Last September, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by senior writer Beth McMurtrie titled “Americans Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?” The subtitle was telling: “The evidence doesn’t look good.” In the article, McMurtrie explores a number of signs that colleges and universities don’t really value good teaching. Most college professors, she writes, don’t receive much training in teaching during grad school or on the job. The instructional work force is dominated by contingent instructors with heavy teaching loads and little support. Teaching is valued in word, but not in deed, with research counting more during promotion and tenure reviews for faculty. And even when those reviews value teaching, they lack meaningful methods to evaluate teaching, relying instead on problematic student evaluations.
That’s a hefty set of challenges, but it’s also something of a roadmap for colleges and universities who want to take their teaching missions seriously. How can we better prepare and support faculty for what is, in most cases, their primary professional responsibility? How can we improve the labor conditions within higher education so that instructors have the time and resources to teach well? And how can we improve the evaluation of teaching in ways that promote good teaching? I’ve been fascinated by McMurtrie’s roadmap since it came out, and I’m going to spend some time exploring that roadmap on the Intentional Teaching podcast in 2024.
In this week's episode, I dig into that last question: How can we improve the evaluation of teaching? Researcher Corbin Campbell was quoted in a Chronicle article recently, saying, “Folks will say quality teaching is hard to measure. Quality research is hard to measure, but we do it.” I’m excited to bring a conversation with two academics who are contributing to efforts on their campuses to assess and evaluate teaching in more meaningful ways.
Beate Brunow is the associate director at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching at Penn State, and Shawn Simonson is a professor of kinesiology at Boise State University. Both have been involved in the development of new frameworks for defining effective teaching, and both are using those frameworks to change how teaching is evaluated at their institutions.
My conversation with Beate and Shawn covers a lot of ground, from the problems with relying on student feedback alone to the challenge of implementing meaningful peer review of teaching to the organizational change necessary to improve our teaching assessment processes. If you care about teaching and learning in higher ed, I think you'll find the conversation interesting. You can listen to the newest episode of Intentional Teaching here (or read the transcript!), or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.
I'm involved in two conferences in 2024 that readers of this newsletter might find interesting.
Inspired by a couple of slowreads shared with me by friends, I'm hosting a slow read of my 2019 book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching this winter! The idea is to take a couple of months to read and discuss Intentional Tech with a virtual book group of interested colleagues. Here's how this will work:
There are, of course, lots of ways to read Intentional Tech. You can order a paperback copy through Amazon and other retailers, you might have electronic access through your institutional library, and my Patreon supporters can get a code for 20% off the book when ordering through my publisher West Virginia University Press.
A lot has changed in the educational technology landscape since Intentional Tech came out in 2019, and I'm excited to explore that changing landscape with y'all through this slow read! And we'll have it all finished the week of March 4th, which is right before my spring break and maybe yours, too.
If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague who might like it! That's one of the best ways you can support the work I'm doing here at Intentional Teaching.
Welcome to the Intentional Teaching newsletter! I'm Derek Bruff, educator and author. The name of this newsletter is a reminder that we should be intentional in how we teach, but also in how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this newsletter will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.
On the Sensibility of Cognitive Outsourcing You may have seen a headline or two about that new MIT Media Lab study "Your Brain on ChatGPT." This is the study in which more than 50 participants wrote SAT essays either with ChatGPT or with Google search (but no AI assistance) or with just their brains. The researchers took electroencephalography (EEG) measures of the participants and concluded that the ChatGPT cohort didn't have the same brain connectivity seen in the other two groups. The...
Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy We're back with another "Take It or Leave It" panel on the podcast this week. I know it's only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there's a lot happening in U.S. higher ed right now, and I find these panels helpful for making sense of it all. Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions...
Teaching with AI Agents: A Conversation about Cogniti I think the first custom AI chatbot I tried was one called “Are You a Witch?” designed by past podcast guest Marc Watkins. This chatbot would answer your questions like ChatGPT, but unlike ChatGPT it would only do so after accusing you of witchcraft (in the most caricatured way possible) and making you solve a riddle. That chatbot was kind of silly, but I soon heard about faculty and other instructors building chatbots to do all kinds of...