Focus on Teaching and Learning
The Seven Deadly Comments That Get in the Way of Learning About Teaching
Marilla Svinicki, Ph.D.
I am very pleased to introduce you to Marilla Svinicki. Marilla has been a friend and colleague who I came to know and respect over a dozen years ago through the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education. In 1999 I had the privilege to work with Marilla on the design of the National Academy for Academic Leadership, sponsored by Syracuse University. Marilla and I were members of a team that developed the "Learning and Assessment" component of the Academy's first national workshop for over 60 trustees, chancellors, presidents, deans, and other campus leaders from throughout the US.
Marilla is a psychologist who specializes in learning and instructional design. She is director of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness and a senior lecturer in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on learning about teaching with us, Marilla.
CMS
I'm always pleased to have an opportunity to dialogue with others who care about teaching. It gives me a chance to let my guard down for a while and say what I really think about teaching without being disparaged by all those others who hold teaching in such low regard.
I mean - doesn't it really get to you when people make derogatory remarks about teaching? You know, the kind who say "Those who can't do - Teach?" Doesn't that just make your blood boil? It does mine.
I know we shouldn't let those words hurt us. After all, they're just words, usually uttered in ignorance of how hard teaching really is. We probably should ignore them, but what you call a thing can influence how you think about it and even what you do about it. So we shouldn't sit by and let others say derogatory things about teaching because they might come to believe them -- or worse yet - we might come to believe them, too.
So what I want to do is review some of those phrases about the futility of learning about teaching. Some are actually meant to be complimentary because they stress the complexity of teaching; others arise from frustration. Regardless of the intent, I hear many of them over and over again to the point where some have become my favorite phrases, a litany of chants about why we can't or shouldn't bother to learn about teaching.
I'm sure that each of you has a similar set of phrases that set your teeth on edge. I thought it might be therapeutic to bring these out in the open and figure a way to respond to them, preferably in a nice, logical way instead of "Oh, yeah?" So I'm going to give you my list of favorites, an expanded version of a list I created for the NEA Advocate last fall, and some thoughts about how to respond to them.
Deadly Comment 1: Teaching is an art, not a science.
Now this is actually meant by most people to be a compliment. It implies that you can't systematize teaching or define what's good about it because it is so complex and individual; to do so would somehow diminish it.
I can argue with this statement from two perspectives. First, it's wrong to imply that there is nothing scientific about art or teaching; even artists are fairly systematic in exploring how to improve their art and every day in every way we're learning more and more about the science of teaching and learning. It's just a lot more complex than some of the simpler fields, like astrophysics.
But even if I were to accept the idea that teaching is an art I can still make the following argument. Some aspects of teaching may indeed seem as creative and ill-defined as art, but it does not follow therefore that no training is necessary or even possible. Great artists, real artists like Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Nureyev did not come to their art untrained. True artists spend years studying the basics of their art, and they never stop studying. Great artists know all the nuances of their tools: how different brush strokes create different effects on the canvas, how a vibrato true to the pitch can be sustained, how a complex step in ballet can be executed safely and precisely and yet retain its grace and beauty. What seems artful and effortless in performance is actually the result of hard work and careful self-reflection.
If you wish to argue that teaching is an art, then you should also be prepared to accept the fact that art, like invention, is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
Those who aspire to be teachers need to be as well prepared in the tools of their art as are great artists. Some tools are really physical tools - like knowing how and when to dim the lights in the classroom or how to use a computer-generated display for interactive analysis during class. And few things are as destructive to a teacher's credibility as an ignorance of the use of those tools. The former director of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Texas at Austin used to tell the story about going to hear a Nobel-prize winning scientist give an after-dinner speech. This esteemed gentleman had a massive tray of slides illustrating his whole talk, but when he went to put the tray in the projector, he managed to turn it over and dump the entire tray out onto the floor. The dinner guests were then treated to the sight of this extremely famous fellow crawling around on his hands and knees trying to retrieve his talk. Not a pretty or inspiring sight.
Some of the tools are more conceptual than concrete. They involve making judgments about teaching. For example, how do you decide when to rephrase a question and when to remain silent a little while longer? How do you know which student to challenge and which to encourage? When do you accept the fact that you've done all you can and there's nothing left for you to do?
A truly artistic teacher can choose from a whole array of materials and methods to create a classroom collage that becomes more than the sum of its parts, but unless that teacher has those materials available the combination can never be created; the artful teaching will never be realized.
Deadly Comment 2: Great teachers are born, not made.
I can't dispute the observation that some teachers come to the classroom as naturally gifted as some artists. Their feel for the flow of the class, their ability to recognize problems before they materialize, and their rapport with students make the rest of us feel clumsy in comparison. They become the "great" teachers of legend. However, if only "born" teachers were allowed in the classroom, there would be a severe shortage of instructors especially in higher education, where very few actually identify themselves as teachers in the first place.
For the vast majority, the journeyman teachers, those skills must be learned somehow. Unfortunately, that learning currently takes place on the job at the expense of our students. Without adequate training in teaching, college instructors fall back on their own experiences as students and base their teaching on secondhand inferences of what their own teachers must have been doing to design the instruction they received as students.
In the past this has worked because students who came to college were selected for their ability to learn on their own, and their strengths and learning styles were very similar to those of their instructors, who were products of the same selection process. Now the students who come to college are far more diverse in background and learning styles. They need instructors who can adapt to a much broader range of learning styles and backgrounds and have learned more than one approach.
And those of us who were not born to be teachers CAN learn a lot about how to make a classroom run smoothly and efficiently. We may have to work hard for those skills to reach the level of internalization that seems to come so naturally to others, but your mother never thought you could learn to dance the waltz either.
Deadly statement 3: All you need to know to teach is your subject.
This is a particular favorite of mine, one which is deeply ingrained in our academic culture. Two variants on it are:
After you tell them (the TAs) what to do on the first day of class, what more is there to learn about teaching?
And the ever popular
Nobody really knows what good teaching is, so how can we teach it to someone else?
Is there really that much to know about teaching beyond the subject? To this argument I'd like to make two counterpoints.
First, it may have been true before, but times have changed. In the past we didn't know much about how learning occurred; at least not enough to be useful in instruction. We were like medicine in the 19th century: lots of practice-based lore, but not much solid information. Things have been changing, however. Psychology is making great strides in understanding how learning occurs, and this new information is as valuable to the teacher as a knowledge of biology is to the physician. Wouldn't you rather go to a physician who understood why bloodletting might have an impact on your disease than one who merely used leeches because that's what everyone did? At the very least, college teachers should learn something about the processes of learning so that they can make intelligent choices about teaching.
We are also learning a lot about ways to vary instruction. New ways to introduce concepts, to involve the students in active learning, to assess their progress are springing up each year. Some come from advances in technology; some from adopting or adapting methods from new populations that are joining the academy such as women, people of color and people from around the globe; some from classroom research. There is so much more instructors can do with a class these days, but not unless they recognize that these options exist.
My second counterpoint to the statement that all you need to know is your subject is that there are differences between knowing the subject for the purposes of research and knowing it for the purposes of teaching. The former allows the luxury of specialization because the knower is communicating only with others who are also knowledgeable.
The latter, knowing a subject for teaching, requires a much broader understanding of how that knowledge connects with other knowledge. Being a subject expert does not automatically qualify one to work with the public. To understand this point, you need only think back to the first time you had to ask a computer expert for help with a computer problem. That person probably launched into an elaborate explanation of the intricacies of ROM vs. RAM, baud rates and parity, and on and on until your eyes glazed over and your ears began to bleed. Weren't we all simply thrilled when Apple Computer invented the Macintosh system, which used phrases we could understand like "Empty the Trash" or "Cut and Paste?" Finally someone had realized that they had to make the computer comprehensible to the rest of us if they wanted to make a lot of money.
To be able to connect with the learner you must know enough about not only your subject but where it intersects with other subjects to be able to find points of entry into your students' existing knowledge base.
Another difference about "knowing the subject" is what we in the trade call "pedagogical content knowledge." This idea is being researched at Stanford and other places by Lee Shulman and his colleagues. The idea behind this concept is that in order to teach a given content efficiently, it helps to know what students will experience as they learn it. This includes knowing where the bottlenecks in understanding are likely to be and how to break through them. It includes knowing several ways of organizing and illuminating the content so that if the students don't understand it the first time, you can do something different instead of just saying it again louder. It includes understanding how the content is sequenced and structured so that important foundation ideas are grasped before more complex ones are introduced. It is a far more complex analysis of an area than simply knowing it for your own benefit.
Deadly statement 4: Teaching is just: a bag of tricks, a popularity contest, or show business.
We might argue that these, too, are variants on the previous statement about only needing to know your subject but I think they deserve their own mention because they are particularly misleading and nastier than the subject comment.
To say that teaching is a bag of tricks is only one way of phrasing this particular sentiment. A more benign way some people talk about teaching is as though it is a series of specific techniques (the tricks) that can be trotted out in succession in a sort of trial and error fashion to see which one triggers learning. This is a very surface level of understanding of teaching. Yes, indeed, you could probably run through a sequence of specific strategies until you hit on one that worked, just like when my car won't start I can run through a series of mindless steps to try to get it going; but then what do you do when you get to the end of the sequence and it still hasn't started? You have to get it towed or call Mr. Goodwrench to bail you out. This cookbook approach to teaching is not being done at the level that deserves the name teaching.
There are reasons why an instructor would choose one strategy over another, why one thing will work with some students and not with others. To use the strategies effectively the instructor should understand the mechanisms behind the "tricks." We ask questions for a reason, not just because someone told us we should. We put an outline on the board because of the effect it has on learning, not because it's expected. So although there are specific "tricks" or techniques that would be useful for any teacher to know about, they are not in and of themselves teaching; they should be surface manifestations of a deeper process of analyzing and planning instruction appropriate to the situation at hand. This is what it means to be a reflective practitioner. One should know the reasons behind one's actions and engage in them deliberately and thoughtfully.
The same is true for these other "teaching is just..." statements. They represent a very superficial analysis of teaching. Is teaching a popularity contest? Well, it's true that teachers who are liked often have better luck reaching the students than those who are not; so in a sense, being popular doesn't hurt. And in another sense, teachers who help students learn the material, do well on measurements like tests, and show a level of concern about learning are more well-liked by the students. But is teaching just a popularity contest? Not even close. You can be the nicest person in the world and still be a rotten teacher, and the students will know it.
And is it nothing more than show business? Certainly it's true that an instructor has to catch and hold the attention of the students to get them to learn so a little show business doesn't hurt. And learning requires some sort of motivation and the instructor who can make the content more interesting has a higher chance of tapping student motivation. And we know that things that are striking or "entertaining" are more likely to be remembered so if having a long-term impact on students is a good thing, then a flair for show business might figure into teaching occasionally. But is teaching just show business? Once again, that observation is way off the mark. Research on learning indicates that it's what you do after you've got their attention that matters in the long run.
The bottom line on all these Teaching is just... statements is that they are trying to reduce a very complex activity to a single component. The component may be a part of teaching, but the statement is no more complete a description of teaching than saying that Pavarotti is just a singer.
Deadly statement 5: All that stuff about teaching is fine for Discipline X, but we do it differently in my discipline.
I think of this one as the arrogance of the parochial. "My group is different, so there is nothing I can learn from you." Speaking as someone who has observed instruction in content areas all the way from accounting to zoology as well as being someone who specializes in knowing about learning, I can say that this is more myth than fact. The specific implementation details will differ from one subject to another, but there are general principles of learning which cut across all subjects, if only because we're all dealing with human beings. For example, I have yet to come across a discipline in which a student wouldn't do better by understanding how what he's learning now fits into the overall "big picture." That doesn't mean that students can't learn bit by bit without understanding the overall purpose or structure of the content; they can certainly memorize this little bit here and that little bit there, but when it comes to long term retention, unless the little bits add up to a complete picture, they won't be around for long.
Now I will concede that there are some clusters of disciplines that have more in common with one another than others. So, for example, language learning which uses the total immersion philosophy by putting the student into a situation in which only the new language is spoken and the student must figure out from the context what is going on is a special case, isn't it? Unless, of course, you think about it at a deeper level and say, isn't that sort of like the inquiry laboratory, where the student is put into the situation of having to figure out from the context the rules of the science or the movement class in which the student learns from watching and trying to imitate the movements of others? OK so maybe there's something analogous there after all if you look beyond the surface features to the underlying learning processes. Well, that's just the point. Once you do look beyond the surface, I find a lot more in common than different, even between wildly disparate subjects like studio art and clinical nursing, or accounting and engineering.
Of course, there is a level of teaching every discipline that is unique to that discipline alone. It is what I referred to earlier as the pedagogical content knowledge. It involves understanding the particular structure and relationships of the concepts in that discipline. Where are the difficulties, which topics are critical, what analogies and examples are most effective? These aspects of teaching are definitely unique to the discipline, but the fact that there is an underlying structure to the discipline, that there will be critical concepts that must be identified and mastered, that one strategy for helping students master them is the use of analogies and metaphors, those things are not unique to any discipline; they hold true for all learning, even the learning of physical skills.
So in the face of the "that won't work in my discipline" comment, we have to move to a deeper level of analysis to see whether or not the statement is true. It will require patience and ability to look past the surface details, and sometimes it takes a little imagination, but more often than not, there is something aspect of each instructional situation that can be informed by every example even if the example is from a very unusual source.
Deadly statement 6: If I spend all this time on teaching, I won't have time to cover all the content.
Well, what can I say? Is there anyone who hasn't heard this one? This one arises from the belief that telling is teaching and hearing is learning. If I said it, they learned it, and if I didn't say it, they didn't learn it, right? Or worse, it's better if they learn twice as much material half as well than half as much material twice as well. Personally I'd rather they really learn a few key concepts about my area and a lot about how to learn the rest on their own since in five years all that stuff that was so important today will be out-of-date and they'll have to start over again anyway.
Tell me this. Just how much do you remember from your introductory biology course, provided you're not a biology major? What about math? How many things could you say in Spanish today? Or French or whatever language you took? All that content we insist on cramming into our courses is mostly for our own benefit because we think it will be academically dishonest if we don't explain the latest controversies in the field. Believe me, my beginning psychology students don't need to agonize over whether long-term memory is organized hierarchically or randomly or in terms of propositions or in dual codes. They just need to know that it is stored in a network of connections. If they become psych majors, they'll learn all about those finer details later when they have sufficient background to grasp them quickly and see their ramifications. Oh yes, I worry that their next instructor will exclaim over how could they not know the dual code theory, didn't you learn that in 320? But for now I'm content to have them get the concept of interconnectedness of memory because that's the level of sophistication which will be most useful to them at this point.
Of course, there are some fields where sequences of courses are very interconnected and there is a lot to be learned on which a subsequent course will build. On the other hand, if we cover so much content that none of it is learned in the first place, the instructor of the subsequent course is in the same fix as if we hadn't covered it at all, except now we can blame it on the students. "Well, it was covered in basic course 101 so it's not my fault they can't do it now." But in those cases where there is a legitimate scaffolding of courses, cooperating instructors should work together to be sure that what is really needed in second semester whatever is really learned in first semester whatever. It may involve scaling down the details and incorporating more assessment and practice but in the long run the students would be better served.
Deadly statement 7: Learning about teaching is nice, but in the end how much difference can we really make as teachers?.
Let me offer a rebuttal to this observation about whether or not one should make the effort to learn about teaching and to do it right, given that we have such a small affect in the big scheme of things. In the area of moral development, models have been proposed to explain why people do the right thing. Some do the right thing because they think it will profit them; others do it because they are afraid of getting caught if they don't; others do it because they want to look right and just. But at the highest level of moral development, you do the right thing for no other reasons than it is the right thing, for that time and that circumstance and according to your best judgment. It doesn't matter if anyone else knows you did it or that you get some payoff for doing it. It sounds so idealistic, even a little preachy, but I've found it the most satisfying of all reasons for doing something. It's really a very self-centered, egotistical motive, but it works.
Teaching is not an easy job; it's frustrating, time-consuming, challenging, irritating, and when it goes wrong, demoralizing. But when it goes right, there's nothing like it. The most wonderful reward I've ever received for teaching was to have a former student who had gone on to win a major prize for her work go out of her way to tell me how much of an influence I had on her as a teacher. It wouldn't matter to me if I never won a monetary award for teaching or was awarded tenure if I continued to get that kind of feedback. We do have an effect and it's one of the most important effects of all.
So for all of us who fight the good fight in defense of the value of learning about teaching, don't let these deadly statements get to you. Maybe some of the points I've raised here will help you counter them. Maybe you have some even better ways of countering them. I think one of the very best ways is through example. If we are what we profess, that's the best argument we could make to the skeptics who believe there is nothing we can or should learn about teaching.
Thank you for listening to my therapy. Now let me invite you to propose your own most irritating statement about teaching........