Like many of my colleagues, I enjoy experimenting with my teaching. I rarely use the same books twice in a row. My syllabus always changes a bit from one iteration of a course to another as I incorporate elements that worked and discard those that did not or that have become too routine.
I have found that if there is nothing new for me in a course, my teaching goes flat, like bubbly on the morning after.
As a result of all my experimentation, I learn new things about teaching and my students. One of the downsides is that there is always something unfinished and less than polished about every given iteration of a course. But I figure that the semester I teach the perfect course should be the semester when somebody videotapes the whole thing so that henceforth my virtual self can stand in and deliver.
I have, by and large, fared well with my approach. Yet when I reflect on the priorities of today's policy makers in Washington and some state capitals, I can't shake the suspicion that my idea of professors as relatively autonomous craftsmen and women in their instructional workshops seems to be on the way out -- made obsolete by the ever louder cry for "accountability."
In the brave new world of higher education, I fear, "quality teaching" will become a synonym for predictable and routine -- presenting the same material in the same way in every version of a given course. Changes in pedagogy or content will have to be sanctioned from higher up and conform to the latest management schemes like "Plan-Do-Check-Act":
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Plan: Establish specific course objectives.
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Do: Make sure instructors teach to those objectives.
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Check: Assess the learning of the students and the effectiveness of the instruction.
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Act: Use the outcome data to improve the process.
Repeat as necessary.
In the end, I wonder, will we have "state report cards" informing the public about the difference between "entry and exit competence" of our students? Most important, will the standards on which student assessments are based be defined by legislators and policy makers?
That could be our future. Or we as faculty members could try to come up with an accountability system of our own. It ought to start with individual faculty members giving a report of their work in the classroom in a given year.
Currently, most universities have reporting schemes in place designed to capture a professor's contribution to research and service. Professors list publications, conference presentations, and other intellectual activities, plus the service work they do on campus governance, dissertation advising, and so forth. Those reports give a pretty good picture of what an individual has done in those two areas.
By contrast, our reporting about teaching is limited to course titles and numbers of students. Nothing about the course as an intellectual and pedagogical event. Nothing on its content, how it had changed over the years, and whether those changes had worked out or not. Nothing on how the instructor had used technology. Nothing on outstanding students and their classwork.
The absence of that kind of substantive reporting from a university's administrative routines should strike us as odd, as it might signal that we don't view teaching as a form of scholarship and that we expect that this fall's course on American history is not going to differ from last fall's or the fall before's.
Maybe we can learn something from practices in an earlier day of American higher education, when some kind of informal reporting on the intellectual fruits of teaching seems to have been common.
For example, in The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand's excellent book about American pragmatism, one can read that in 1882, George Morris, a professor of philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, reported about his graduate courses to the university's president, Daniel Coit Gilman. Morris mentioned in one such report that he had a standout student in his class named John Dewey:
Mr. Dewey's paper on Empedocles embodied an ingenious attempt to find, in the fragments of doctrine attributed to the philosopher, justification for his spiritualistic interpretation of his maxim "Like is known by like" (p. 267).
Why not give our accounting about teaching the same importance as our accounting about research and service? Why not -- on our own initiative -- add some kind of substantive reporting to our annual reports (or, alternatively, establish a separate process for reporting about research/service and teaching). Our reports could even be made available on a Web site accessible to professors and students who want to get a more in-depth sense of a course.
At a minimum, that kind of reporting -- coupled with thoughtful harnessing of the power of the Internet -- would create greater campuswide transparency about one of the university's main tasks. When used by thoughtful leaders, it could help to institutionalize the oft-discussed "collective conversation about teaching" and accelerate innovation and learning.
Finally, such a simple institutional reform would provide those of us laboring in the teaching trenches with a voice to increase our chances of steering the accountability movement in the right direction.
