Professor Daniel J. Bernstein
AT – Professor Amy B. M. Tsui DB – Professor Daniel J. Bernstein AT: I’d like to start with some background information about your center. Did you set up this center (Center for Teaching Excellence) at Kansas U or did you just come and take over?
Interview with
Wednesday, 12 April 2006
DB: It was set up in 1997. Fred Rodriguez, who was an Associate Professor of Education, established the basic structure. He set up most of the fundamental disposition here. He put together an advisory board of well known and distinguished professors, which we have maintained. He also created a liaison, invited every department to send a liaison and he called them the Ambassadors. And we continue that tradition. In fact this week Monday to Thursday I’m having lunch with 10 or 15 of the Ambassadors each day. We do that twice a semester to keep in touch. Fred designed both of those things. After 4 years, he decided to become an Associate Dean in the School of Education. He told me in part this was because there was a new Dean coming in, who was new to KU and new to being a Dean. They filled in with an interim and searched that year, and I arrived in 2002. The good news was, there were no problems. There was no fire to put out, no crisis. It was a typical teaching center, running along with programs designed around the idea that Education professors would tell the other professors how to teach. That’s the normal model in the US. I go now to an organizational meeting every year of people who are center directors. And the overwhelming majority have a degree in Education, and their centers offer what Education has to offer other teachers. I have never worked in a center before, and in fact, even worse, I’ve never had a course in a School of Education. I’ve always been interested in my own teaching, from early in my career, I had taken on a lot of large-class teaching and teaching designed to produce learning more than to produce discrimination among students. After I became a full professor, I got interested again in the issue of how we honor and represent teaching in research universities. And for a period of 10 years I worked with my Faculty colleagues to find ways for them to be thoughtful about their teaching, to inquire into their teaching, and to make their teaching and their students’ learning visible to other colleagues. Very much modeled after the way many of us have in our research career, just trying to bring the part of our intellectual work to kind of a community conversation. And the people at Kansas contacted me and asked if I would apply for the job when their
1
director stepped down. I said, “Well, I’ve never worked this, but here’s what I’ve been doing, and if that interests you, then we could talk.” AT: So were you previously at Nebraska?
DB: Yes, I was, for 29 years. AT: So, obviously they were very impressed by the work that you were doing at Nebraska.
DB: Someone was, I guessed, because they wrote to me and asked me to apply. I didn’t even know there was a job. So when I came, I had all of the structure and tradition, although a short tradition, but everything about the center, the physical space, the basic outline and the budget were all there. And all I did was sort of bring in an additional vision. In a way, I was doing something that is what Schools of Education in the US teach their K12 teachers do. They called it “reflective practice”: you watch your own teaching; you asked if your students are learning; and you adapt and change your teaching practice so that your students learn more. Pretty simple idea. I talked about it in kind of higher education language. I called it “inquiry into learning”. I draw it parallel between inquiry into learning and the way we do our research: you frame a question; you read the background; you adopt a method which is appropriate to your field of study; you observe something; you interpret what you’ve observed; and you share it with your colleagues. That’s what we do as researchers, and so I simply said “Let’s treat our teaching like that.” That’s the language that a research university professor is accustomed to, and so it’s a familiar way of thinking. Had I adopted the language of K12 teachers, then it would have seemed less familiar. So I came with a simple idea that I had picked up from Lee Shulman and others. I was fortunate at Nebraska; I found outside grants to kind of put Lee and Pat Hutching’s ideas into practice. I also now recognize that the underlying ideas also come from Mary Huber. They all work at Carnegie. I work at a university. I can take their ideas and try to make them happen in the context of regular faculty members doing their work. That’s really all I added to the existing center – to just take our budget and our program and use them to promote the simple idea that faculty members would want to inquire into how well their students are learning. AT: This was when you were at Nebraska?
DB: At Nebraska, I developed the idea, then when I came to Kansas, I was in a much better position to do it because instead of being just one faculty member of the Psychology Department inviting people from other departments, here I speak on behalf of the institution. So it’s a very good position from which I can describe this idea. And I have a budget in my annual budget; I don’t have to get grants to support the faculty members. I give a very small honourium to people who participated. It’s more of a thank you note; not enough money to be a real incentive, just “Thank you, I appreciate what you’re doing.” AT: When you were at Nebraska, when you invited colleagues to look at their teaching and learning, did you get enthusiastic responses or did you get the kind of responses like “Look, that’s all very well, but I have to be assessed on my research, and how am I going to find time to do that?”
2
DB: I’ve got both responses. That was why when I wrote the grant, the grant included money as a larger honourim to get the faculty members to give me some time. Part of why we were doing it at Nebraska was to get teaching to count more in the tenure promotion process. And I had spent much time. The first project I was part of was with some faculty members from English and Agriculture. We tried to develop ways of showing what the teachers were doing, beyond just the rating by students. We had conversations with department heads and chairs, and with Deans, and we said to them, “What could we do that would help you count teaching more, as more important?” They all said that they would not make an important decision, that meant giving someone more salary or promoting and tenuring somebody, just on the opinion of students. They didn’t believe the student’s rating enough to make an important decision. And secondly they said, when faculty visit someone else’s class, and sit in the back of the room and write a letter, those were always positive and so they were useless. Because they give no real information, no differentiation. So they said, “I would happily reward good teaching if I saw real evidence.” So that got me interested in what would real evidence look like. From my career as a researcher, I knew that the main evidence we use in research is peer review. You send a grant proposal to a funding agency and they have colleagues read it and give it a ranking. You send an article to a journal and the editor asked colleagues to tell me “Is this very good, good, not so good? Should I publish it or not?” So I had the idea that we should do that with teaching. The problem was we have nothing like an article or grant proposal to show to another teacher. Usually the only way we observe teaching is by watching in the classroom. This was about 1998, I got interested in course portfolios. It is different from a teaching portfolio in that it is a representation of a single course in depth. And I saw this as an object, a thing, a product, that could be used, could be reviewed by somebody at another university. Because the credibility of a reviewer increases with the distance from wherever you live. A typical American academic joke, “An expert is someone who lives at least 100 miles away.” But you can’t bring that person to the campus and have them watched. I want to raise the point that the performance, the talking, the lecturing and whatever that a teacher does in a classroom is not the whole of the teaching, it’s just a part. That teaching includes the selection of the goals for the class, the selection of the materials, instructional design, deciding how to have the students spent their time with the professor, arranging how they spend their time preparing outside of class, designing opportunities for the students to demonstrate what they have learnt, through various assignments, examinations, papers, projects, group work, oral presentation, whatever. And then evaluating and learning from that, reflecting on that is very hard work. So rather than putting all of our emphasis on the 3-hour per week that someone is talking to students, we want to expand the vision wider, and the course portfolio captures all of that. So both because it was portable, I could send it to somebody, and because it was more broad, I chose the course portfolio as the equivalent of the journal article in the research world. And that was really the turning point: recognizing that I want to help faculty members capture the intellectual work they did as teachers in a readable, concise, reflective, evidence-rich document that could be shared, could be made public. The English word “publication” has taken on a life for its own. We need publications. All the work really means is to make public, to make visible, to share with others. So we kind of
3
invented a different way to make this work public, by creating electronic spaces, where these portfolios could be displayed. AT: Did you get the university HR policy to change that they would equate a course portfolio with a research article?
DB: I had not worked on that question. That’s a great question and it’s a key issue for lots of people. At Nebraska, there is a case of a person whose course portfolios were reviewed externally and formally by the same mechanism as research, and he was in fact promoted to full professor based on peer reviews of his course portfolio. So in a Mathematical sense, that is an existence proof for demonstration that it can happen. At the University of Kansas, I don’t think that would happen. What I have focused on instead is making sure that teaching is evaluated with this intellectual product rather than simply relying on the opinion of the students in the class. I believe that it sort of raised the standard of what is quality learning. And because the evidence is stronger, it gives more weight to teaching because the people who do this well can really excel. Just as there is variety among the eight universities in Hong Kong, there is great variety among the 3000 higher education institutes in the US. I believe that by making peer review of course portfolios a well-known practice, other universities that want to use excellent teaching the same as research will have a good model. So I think the use of these peerreviewed course portfolios as the primary intellectual work is completely appropriate for universities that do not have the resources to give their faculty time, equipment and materials to do work that will be routinely published. AT: The example from Nebraska is great. When you have evidence like that, people then will say that the university does put weight on teaching, but in Kansas, for example, it is not reflected in the promotion and tenure criteria. Do you find it difficult to get people to get excited about it and put aside time to do it?
DB: Teaching is important under promotion and tenure at Kansas. You could have a nationally distinguished research career; if your teaching is bad, you’ll not get tenure at Kansas. So it is not the case that research is the only thing that matters. It’s just that the only measure of teaching that people were using was the opinion of students. That annoys faculties. Faculty members don’t believe that that’s the best way of evaluating their teaching. People do care that they are good teachers. They want very much for their students to learn. So I find that faculty members who are also working on their research really enjoy being in a community that has the same excitement and interest and sharing of work around teaching that they are accustomed to around their research, so we have lots of people interested in participating. AT: At both universities?
DB: Yes. At Nebraska, over the years, while I was there, the number of faculties who have participated were up around 80 and it’s now well over a hundred who had taken the time and the energy to commit their ideas about their teaching, and the evidence of their student learning to an electronic course portfolio, and have asked for external peer reviews and commentary on their teaching.
4
AT:
Could I just ask you whether at both universities or at either university, whether it’s something that you feel came naturally or it’s something that you really have to work hard to change the culture?
DB: It’s my experience that a typical faculty member, above all there are certainly people who have no interests in teaching and simply are interested in their own research career, but the majority of people who take a job as a college teacher care about teaching and want to be good teachers just as they want to be good researchers, and their ideal job would be a job with some balance in it. Boyer, in his original 1990 book, reported survey of one of the grants that we had in the early 1990s at Nebraska show that what happened is that usual university policies are kind of beat that out of people. They suppress their interest in teaching. So by providing an interesting collaborative community in which faculty members can get together with other people who are good teachers, and share their work, they find it very enjoyable. I tried to claim that it doesn’t take more time to be intentional about your teaching. You just don’t throw away all of the intellectual work you do anyway. You got to design a course, you got to give assignments to students; you read those assignments and give them feedback and grades. You got to have to think about how you’re going to change the course next time. All we are saying is don’t throw that away. The marginal extra time it takes to write it down is very small, compared to how much time it took you to deliver the course. In an American semester, there are 45 hours of class time and it leaves that many hours of out of class time, reading students’ work, preparing class, advising, all that. So, if it takes another 5 or 10 hours to gather what you’ve done and think about it, that’s a tiny cost as a percentage of all the work you’ve already done. AT: One of the problems that I have here is although teaching is counted in promotion and tenure, all you have to do is just barely enough to get over the threshold, but you have to do really well for research.
DB: It’s a wonderful point and it’s just the central issue that I try to deal with. You hit it on the head what I’m doing. What I want to do is to raise that threshold significantly. As long as we’re relying on students who have some insights into certain parts of teaching but by no means professional, we can’t raise that threshold. I joke that how about if we evaluate a chemist’s research by asking the undergraduate assistant in her laboratory whether she is a good scientist, everybody laughed. That would be silly. But that’s what we do when we evaluate teaching. So, my strategy is to systemically try to raise that threshold in teaching, so that it starts to look like the threshold in research. The problem is then that there’s no product, no evidence, no frame that a reviewer could look at to make that kind of judgment. And so by creating the opportunity for someone to make the teaching and learning that she has done visible to a reviewer, we can begin to raise that threshold. AT: Do you have the university administration support or the HR people support on this?
DB: Yes. Because this University has always had in public discourse, pride in teaching, and the belief that its teaching is very good. When I first took the job, I visited with about 60 department chairs, made an appointment, went to his/her office for an hour, introduced myself, asked what they were interested in, asked about their department, asked about how the center could be useful, the “just to get to know you” kind of conversation. At least 50 of those 60 chairs said to me, “Our department is one of the best teaching departments on campus.” First of all, they thought that was a good thing to say. They want to be a good department. And second, the threshold is so low that they thought that their people were all doing well, because they were not comparing them nation-wide, to
5
those who are doing the most interesting or innovative teaching. So just “With what I imagine the other departments are like, we must be very good.” One of the thoughts related to your observation about the threshold. In my days, the centers for teaching were often assumed to be remedial. You got sent to the center if you were doing a bad job. And many center directors would say very publicly and very frequently that they provide “confidential services”. I never say that. What I say is we get the very best teachers to come to the center to share their excellent work and others can come in the same way you would go to a center for Humanities or a center for Natural Sciences, they hear the latest colloquial from good scholars. Again, it is part of the raising the threshold. I want people to recognize that there is real excellence in teaching – people who look at their student learning, and to go outside their immediate community to find new ways to teach, and are using innovations they read about/from speakers that we bring in. So I think an important part of promoting a center is to communicate that it is about excellence, not a place you go as if you have been punished for being a bad teacher. AT: I think that’s an excellent point. It is an entirely different conception of what a center like that should be doing. That’s really great. I would like to just chip in here and ask how you managed to change the perception of these 50 chairs?
DB: That work is in progress. One reason that they believe that is that the university has many many teaching awards. So every department has several people who have received these awards, and these people don’t do the obvious mathematics and figure out everybody got that. They don’t realize how ordinary it is. So we talk a lot about grade inflation, KU has teaching award inflation. So we’ve done two things. One is when there’s a faculty member whose work is quite excellent, I make sure that I communicate our representation of their work to the chairs, so that they see, “This is what excellent teaching looks like”. So I am trying to raise their perceptual threshold. So a big part of the energy I’ve put into the job in my time here has been making it as visible as I can. And the university does that all the time around research; we are constantly getting messages from the Chancellor about this excellent research project to that excellent grant. So I just joined that course but on teaching. Second is, we have a department teaching award. It’s ten thousand US dollars. It’s a lot of money. And the criterion for the award, when I came, was mostly how many of our faculty have won individual teaching awards. What I’ve changed it to is a department version of a course portfolio. What are your goals for your students in your department? How would you know that a major is a good student? How are you measuring that? How do you have department-wide conversation looking at your measures of how well your students are doing? What changes have you made in the courses you teach to improve how the students are doing on the measures you care about? We are inviting chairs to come to the center to talk about those criteria and they said, “How would I know that?” Well, we can point to individual teachers who are doing that in their classes. In my first year here, there were ten out of seventy departments who applied for this award. There were four of them that we picked as finalists to do a larger application. It’s after that that I got my advisory board to change the criteria to suit my vision of collaborative looking at learning. The next year, none of those finalists the first year were selected as finalists the second year. And they got the message “This is not good enough.” And those departments are now inquiring with us “What would it look like if we
6
did this better?” And so two of those departments this year held department teaching retreats outside this semester, get all the faculties together, talk about teaching goals, ask the question “How are we measuring learning?”, looking for places in the curriculum where we can collaborate, make courses better, change courses. So by making those criteria very public. When we announced the award, we said “On Friday, this year’s award winner will be announced.” It’s a surprise, and the Chancellor of the University, that’s our top officer, and I will show up at the faculty meeting and surprise the department that they’ve won the award. And the campus biweekly newspaper photographer will be there and there will be a big story all over the university website and then the printed version about the Chancellor giving this award to the department. And then we will have a celebration in May, and then a big teaching summit in August before the semester starts. We’ll invite 300 faculty members to get together and spend half a day, talking about teaching. We’ll describe that department and why they got the award. And the Chancellor will give them the ten thousand dollars. So each of those is the moment where we are communicating – the standard has to do with student excellence, not just who talks well and who the students like. And that’s how we gradually ratchet up the threshold. One more version. I spent 2 years working with a panel of very distinguished professors, people who have research name, chairs, and department chairs. These are all highly respected people on campus. We played with the question, “How would you review teaching if you treated it like research?” and they came up with the process where the faculty members would provide basically the elements of a course portfolio: the lecture plan, goals for the students, teaching methods that should work, evidence of student learning, and the description of what is the quality of that work, and what habits of mine were given good credit, and then a reflective piece, having to do with what did I learn from teaching this class and how will I improve it next time. And we got that description put into the university document for peer review of teaching for tenure. So now the expectation is, when you go up for tenure, your department will have looked at your teaching using that framework. It’s not enough to just say, “The students like this person and I went to his class and he can talk fine.” Again it’s raising the threshold as you’ve pointed out, and doing so by getting this language, this notion of teaching as an inquiry into learning, getting that language into everyplace that we can, where we talk about or evaluate teaching. AT: When you introduced this external review, I have two questions, one is what was the reaction of the faculty towards this? And the second thing is, were you able to get a lot of help from other universities to engage in this kind of review, because you must have a common language in order to be able to do that?
DB: Some faculties were negative about it, saying it’s too much work and that we shouldn’t waste our colleagues’ time. I played upon the fact that these are the people who will tell you that they think teaching matters. And I simply say I was a journal editor for two different journals for seven years, and I spend a lot of time reading other people’s work and evaluating it, and I did that for the good of my community, for my clinical building. So I just point out that when we care about research, we are happy to serve on the editorial board to review grants and so on. Some people still acknowledge they’re parallel but just basically say, “I am sorry, I don’t care about teaching.”
7
AT:
What would be the percentage? Is it a 40/60 balance? And which way does it tip?
DB: I would say that, maybe 20-30 percent of the faculty members I know just rejected it as not important, and others, the rest 60-70 percent would say, “Yes, that’s a reasonable thing to do. That’s they’re appropriately parallel.” The faculty in general would much rather have their teaching evaluated by peers than by students, we need both, the students’ voice is critical for things like, is this professor respectful? Is this professor accessible, and timely, that sort of things. But faculty members get very annoyed when the students were asked if the professor knows what he was talking about. How do they know? They are beginners. Or is the work too hard? There’s a conflict of interest. So faculty members in general would much rather have their colleagues have a voice than not. Getting people to do these reviews is not easy. You have to ask. But anytime I really need a reviewer I’ve been able to find someone who I thought was qualified to write a review. I would never suggest that every professor’s course should be reviewed externally every year. I think that’s too much. I would say that in a 5-year period, I would like to see a professor create a course portfolio with a course he offered, say three times or more, so that I can see growth, or change, or trajectory, and have that externally reviewed. And I think there is willingness to participate to make that a reasonable and realistic goal. There is an interesting question in the picking of the reviewers. Who should they be? One version is they should be people who are at research universities like the one we are at. My view is they should be people who are nationally known for their teaching, and they may not be at a research university. So that’s something that’s delicate to negotiate. My argument is, when we pick reviewers for our research, we pick people who are the best we can think of. We want to know is it judged by the very best researchers to be good. And it doesn’t make sense to pick people who are ordinary teachers but happen to be at research universities as our peers. I don’t often win that argument. People aim low, they’re willing to take ordinary teachers from research universities as the judge, but it is a very interesting question. So, if we imagine having each professor’s course portfolio evaluated externally once every 5 years, there is enough willingness of people to do that work. I think that is realistic. There is not enough willingness to review everybody every year. I don’t feel that there’s personal power available to do that. AT: At your university, are you into outcome-based assessment? I mean is that something which is part of the professors’ work?
DB: There’s language about that, but in practice, no. And so part of why I like the portfolio is that it brings each individual practice into alignment with that goal. But as an institution, our assessment reporting to our accrediting group, equivalent to the UGC, is not meaningfully based on outcomes, no. AT: So was that a conscious rejection of this idea or is it just something which hasn’t made an impact on your university?
DB: Let me be somewhat frank. I think it is just laziness. When the outside accrediting agency
8
comes to evaluate the university once every ten years, faculty members are not very interested in that. They don’t want to spend time on that. And so the university leadership does all the work, write the reports, visit with the outside auditors and so on. And so the work is typically done by kind of institutional research office. The office that keeps the data on how many classes students are taking, and how many graduates, and all that sorts of things. And so it is done by people who are not faculty members, it is done, in my personal view, kind of superficially, and the outside agency seems to accept that. The one thing that KU did that was kind of novel ten years ago but I found not so interesting now, is sample every year about 50 undergraduate seniors, 4th year students, and they come in for an hour in their last semester of their senior year and meet with the faculty committee and answer questions about, sort of intellectual-wide, the world, the causative etc. And from that interview, the faculty rate them on how well they have achieved some of our university’s educational goals. On paper, that looks reasonable. In practice, I am not impressed with it. But it has passed the review of the external review committee, so they think it’s ok. It was passes for outcome assessment. The biggest problem with it is that we do not turnaround and use it to change our teaching. It’s not, in American parlance, “closing a loop”: that the institution has the evidence, but it does not then turnaround and say to the unit, “Here is what our students are weak on, what are you doing to improve them?” They just collect the data and that is it. AT: So if you have a choice you would have introduced outcome-based assessment into the courses, would you?
DB: Yes, and in fact my ultimate goal, which I have expressed to academic leaders in a positive kind of helpful suggestion way, is a faculty member course portfolio will always include students’ work, as one of the defining characteristics of it, that there is raw student work to be looked at by an external reviewer. So if you’re head of department of 10 faculty members, and they taught courses throughout the curriculum, first year courses and second year courses and so on, and you have a collection of course portfolios from those courses, an outside reviewer could quickly get a feeling for the quality of work being done in your program, because you have a sample. What we ask for in each course portfolio, just as an ideal, would be two top level papers or projects, two second level, and two kind of ordinary; an example of the quality of work at those levels of achievement; and then a distribution of how many students achieve at each level over the whole course. So everybody got some brilliant students who learn everything; that is not so interesting. What I want to know is what percentage of the class is learning at that high level? I want to see from the work what a high level means to this professor. To me that’s outcomebased, because the course portfolio stands in for the work of the department, and I think it’s easy in itself because the department doesn’t do any extra work, it just doesn’t throw away the work it is doing. It makes its regular routine teaching visible to an outside person. AT: Dan, you have been doing such a lot of work and I looked at your website, your setup is not very big. And I wonder how you mange to do all of these.
9
DB: I’ve been doing it gradually over a long time, somewhere in the early 90s, I made full professor, and began to think again about how to make teaching matter, to be important to the university. And I have been very fortunate to be around a lot of interesting, innovative thoughtful people like Lee Shulman, like Pat Hutching, like Mary Huber. My colleagues in the Carnegie Academy. So I don’t have to spend my time now on kind of thinking of new things to do. The vision of bringing the joy of inquiry to the faculty colleague is sort of there. So I just spend all my time creating programs for colleagues to learn about it, and to do it. AT: So, say for example, your five staff members, what level of appointment are they at? Are they at associate professor level?
DB: No, I am the only PhD in the entire operation. I am a faculty member in the Psychology Department, tenured full professor. My colleague Judy Eddy, is the only other full-time employee. She has a master’s degree in Composition and Rhetoric. She has done a little bit of teaching. She does all of our budget work; she does all of our scheduling and planning; she does all of our publication; and she is our web person. She is, in short, a miracle. I could not imagine doing this work without her. She is just a wonderful human being. The other people you see in the picture are all students we pay hourly. And if you add all of them together, it’s about 40 hours a week. The undergraduate students do clerical kind of work. They maintain the database, they copy things, answer the phone, put out mailing, just when we invite people, electronic invitation and paper invitation and so on. We have a couple of graduate students who interact with faculty members around the portfolio. They talk with them, they interview them, they help shape the writing so that it’s readable to someone who isn’t a specialist. So you are right, it’s a tiny little center. AT: Say, for an example, you are going out and talking to department chairs and also if people want to write a portfolio, they say “Well, I really don’t know how to do that.” They come to you for help, and you have to identify all the good practices so that you can showcase them?
DB: I am in contact with that national community of people who are doing this work, so I have lots of good examples and I don’t have to spend my time trying to figure out what should I expose my colleagues to. I’m kind of sufficiently familiar that I don’t do a lot of preparing because I am part of that national community that is writing course portfolios. I try to be efficient by running institute seminars. I’m not doing this work one on one. I will get a dozen faculty members together for two whole days and they will read something before they come. We will break up into small groups. They will talk about their own courses, their own course goal; they will do the basic intellectual thinking work over those two days, and produce a project plan where they figure out “What would it take for me to turn my course next semester into a portfolio?” And the graduate students will help them during the semester to gather the student evidence, and then call them and interview them to help them create the reflective writing. So I run sort of small graduate seminars basically, with my faculty colleagues as participants. And that way, 25 or 30 a year will become richly-exposed to this idea and they will make a public representation and that is the first step. And in a given year maybe half of those people will take it further to really having a good archive and making their work public. Very slow work.
10
AT:
Those department awards and teaching awards, are they part of your brief as well?
DB: The department award is, individual awards are in the brief of the office that I report to. So the logistical support comes from them. I serve on those committees. So I read all the files and participate in them to decide on the individual awards. And this year the provost allowed one of those committees to move away from student testimonial letters and to use that new structure of inquiry, and asking for materials and support of the award nomination. Again here, it’s a phrase I don’t like when it’s used in politics, but I try to “stay on message” – it is used in politics in the US, that all the members of the political team say the same thing. No matter who you ask, no matter what the question is, they always say the same thing. They “stay on the message”; it’s a way we say that. So in the same way, when I’m asked about teaching, I talk about inquiry; I talk about intellectual goal; I talk about capturing student work; I talk about reflective practice. So now it’s found in the documentation on the personnel process. This year it found its way into individual teaching awards. Three years ago, it found its way into department teaching award. So the conversation about what is excellence in teaching has shifted. It embraces this idea of inquiry. It will take ten years, but eventually all conversations around teaching will use that metaphor. AT: Having a common language is so important.
DB: Yes, and one thing you pointed out earlier that’s very fortunate is, in principle, I have the support of the administrative leaders. They already claim they support teaching. So all I have to do is convince them that the way I talk about excellence is a good way. And so that’s why I have their support. They see me as helping them in their mission. That is a real luxury. At some important level in American universities, the HR policies are actually primarily set in the department. There is a great deal of variability from one department to another, as they view themselves in terms of their desire for excellence. And so what I’ve tried to do instead is to change the criteria for excellence in teaching. Raise that threshold significantly over time, and then I think teaching will simply count because people can’t ignore the excellence. AT: And you managed to get the department to accept the threshold that you have set?
DB: Some have, some have not. It’s one of the things I learnt. When I was very young, I wanted everything to happen quickly. I spent the last ten years I was at Nebraska working on these issues. And I saw some changes over the ten year period. I now understand that nothing changes in a large university system quickly, so I look at each step, I try to be patient and consistent and available. There were people who told me I could never make a change in the personnel form; and after three years, there was a change in the personnel form. That was actually pretty fast. It is going to take another couple of years till everyone uses that form and start to understand what it means. And then that will drift down into the annual review because it makes sense to align your annual review with the ultimate review. I have no illusion that I’m transforming the culture of this campus. I am trying to introduce ideas and language about the threshold for excellence in as many places as I can identify. And then I believe that if people use those procedures over a period of time, they will become community practice. But if I don’t get them into the language, into the
11
documents, into the awards, into the promotion and tenure guideline, then they’ll never happen. The good news is – here I can’t praise Lee Shulman and Mary Huber and Pat Hutching enough, I sometimes tease that I am like a franchise of their work – the good news is the ideas that I am offering to my colleagues are very good ones. And faculty members who engage this process, who think about their teaching, become very enthusiastic. They feel they learn a lot about their own teaching, they feel the teaching becomes interesting again. They are solving a puzzle, or working on a problem, or moving forward; they become intentional rather than just “I have to teach this class again”. AT: Yes, as I saw on the web, you have the faculty reaction which is great. Are they from Nebraska or are they from Kansas U? It’s wonderful and there’re quite a lot of them there.
DB: In the Nebraska group, we have written a book. It’s coming out in June and has a whole chapter on the reactions of the faculties in Nebraska. And it’s just stunning how much people like it. We hired a qualitative researcher, not a member of our team, to interview 80 faculty members and asked them about their experience. We were paying them to do it. The way they talked about it we should have been charging them money to do it. So again I leave all the credits for that to Lee and Pat, because their notion that people will enjoy the intellectual challenge of thinking deeply about their student learning turns out to be true. The faculties like talking about their teaching. They like solving puzzles. They like listening to people like them, similar to them, engage in discussion of the work that they do. So my role in it – I am not hyper-modest and I’m not saying I do nothing – what I’m very good at is creating a community in which people can learn from each other and share these good ideas. And I am fortunate that I am “riding the right horse”, if you like the metaphor, I picked the right ideas to use. My impression that Lee and Pat and Mary were doing good work was correct. So I get people together and the framework that we use makes sense to faculty members. It helps them think intelligently about something that they individually care about. At different universities they know how much teaching matters compared to research. Some universities, teaching is much more important than research; some universities, it’s less important but it can’t be bad. But within whatever part of their job they are putting into teaching, they get excited when they feel their teaching is intellectual work. AT: This is so useful and so inspiring.
E nd
12