Why Don't Professors Share Teaching Practices the Way They Cite Research
edsurge.com
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Most people who've been trained in sales or leadership know how much of that training is useless. The techniques work fine for the teacher, they might work fine for someone else in the class, but they don't work for you. It's a fundamentally social, interpersonal task, and so a method that works for one person may fall completely flat for another.
The teachers I know generally describe something similar. A full day of staff development might produce one good insight, and it's not always clear which tip is good and which ones aren't going to work for you.
My best teachers have shared certain skills, but they've also taught with vastly different formats and techniques. Training helps, and all of them were experienced teachers, but attempts to "export" advanced teaching skills almost always fall flat.
While meeting many student groups would seem like it would take a lot of time, it ended up being about the same as a lesson prep + lecture time (there is needed prep and recovery time in lecturing).
People also need to realize, college instructors aren't paid to teach. They're paid to research and so of course they'll be lazy on sharing what they've learned from teaching. Universities have teaching centers, but those can only do so much when you really need to also be talking to fellow instructors in your specific field since every topic can't be taught the same.
I understand that this is the prevailing attitude, but it is not true. If they were not paid to teach, there would be no consequences for them failing to provide lectures—i.e., they would not be fired—then instructors would simply not show up. It's not volunteer work.
As a former academic, I can tell you the sad truth is that most instructors simply do not care about that aspect of their jobs and phone it in. I think it's probably more accurate to say that there is no reward for being a good, caring instructor (and vice versa, no real punishment for being a lazy or ineffectual instructor).
Tenure-track professors are rewarded mostly based on research, but many classes are taught by lecturers, instructors, adjuncts, and other non-tenure-track teaching staff. These people should care about teaching efficacy, though they are often overworked (see below) so perhaps they just don't have time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/the-college-facult...
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-cos...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/24/exploi...
But a lot of those people are teaching to pay the bills as they do research in an effort to get on the tenure track.
I was a lecturer in math and engineering for one semester at a big ten university. Most college teaching is done by adjuncts, who have no research responsibilities unless they're also holding down a separate research job or trying to do scholarship on their own time. They have nothing to share because they don't last long enough to develop real expertise.
My anecdotal experience as a once-ago student and now teacher is that significantly more consideration goes into k12 instructional practices compared to higher education.
Perhaps it's merely a matter of student expectations aligning instructor incentives: in k12, I am being held accountable for the educational progress/lack of progress in my students regardless of ability and background, but in higher education this is not the focus of accountability. Other concerns take priority - so instructional practices tend to be traditional and, consequently, are shared less frequently?
I think we may both be right in a sense. My view is based on my schooling experiences: I have dysgraphia, which made the traditional methods of K-12 education literally torturous for me. Despite a formal diagnosis and a IEP, I had to constantly fight with teachers and school administrators to get accommodations.
I went to a small school for college, and I graduated on time despite being one of the most academically rigorous institutions in the country. College was definitely a struggle for me, but I felt that the professors were on my side, and had a holistic view of student success. This experience might be different if you went to a research institution, where classes were taught by TAs.
The only reason K12 wasn't a complete disaster for me is because my parents were immensely supportive, and because I realized that a learning disability didn't make me worse than other people. I get angry every time I think back to the other kids who were in special education with me, who were treated like problems by teachers and administrators because they interfered with the K12 machinery. They internalized all of this hatred towards themselves and hated themselves because of it.
The focus on test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance in K12 education is a disaster that hurts the most vulnerable children in our school system. I listen to my friends who are teachers, and they all know who these children are, but they don't have the time or the resources to help them. Enforcing accountability through grades and test scores ensures that these students will be left behind, because their energy is better spent making sure 10 other students score 5 percentage points higher on the next standardized test.
We will never have the number of classrooms that can provide that level of support because it would explode the budget of schools. It's probably part of the answer, though.
But more importantly, professors would do a better job if they had incentives to teach. It is time consuming to prepare a class, especially if there are labs to set up and maintain. Even worse, some professors have to teach classes for things that are not their domain of expertise. In some universities, it's not uncommon that, let say, a professor specializing in logic has to teach operating systems.
All the time spent on teaching is basically lost as career advancements are based on research and administrative work.
From what I know about teacher portfolios, their focus is often "too meta": they discuss the process the teacher used rather than share the actual result (e.g. lesson plan, notes, or slides).
At the education meetup during Pycon 2014, Greg Wilson of software-carpentry asked a really good related question: Why does open source work so well for code and not so well for educational content? I don't know if anyone has an answer to that yet... Why is OER not taking off more? Here is a blog post of my own ideas about what git-for-authors could look like: https://minireference.com/blog/git-for-authors/ It's a really interesting space to watch.
Teaching even a single class (2 lectures/3 hours each per week+new homework assignments so students can't copy your old ones+answering questions in email+office hours) when you are fully engaged is a 40 hour per week commitment for 12-14 weeks.
If you are required to teach more than 2 classes, your teaching quality suffers. If your research needs priority, your teaching quality suffers.
Improving pedagogy is wonderful, and I'm glad people are looking at it. However, what everybody actually needs is the time to put it into practice.
The fact that teachers are woefully underpaid for this kind of thing just makes everything worse (Most lecturers I know get less than $5000 for a 12-14 week course--they could make more at McDonald's or WalMart).