To the Editor:
We enjoyed "Educators Mull How to Motivate Professors to Improve Teaching" (The Chronicle, January 24), and we are happy to see so much attention being paid to the issue of how to improve teaching practices. As the article suggests, there is currently a rather large gap between knowledge about effective teaching practices in higher education and the use of these practices in higher education.
We are in the process of finalizing a literature review on change strategies in higher education. Two things that are very clear in our preliminary results are relevant. First, and perhaps most important, there is very little research conducted on how to promote change in instructional practices used in higher education. For example, many articles in our review did not base their change efforts on any other theoretical or empirical work. Second, the types of change strategies considered and used tended to be narrowly conceived. They typically focused either on individual instructors or on policy issues (such as tenure criteria). There were very few strategies that combined these perspectives.
If we do not take a broader picture of change, change will not occur. As a recent synthesis of a National Academies workshop on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education concludes, "the greatest gains in STEM education are likely to come from the development of strategies to encourage faculty and administrators to implement proven instructional strategies." Noting that we lack such models of change, the conclusion calls for the development of "models for implementation, dissemination, and institutionalization for STEM reforms where the relative roles of evidence-based research on teaching, leadership, workloads, rewards, and so on are clearly delineated." The issue is not just one of finding better ways to motivate professors. Most professors already take their teaching responsibilities seriously and are motivated to do a good job. Improving instruction will require strategic and systematic work at all levels of the educational system.
Charles Henderson
Associate Professor of Physics
Andrea Beach
Associate Professor of
Education Leadership, Research, and Technology
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Mich.
Noah Finkelstein
Associate Professor of Physics
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colo.
Comments
1. jmorrison - February 09, 2010 at 01:21 pm
Perhaps instead of using change strategies that focus on individual professors, it would be more productive to use strategies that focus on changing organizational culture. Certainly distributing information about evidence-based research on teaching, leadership, and so on would be helpful, but this information would be more useful if it were used in the context of departmental/program faculty engaging in serious discussions about what the future holds for their students, their discipline, and their careers and the implications of this discussion for their teaching practices. In other words, faculty members cannot be told what methods would help them improve their instruction, but in the process of intensive interaction with departmental colleagues, they may become more receptive to considering alternative instructional strategies and as a result organizational norms supporting these strategies may evolve.
We have ongoing discussions of barriers to incorporating technology-enhanced active learning instructional strategies and solutions to overcome these barriers on Ideagora (http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/). You are welcome to join the discussion.
James L. Morrison
Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership
UNC-Chapel Hill
2. beachand - February 11, 2010 at 04:15 pm
Thanks for the comments and invitation. If you are interested in more info on our work, you can find them at http://homepages.wmich.edu/~chenders/Publications/HendersonTransitions2011.pdf or http://homepages.wmich.edu/~chenders/Publications/HendersonJCST2009ChangeStrategies.pdf
Andrea Beach
3. ninestein - February 20, 2010 at 06:05 pm
I think one of the ways we should be thinking is to find a way that teachers are not the only source in the education experience. I am very interested in finding ways that allow the students to explore and discover information individually instead of limiting it to a in-class lecture. I think that the future of education is needs to involve the internet and the teacher needs to become a collaborator with the students to give them access to the information for them to discover it on their own.