On good college teaching

[Anacharsis]

The Wilson Quarterly had an interesting article on the subject that I thought I'd share.

 

Once, I noticed that my ratings for a class in Greek history at a university in Florida were considerably lower than usual. In a discussion on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, I had asked the class whether the Athenian empire, originally a confederacy of cities for mutual defense, became a tyranny by the time of the Peloponnesian War. All students who spoke agreed that the Athenian empire was a tyranny, because when the city of Mytilene tried to secede, the Athenians besieged and conquered it. This is a perfectly defensible opinion, but I wanted to show that another opinion was possible. I pointed out that most cities never tried to secede from the empire, and that Mytilene, unlike most member cities, was an aristocracy, which surrendered after its common people were given arms by the aristocrats and refused to fight the Athenians. The students insisted that this point was irrelevant: how could the cities possibly be free if they could not leave the empire freely? I pointed out that in 1861, our own state of Florida had seceded from the United States, which attacked it and forced it back into the Union. Did this mean that we were not free? The class fell silent. My remark, which I had meant to keep the discussion going, killed it completely. My evaluations for that course included several criticisms of my lack of respect for student opinions. Since then, I have tried not to make similarly devastating arguments in class discussions.

 

This case illustrates how evaluations conducted by colleges and universities help create an atmosphere in which students’ opinions are given more respect than is always good for their education. In college and graduate school, my own best teachers repeatedly challenged my opinions and sometimes ridiculed them, not necessarily to make me abandon them but to make me defend them more rigorously and to revise them if they were inadequately thought out. If now I deliberately avoid challenging my students’ opinions as much as my best teachers did — and I regret to say that I do — the reason is that I need to teach my students as I find them, and my ability to teach them is reduced if they are alienated, as my students in that class in Florida were. This problem is chiefly caused by the widespread attitude that students are “consumers†who need to be kept happy with the “product†that they are buying from their professors — which they believe is an enjoyable experience taking the course, not a rigorous education. Yet students should realize that the best professors are not always the nicest ones.

 

I wonder, how much of this changing attitude has to do with the increasing financial stakes that surround a college education?

 

It seems to me that students fear controversy because a controversial class could lead to a controversial grade -- which can have immediate consequences in the case of GPA-based scholarships, and longer-term consequences if poor grades prevent graduation or make it difficult to get high-paying jobs that filter candidates by GPA. With rising tuition costs, being stuck with student loan debt and no degree or limited job prospects is the worst of both worlds.

 

I imagine that professors fear controversy for similar reasons -- the job market for academics without tenure seems very tight, and anything that might cause negative evaluations carries a financial risk. Perhaps if they are new enough, they are still paying off student loans of their own?

Edited July 24, 2016 by Anacharsis

[Lolly]

Or, this professor does not respect student opinions. When this incident happened, he saw himself as presenting an alternative line of thought. In actuality, he degraded and spoke condescendingly to the students who had offered an opinion when asked. Truth is that the students' opinions on his teaching reflect more than just this one incident. If many students are reflecting this attitude towards his teaching, he should probably look at himself as a professor more closely and check to see if he is being condescending when dealing with students in class discussions. He doesn't need to avoid challenging their opinions; he needs to do it in a manner that is not devaluing the student response.

 

My girls utilize professor reviews when they are choosing their professors. There are a lot of students who give good reviews to instructors are just easy. Those are pretty simple to spot. There are some negative reviews that cause the reaction of, "hmmm, he sounds like he is actually really good". They can tell from the wording that the instructor is hard but fair and knows the material.

 

Why have student grades risen lately? Personally, what I am seeing is odd things in grading that are coming about because the classes are using the internet so much. Often read a selection, write something short about it, write a response to another student's reply. I know my kid's aren't getting anything out of this, and the grades on these activities are pretty much always perfects. Quizzes are generated online. The questions are often reused on tests. Most of the internet based assignments turn out to be busywork that results in perfect scores. In addition, my kids are not seeing their peers come up with great grades like I am hearing is happening to all students. Online, my friends are mostly reporting 4.0s regularly for their kids. Then again, a lot of them don't mention grades. I sometimes wonder about these self reported happenings though. Among the kids mine knew in high school, 95% had at least a 32 on the ACT. I am pretty sure there was some lying going on there...

Edited July 24, 2016 by Lolly

[regentrude]

 

 

Yet Arreola also acknowledges the clear evidence that lower-level courses receive lower student ratings than upper-level ones, required courses receive lower ratings than electives, and courses in the natural sciences and mathematics receive lower ratings than courses in the humanities and social sciences. This difference is unlikely to reflect worse teaching, since most professors teach a mixture of lower- and upper-level and required and elective courses, and Graduate Record Examination scores demonstrate that colleges are actually doing a better job of teaching students in mathematics and the natural sciences than in the social sciences and humanities. The reason is more likely to be that, regardless of the quality of teaching, most students are more interested in their upper-level and elective courses than in their lower-level and required courses, and find their courses in the humanities and social sciences easier than those in the natural sciences and mathematics.

As a professor, I am on the receiving end of student comments, and the bolded is spot on. It is extremely difficult to received good ratings in required courses for non-majors that are difficult because they require a mastery of math and have a large enrollment. It is far easier to achieve good ratings in an upper level class that is only taken by a small number of students who major in the subject.

This said, student ratings are not a suitable measure for the quality of teaching. Evaluating the instructor is not mandatory. We achieve response rates of around 25-30%, and there is large self selection. Pretty much all who have a serious grudge will take the time to voice their grievances, and a few of the top students will voice their approval. The middle 50% do not bother answering.

RatemyProfessor is even worse. I have taught over 5,000 students over the course of my career and have 42 ratings on RmP. That is less than 1%, and not representative.

 

 

 

The real reason that grade inflation is a serious problem, and that those who consider it unimportant are wrong, is that grading is almost the only way to make sure that students do the assigned work and learn something. The majority of students will do the least work they think will get them an acceptable grade. If a superficial knowledge of the material, or no knowledge at all, will get them the grade they want, that is all they will bother to acquire.

 

Sadly, for many students this is true. I have received negative comments that I dared to incorporate last year's important discovery of gravitational waves into my lecture on gravitation because that was "extra" information and not on the test; the complaining students would have wanted to see me work yet another simple example (like the ones I already did, and like they are worked out in the textbook). A certain percentage of students is not interested in learning, but in getting a  grade. 

 

 

 

Many people think that online education (“distance learningâ€) can revolutionize higher education, allowing students to take courses from the best professors in the world at scarcely any cost. These predictions seem to me greatly to overestimate students’ self-discipline. In theory, a lecture you can watch and hear whenever you like, as often as you like, is splendid. Likewise, in theory you could turn students loose in a good library and let them read there for four years and emerge with an excellent education. In practice, almost all of us, let alone most students who attend universities today, tend to postpone things that we can do anytime, especially things we are not eager to do anyway. We also tend to listen much more carefully to people who are present and looking at us, even in a large classroom, than to images and voices from a screen. Not listening carefully to an online lecture means texting, talking, playing video games, and doing other things that make paying close attention impossible. Taking careful notes, which is usually a crucial part of paying full attention to a lecture, seems hardly worth doing when you can listen to the lecture again anytime.

 

I teach in seat sections and an online section, and the above is my observation. 

 

 

 

The continuing interest in online education in universities today is in part a sign of indifference to whether students learn anything or not.

 

I do not believe this is correct. At the school where I teach, we are forced to offer online sections because the enrollment has far exceeded the available resources of rooms and instructors. We simply have no room to seat all students. We are aware that this is less than ideal, but it is the only way we can accommodate the students and not force them to postpone the course for a semester. We do our best to balance the needs of the students with our abilities and, for example, only offer lectures online and still have in seat recitations twice a week for all students.

But new buildings are not something that can easily be acquired. The university is not at fault if legislature does not give the funding.

Edited July 24, 2016 by regentrude

[regentrude]

Personally, what I am seeing is odd things in grading that are coming about because the classes are using the internet so much. Often read a selection, write something short about it, write a response to another student's reply. I know my kid's aren't getting anything out of this, and the grades on these activities are pretty much always perfects. Quizzes are generated online. The questions are often reused on tests. Most of the internet based assignments turn out to be busywork that results in perfect scores.

 

The purpose of these graded online activities is often to get students to engage with the material at all.

I give very simple online quizzes for my online section to force them to watch the lecture and read the assigned reading. For a student who does so, the quiz is easy and they receive a perfect. The purpose of the quiz was to give them an incentive to do the learning work they would not otherwise do. I wish I would not have to do this. I would much prefer to just give exams and not quizzes and homework grades. 

The reason quiz questions or class examples are reused on tests can be to give students an incentive to study or a reward for paying attention in class. Honestly, I could give my students the test prep homework as a test and the grade distribution would probably be the same as with an unknown exam. Sad but true.

[Bluegoat]

I generally found finding the best teachers was the most useful way to choose classes, but teacher ratings by students were largely useless.  I also tend to think they can be damaging if they are not treated properly by the administration - what students think they want doesn't always mean good teaching.

 

Given that the rating for the class described in the OP was unusual, it may just have been an unusual group of students, or the teacher came off differently than he thought.

 

However, I do think there is a mindset among some students, particularly in the humanities, that their largely ignorant opinions are actually important. I found that in my university, some departments really seemed to cater to that. 

 

And the other side of that is some profs are just jerks.

 

As for other points - there are schools where students are left more largely alone to accomplish their work.  It can work, but I think it requires some kinds of practice that we don't expect at our universities and also a realization that some students will fail under that model.  It also, IMO, means that there cannot be too many competing pressures for the student - when there are, anything that isn't immediate will get pushed to the back-burner. 

 

I am very much of the view that the move to push online classes as equal is related to a profound misunderstanding of what goes on in humanities teaching, at least on the liberal arts side.  In the situations I am most involved with, the move actually is not, as in regentrude's case, about lack of space, it is about trying to get more bang for buck out of profs salaries - in fact in some cases it is about trying to get the numbers to maintain the teaching positions and infrastructure that already exists.  A lecture to a class may only reach 100 people, and a tutorial can handle even less, not just because of space but the limitations of the students.  But if the lecture is recorded it can be distributed widely, and students from all over could participate in online tutorials.  This isn't totally bad IMO - for some it is the only option for any participation, but it isn't the same as actually being there. 

 

I think it springs from the problem of how to make a "business" based on a personal action more economically efficient, which is typically very limited in service-based industries.

 

 

[MerryAtHope]

"You all did a great job defending that side of the argument. Now, what if we take the other side of the argument. Can we defend that as well? What are some arguments that a person could use to defend the opposite opinion?" 

 

It's not that hard to get students to consider other arguments in a positive way that respects their opinions and builds them up, but it may take acknowledging that today's culture has changed since he was in school, and it may take a different presentation. So many things could be going on here, such as:

 

The students' previous educational experiences didn't prepare them to argue two sides of an issue.

 

Students' may have learned that it's safest to "agree" with the instructor--and his presentation seemed to lean towards one opinion. Once they dug in and supported that side--how do they now back out and disagree? They may not be prepared yet to understand how to do that in an educational setting where grades (and therefore a lot of money) are on the line. They may have felt "hung out to dry" by the approach.

 

(Personally, I think arguments for both sides should be presented before encouraging students to make an opinion--so I would have approached the conversation differently anyway.)

 

I remember growing up that the way my grandparents argued was with a lot of enthusiasm, engagement, sometimes even with anger or what we today would consider "rude" speech--but they just considered it healthy debate and these were people who genuinely loved and cared about each other. Still, I wouldn't argue in that way today--and I think the style of arguing has changed even more with today's college-aged students. That doesn't mean that they aren't ready to think and be challenged...but it may just have to be somewhat different in approach. 

 

Sometimes students genuinely haven't been prepared to argue two sides of an issue--so, there may be more foundational work that needs to be done, especially with younger college students. (Hopefully upperclassmen are more prepared by that time...)

 

Anyway, there could be more going on than how the article's author interpreted the situation.