This morning I had an e-mail from a friend whose spouse works for a campus-based Teaching and Learning Center. His message reminded me of how important such centers are, and how fragile they are as institutions.
The Teaching and Learning movement, in its modern form, is really only about a generation old. Current staff of the centers are really the first full-time student learning and faculty teaching professionals on our campuses. I am far from an expert on the subject, but I have followed the development of our center (the McGraw Center) from its inception, and I have the impression that we are one of a very large number of universities (and, doubtless, colleges) that have established such centers.
The McGraw Center Web page says that “effective teaching and successful learning depend on an understanding of the research on human learning,” and I think that is the intuition that created the field. For the past half-century the development of cognitive psychology has driven efforts to improve student learning in elementary and secondary education. But one of the ironies of the conduct of higher education has been that the universities that spawned cognitive psychology did not perceive that it contained equally important messages for postsecondary education. There was in fact a rudimentary form of just such a center at Harvard when I was a graduate student in the 1950s, directed by a quiet genius named Bill Perry, but my memory is that it was mainly aimed at assisting students.
The new generation of centers is also aimed at faculty, and its message is that teaching ought to be a self-conscious act — that teaching can be taught, and improved, and that it ought to be assessed in terms of learning outcomes. After all, if we believe (as most Americans seem to do) that K-12 student learning can be enhanced, why not student learning in grades 13-16?
So I am pleased to see that Teaching and Learning is now (to some extent) kosher at the university level. But I am not so optimistic that its lessons have been internalized by the departments that in fact control most of undergraduate education. This is partly shown by the slow progress of the postsecondary assessment movement. It is also shown by the very slow progress being made in teaching graduate students to teach. Mostly we still live in an era of apprenticeship in which senior faculty seem to believe either that teaching cannot be taught, or does not need to be taught. Of course, as I recently wrote in my blog, if we evaluated teaching more systematically and rewarded it more seriously, things would change for the better.
But the new centers are an important step in the right direction. What we need now is for central administrations to support them adequately, and for the academic departments to begin to see that they can improve their performance by partnering with the centers. This is a battle worth fighting for those who believe that universities are just as much about systematic learning by students as systematic learning by faculty. We should give student learning a chance!
