Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and Its Discontents

CHAPTER 6. A revolution in teaching and learning?

CHAPTER 6 A revolution in teaching and learning?* Has a lot of rhetoric been expended on a potential revolution in teaching and learning? Yes. Have public policies emerged to require or invite improved student learning? Yes. Are numerous teaching innovations being undertaken? Some. What initiated and sustains these activities? Probably external pressures and a few people in higher education devoted to the improvement of teaching. With all this activity, why should we be so agnostic about a teaching and learning revolution? Because there are few serious incentives to improve the quality of learning and because improving the quality of learning is exceedingly difficult. There are no silver bullets! Let’s face it, there is no large-scale, serious movement to improve the quality of teaching in higher education. The claims that new technology is dramatically altering the way students learn and the ways professors teach are overstated, a cross between naïve and self-serving. If you believe them, there are a lot of other things I would like to sell you. There are, nonetheless, tremendous concerns about the quality of what students are learning, the ‘value-added’ by colleges or universities to what students already know. With conflicts erupting over how high tuition should be in the context of universities and colleges needing more money and students (and their families) angry at costs, issues of value-added and knowledge gained are on the table. Something is happening; we just do not know exactly what the something is. Rumblings about the quality of teaching and learning began as a sidebar to the economic difficulties and caustic criticisms of higher education during the 1980s. Critics saw higher education as a poorly run industry, fiscally irresponsible and managerially inefficient, and they focused on organizational restructuring and ways to constrain expenses. In the jargon of the day, well-run organizations require efficient structures, strong leadership, and cost containment. Teach- * A prior version was co-authored with Ursula Wagener and Nichole Shumanis . high 3 to?rdelt:Whats minta 1 4/8/10 10:14 AM Page 147 ing and learning should also be measured along these lines, and when the critics looked, they discovered that college students learned too little, that professors taught very few hours per week, that students were leaving college before completing their degrees, and even when they did graduate, they were ill-equipped for the labor market. The worries about teaching and learning in the early 1980s began as afterthoughts, which grew as complaints about higher education increased. Public officials picked them up and called upon professors to teach more often and more efficiently. Officials suggested that the public had a right to see evidence that students were learning and that public accountability included educational outcomes, as well as the standard reports to accrediting agencies and to auditing and accounting firms. On campuses, conversations turned to teaching and curricular innovations. Some schools tampered with their general education offerings, revising required and elective courses; many increased the number of course offerings and developed interdisciplinary majors as ways to make learning more inviting and attractive. Greater expenditures on technology to support teaching and learning occurred. A few schools, especially in the health professions, introduced competency-based learning to test how competent students were at using their knowledge. Teaching and writing centers were established, designed to help professors and graduate students become better teachers and aid students in preparing papers. Learning communities started to become popular, especially at residential schools where faculty and students could spend more time together, but also within a few community colleges . These efforts were attempts to rebalance the conversation about what matters in higher education by adding teaching and learning to the organizational restructuring, managerial changes, and cost-cutting that was coming to dominate reform. As a consequence , how professors taught and how much students learned became part of the public dialogue over higher education. National reports by higher education organizations were one forum for stimulating interest in teaching and learning, and criticizing curricular content, teaching practices, learning outcomes, and insufficient student involvement in their learning. The rhetoric was lofty—”value-added,” “collaborative and cooperative learning,” “classroom assessment,” and “teaching as scholarship.” Studies of 148 Higher Education and the American Dream high 3 to?rdelt:Whats minta 1 4/8/10 10:14 AM Page 148 the brain helped educators to better understand cognitive processes. For one of the first times in American higher education history...