An Evidence-based Guide to College and University Teaching

Developing the Model Teacher

Aaron S. Richmond, Guy A. Boysen, Regan A. R. Gurung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000486919
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An Evidence-based Guide to College and University Teaching outlines a definition of "model teaching" based on research evidence and accepted best practices in high education.

Teachers at all levels of skill and experience can benefit from clear, objective guidelines for defining and measuring quality teaching. To fulfil this need, this book outlines six fundamental areas of teaching competency—model teaching characteristics—and provides detailed definitions of each characteristic. The authors define these essential characteristics as training, course content, the assessment process, instructional methods, syllabus construction, and the use of student evaluations. This guide outlines through research and supplemental evidence how each characteristic can be used toward tenure, promotion, teaching portfolios, and general professional development. Additional features include a self-assessment tool that corresponds to the model teaching characteristics, case studies illustrating common teaching problems, and lists of "must reads" about college teaching.

An Evidence-based Guide to College and University Teaching describes how college faculty from all disciplines and at all levels of their career – from graduate students to late-career faculty – can use the model teaching characteristics to evaluate, guide, and improve their teaching. The book is additionally useful for teachers, trainers, and administrators responsible for promoting excellence in college teaching.

1

ARE YOU A GOOD TEACHER?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119562-1

Consider this all-too-familiar story about teaching. Guy was a second-year graduate student in a counseling psychology program with a secret he had been told to keep close to the vest during his doctoral studies: He wanted to be a teacher. Apparently, his secret was not that well-kept, because word had gotten out that he was interested in teaching a course. That was all it took. His interest in teaching led to an offer to replace the regular instructor of Learning and Memory. He had not taken graduate work in either of those areas. He had not taken a course on teaching. He had not been trained in pedagogy or assessment or even how to properly construct a syllabus. He had less than 30 days to prep the course.

Does the story of an underprepared college teacher sound familiar? A lack of teacher preparation and development is endemic to colleges and universities (Ansburg et al., 2022). Although pedagogical training is more common than it once was, expertise in a subject area is generally the one prerequisite needed for someone to be given control over a college or university course. Frankly, enthusiasm and basic competence may be sufficient in many cases. The great Greek orators of old, the ancient teachers in Indian Gurukuls (schools), the Chinese sages bestowing knowledge: all these teachers focused on their students with passion and dedication but had no formalized training in pedagogy. These teachers did what their own teachers did before them. In the history of modern education, most college courses ever offered have been taught by instructors with little formal teacher training (Gurung and Schwartz, 2009). This is not a problem for the history books, however; courses on college teaching are still far from universal.

All three of us were untrained educators early in our careers when teaching opportunities arose. We leapt at the opportunity. Guy’s preparation after learning he would be teaching the Learning and Memory course should also ring true with many readers. He read the textbook and mimicked what he thought were the best techniques of his previous teachers. Learning objectives, pedagogical strategies, outcomes assessment, alignment of evaluation and objectives, syllabus transparency—these are just some of the issues that did not enter his mind when preparing the course. How did it all turn out? As cringeworthy as the course seems in retrospect, his teaching evaluations were fine, and he taught many more classes for the department. Regan and Aaron have similar stories from their early teaching days. Our friends and colleagues in different disciplines suggest that things are similar across the board, and lack of teacher preparation has been a topic of discussion in higher education for decades (Bok, 1991; Boysen, 2011; Weimer, 2010).

#ModelTeachers need preparation to hone the craft and science of education.

The “success” we had in our very first course illustrates another problem. If higher education lacks basic standards for becoming a teacher, how can we evaluate whether a teacher is minimally competent? Whereas many instructors must partake in training to teach online, that is not the case for face-to-face courses. The status quo for determining competency is subjective analysis of student teaching evaluations, which tend to be as inflated as student grades (Benton and Ryalls, 2016). Our first teaching gigs represented a far-from-sophisticated approach to course design, but it is likely that we would still have teaching jobs today had we chosen to approach every subsequent course in the same way. To summarize, the pedagogical requirements needed to obtain a college or university teaching position are fairly low, and keeping that position is largely determined through unsystematic analysis of student satisfaction surveys—as a profession, we can do better.

What Is Model Teaching?

Consider an alternative to underprepared teachers and insubstantial evaluations of performance. What if there was a set of agreed-upon characteristics that defined model teaching? For new teachers, such a definition would provide guidance on minimum qualifications. For established teachers, such a definition would provide a rich means of evaluation. Perhaps most important, for both new and established teachers it could provide much-needed direction in what should be a continual process of professional development. Higher education needs clear guidelines on what it means to be a competent teacher—we need a definition of model teaching.

Our goal in this book is to provide a detailed outline of the criteria that define model teaching and a guide to the development of those criteria. What do we mean by “model teaching”? Models serve as idealized examples to be emulated. In the current context, we use the term “model” in reference to teaching practices generally accepted as ideal in higher education. We believe that teaching practices are ideal if they can be scientifically shown to increase desirable student outcomes such as learning, or if they are otherwise considered foundational best practices in higher education. In terms of what counts as teaching, we conceptualize it broadly. Teaching includes activities that occur inside and outside of the classroom, online or face-to-face, synchronously or asynchronously. Specifically, teaching includes preparation to teach, instruction in the classroom or online, and evaluation of learning and teaching effectiveness. As with any definition, there may be disagreement about the particulars of what is and is not included, and we are certain that our definition will evolve with the accumulation of pedagogical knowledge. Nonetheless, we are also certain that individuals who meet the criteria outlined in our definition would be difficult to describe as anything other than model teachers.

The Need for Another Definition of Teaching Excellence

This book is far from the first effort to outline effective teaching practices or to define what it means to be a good teacher. There are many high-quality sources of information about best teaching practices, but they are too piecemeal to be useful as standards for model teaching. Take the example of the Teacher Behavior Checklist (Keeley et al., 2006). The TBC lists 28 ideal teacher behaviors and requires students to rate how frequently their instructor exhibits each behavior. Some items ask students to rate how frequently their teacher “speaks clearly”, “dresses nicely”, and “makes the class laugh through jokes and funny stories”. Great teaching is copiously represented on the TBC, but it is ultimately hampered by its reliance on the limited perspective of students (more on the TBC in Chapters 2, 4, and 8). Model teaching includes behaviors not visible from a classroom desk and must also extend to the online realm (Richmond et al., 2021).

There have been efforts to expand upon the limited perspective offered by student evaluations. For example, Bernstein and colleagues (2010) described the ideal teacher as conforming to a scientist-educator model. Scientist-educators do not simply disseminate information. They intentionally design courses based on known principles of learning and examine student performance systematically to assess and improve learning. In a more far-reaching effort to define the quality, Chickering and Gamson (1987) famously set forth “seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education”. According to their principles, good teachers do things such as set high expectations, frequently interact with students, and respect diversity. Specific to online instruction, Quality Matters (qualitymatters.org) reviews and certifies online courses based on consistency with their standards for design and delivery.

Each of these definitions of teaching excellence is purposefully narrow; their creators have intentionally left out fundamental aspects of teaching. Thus, model teaching reflects not just one of these definitions, but all of them. Is a model teacher someone with a high score on the TBC who engages in teaching as a scientist-educator and complies with the principles of quality? We are not going to argue that there is a simple mathematical formula such as A + B + C = model teaching, but the idea of integrating various components of quality in one model is precisely the direction we are heading in.

Teachers cannot be expected to piece together the entire pedagogical literature on their own. The novice teacher must focus on course preparation. Experienced teachers may have knowledge of the pedagogical literature, but relatively few of them will have the comprehensive knowledge possessed by faculty who specialize in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Other teachers, having received no pedagogical training, may be completely unaware of the extensive literature that could be informing their teaching. Lack of time, expertise, and awareness are just some of the reasons why teachers are unlikely to construct complete knowledge of model teaching on their own. What is needed is one comprehensive guide to basic teaching competencies that spans from initial training, to course planning, to teaching techniques, and finally to evaluation of outcomes. Such a resource now exists.

Stop, Think, and Self-Assess!

Self-assessment is a key to learning. Improvement is not possible without an understanding of your current knowledge and skills. As such, throughout this book we will be asking you to think about how frequently you engage in the teaching activities we outline in each chapter. By way of short preview of what is to come, take a moment and indicate how often you participate in the activities listed in Table 1.1.

TABLE 1.1 A Self-Assessment Preview of the Model Teaching Criteria

Directions: Please indicate on the scale below how often you incorporate these efforts/activities to improve your syllabus.	Your Score
Scale: 5 = Always, 4 = Often, 3 = Sometimes, 2 = Rarely, 1 = Never
1. You utilize pedagogical training that stems from credit-bearing courses you have completed on teaching. (See Chapter 3 on training.)
2. You teach only courses for which you have documented graduate coursework. (See Chapter 3 on training.)
3. Your course learning goals reflect the breadth of content in your discipline. (See Chapter 4 on course content.)
4. You infuse diversity issues throughout your teaching. (See Chapter 4 on course content.)
5. You articulate specific, measurable learning objectives in ...