of instructor development. I have no illusions that at some point in the future all instructors will embrace student-centered learning the first day they step into the classroom and follow that practice throughout their careers. That being the case, in the chapters that follow I have tried to provide support for faculty at all three stages.

Chapter 2: Plan of the Book

CHAPTER 2

Balancing the expansion the knowledge base of the students with the development of their critical reasoning skills challenges all postsecondary teachers. These two goals cannot be accomplished as addenda to each other. Students do not learn new habits of reasoning by committing lists of items to memory. They do not acquire the knowledge base by drilling on problem sets. The knowledge base must be taught using techniques that are effective for teaching information, and the skill set must be developed using techniques that challenge reasoning. Each moment in the curriculum has its golden proportion of knowledge gained and skills practiced.

Every instructor should know the qualities that students bring to the classroom. There can be at least one generation and sometimes as many as four generations that separate the students from the teacher. You need to understand what these generational experiences are and how they affect performance in the classroom. The current students, born between 1984 and 2000, seem to have something in common with the baby boom and post-boom generations who fill the professoriate. Yet, the differences remain quite large (Howe and Strauss 2000).

More importantly, the vast majority of our students intend to spend their lives outside the university. They have different goals and values than those who chose to work as professors. The professor has always set the standards for classroom performance. Given these generational differences, we must adapt the way we communicate these standards. The failure to do so risks exposing us to charges of irrelevance and ivory-tower-ism.

Our teaching is embedded in a university curriculum. This curriculum makes demands on individual courses that professors cannot ignore. New professors experienced a curriculum as students. When they enter a department, they take on responsibility for holding up their end of a convers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Teaching as an Art and Teaching as a Craft
• Part 2 What Do We Know About Postsecondary Intellectual Development?
• Part 3 What Do We Know About Effective Undergraduate Teaching?
• Part 4 The Role of the Teacher in the Classroom
• Part 5 Demands on the New Instructor
• Part 6 Universal Design
• Part 7 Constructing the Syllabus
• Part 8 Setting Your Expectations for Students’ Reasoning Skills
• Part 9 Setting Your Expectations for Creativity
• Part 10 Assessing Student Learning
• Part 11 The Lecture Classroom
• Part 12 The Discussion Classroom
• Part 13 The Seminar Classroom
• Part 14 The Laboratory Classroom
• Part 15 The On-Line Classroom
• Part 16 Advising in the Classroom
• Part 17 Effective Evaluation of Student Achievement
• Part 18 Administrative Issues in the Classroom
• Part 19 Evaluating the Instructor
• A Final Word
• Web Resources
• References
• About the Author