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MEET THE EXPERTS
KAY M.
MCCLENNEY
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FRANK
DEFORD
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GEORGE
KUH
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LARA K.
COUTURIER
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LEE
SHULMAN
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PATRICK M.
CALLAN
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RICHARD H.
HERSH
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LEE SHULMAN
President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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A few more interesting comments from Lee Shulman, excerpted from his interview.
Q: Are most college and university teachers trained to teach?
SHULMAN: No. That's another one of our big problems. The Ph.D., which is the key to becoming a college or university faculty member, is a degree that prepares people to do research and scholarship. But there is, with the exception of some small number of programs, nearly no training for teaching as part of the Ph.D. experience. Training suggests that you are mentored on the job by a senior person who watches you teach, who videotapes you, gives you feedback, who helps hone the skills. It doesn't happen. When I arrived at my first university position and was teaching 1000 students a day -- 500 in the morning, and 500 in the afternoon -- the first advice I got from an older faculty member was, "Don't delay too long in preparing your first research proposal to the appropriate government agency, because you've got to get your research going." No reference at all to the thousand students I was teaching. And that's the norm.
Q: is there an "I taught it and they didn't learn it" mentality?
SHULMAN: I don't think faculty are crass. There's something inherent about teaching well that is satisfying. The late Al Shanker said that people misunderstand, they think teaching is like selling encyclopedias, where the commission is what keeps you going. And so if you gave teachers a commission for every kid that learned more, they'd work harder. But teaching is a lot more like lion taming: when you're in the cage with the cats, you're intrinsically motivated to have them paying attention and engaging with you. And you're not going to work harder just because you're calculating how many bucks an hour you're making.
Q: Tom Fleming, the professor who was using transponders in his astronomy lecture�
SHULMAN: What I found exciting about Tom Fleming is that what he provided to us was a vision of the possible. There is no reason that I can think of why most of the faculty teaching undergraduates in lecture settings in that university couldn't be as effective as Tom. Here's a person who has figured out how to marshal not only the technological resources but the teaching resources to transform a potentially sleepy, disengaged, uninterested group of 130 students into an almost active seminar, that you wouldn't think could occur with more than 15 or 20. What is so encouraging about Tom, is it's not like Oz. It's not done behind the curtain. It's not done with smoke and mirrors. You can see what he's doing and you look at it, and you say, "I could do that!"
Q: Will America's professors say, "I could do that?"
SHULMAN: If they are challenged to do so, if it's made quite clear that it's not a bait and switch, that the same leaders of the Academy who want them to take their teaching as seriously as Tom does, and to do it as well as Tom does, are then going to recognize and reward them for doing so ... I think the answer's yes. I think they will.
Q: Is teaching valued?
SHULMAN: Part of the problem is that in spite of all the pious things we say about the importance of teaching, we continue to take things like the US News rankings very, very seriously. The single biggest factor in those rankings is the reputation and prestige of the institution, which they get from the prestige of the faculty in the institution, whether those faculty are teaching undergraduates or not. And yet we talk about the top 10 universities, as if this really means something for teaching, when in fact we don't know anything about the quality of teaching. What we know is the amount and visibility of the publication and funded research that lent prestige to those institutions. As long as we continue doing that, we create a terrible barrier for the leaders of the institutions to do what you and I know they ought to do about teaching.
Q: What's the great enemy of teaching excellence?
SHULMAN: The great enemy of learning, and of course learning is what we teachers are trying to support, is anonymity and invisibility. People who are invisible don't learn. Because in no sense are they accountable, in no sense are they responsible, and therefore they can simply turn off and slip into a kind of learning closet.
Q: Talk to me about part-time teachers.
SHULMAN: I think the growing number of part-time faculty is not so much a menace as a tragedy. Full-time makes far more sense for the person being employed because they get a certain stability in their lives. They're not wasting their time racing around. They're not in a constant state of anxiety, and they can invest themselves much more wholeheartedly and fully in the life of the institution, which means collaborative planning, courses, working with students, et cetera.
Q: Are there solutions?
SHULMAN: Right now what's happening is that we're fixing our higher education institutions like we patch the black top on our roads, a pothole at a time. At a certain point you gotta step back and say, "We gotta look at this whole road again and see how to redesign and repave it." Because just filling potholes becomes dysfunctional.
Q: What does the public need to know?
SHULMAN: The public have to convey a very straight-forward message to the leadership of higher education: you must do everything you already know how to do to bring the quality of teaching and learning in these institutions up to the level of the scholarship that's already being done in those institutions, even if for awhile it means less of that scholarship's gonna go on. You know it's a zero-sum game. But we as a society will no longer tolerate having good teaching be an anomaly and an exception. We insist that Tom be the norm and Paulette be the tragic exception that we know how to do something about. And we're gonna start doing it now. That's the message that the public would have to deliver.
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[ BACK ]
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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