I don’t really want to the chest-beating and grunting silverback in my department so I turn to my CM colleagues for their insight and opinions. Increasingly I feel pressure from my department, my college, and recently instituted offices in the administration charged with “enrollment management” that want to dictate how and what I teach and—for me most importantly—how I “grade” my students. Most of this pressure it seems comes from “assessment” policies.
Am I wrong in thinking that it doesn’t seem right that: 1., officials who have never taught want to require me to follow a “standard” syllabus,” one that all sections of a course MUST have? 2., that my colleagues who have never taught my courses want to prescribe in the name of assessment, “learning goals,” and accreditation how many exams my students MUST take and how many pages my students MUST write?
Q: Has college changed so fundamentally that I need to be resigned that I’m no longer an instructor but an employee? Is that even a question where you are?
Well, remember that Socrates got into trouble when he started accepting gold for teaching. And look how he ended up. We have an Incompetent Dean of Students (a former economist with no knowledge of science) who wants us to "redesign" our introductory courses on physics for engineers, and for pre-meds, because we flunk more students than he likes. It doesn't occur to him that he'll need to drive over bridges designed by these students, and get his prostate operated on by one. In your case, though, I must observe, jeez, the edu-jargon is thick!
ReplyDeleteQ: Has college changed so fundamentally that I need to be resigned that I’m no longer an instructor but an employee? Is that even a question where you are?
ReplyDeleteI think that there's a difference between trying to come up with guidelines for syllabi and with telling professors how they should grade.
I was on a committee to determine how many papers freshman students should write in freshman comp, and what the default book should be. I don't have a problem with a committee made up of English professors saying "there must be a minimum of x papers of x words each" and "we are going to use the x textbook in freshman comp". There's still a lot of leeway there. I can assign a supplemental text, come up with a course "theme," whatever. In this committee's case it was made up of the people that teach comp most in my department, and silverback or not (I guess I am), that includes me. Being a teacher that teaches a huge amount of comp also entitles me, in my department, to carry more of the decision-making weight regarding comp. One person in my department who is senior to me but hasn't taught comp for years, wanted something done differently. We ignored him.
I don't see where administrators get off telling the profs what they're supposed to do, so long as I'm teaching composition and not trying to teach them biology.
And you can fight the power with regard to grade "demands" from above. Part of that involves faculty unity, especially top-down. The more I make my students work, the more students I drive out and fail for their ineptitude, the easier it is for my untenured colleagues to do so.
Bad teaching evals, if they are related to grades, need to be finessed by the people in charge, and blunted with eloquent personal evaluations of the prof in question, with information gleaned from class visits and perusal of syllabi and graded papers.
I am actually more likely to be critical of a tenure candidate that seems to be giving candy grades. I don't care if their evaluations are great because they are nice and "understanding," because those same students then expect the same of me, and I don't play that shit.
As for what's going on where I am, I get paid shit, I drive out more students than I keep, and nobody says boo to me about it. My upper-divisions don't make part of the time but that's the price I pay for being a mean old bitch.
This is one of the top three reasons I am leaving the academy. For some reason, uniformity as such is considered good and needs little further justification. The justification is facilitating control, management, measurability, etc. - but it does violence to what makes a good class. College classes are now just a particular mechanism in the machine that changes money into degrees. We are cogs in that machine and things work best if we are identical and interchangeable.
ReplyDeleteWe just went though a process to ensure that our survey-level classes can continue to fulfill core class distribution requirements: the board that oversees it demands an 'assessment means' for each (sigh) 'learning outcome goal' or somesuch jargon. 'But that's why we have these exams and written assignments, to assess student learning...' No, those won't do-- they want some additional pre- and post-test grafted on to demonstrate what our gradebooks (and grades, duh) already demonstrate. Such rubbish.
ReplyDeleteSlave just summed it up for those universities that are standardizing the hell out of everything:
ReplyDelete"We are cogs in that machine and things work best if we are identical and interchangeable."
And that takes things in a very depressing direction. The best courses I took as an undergrad were the ones where the instructor could get stoked about the topics. The best courses I've taught are the ones where I can get stoked about the topics.
I understand the need to set a handful of "learning outcomes" for the sake of having lower level courses lead smoothly into upper level courses, but they're hiring people with PhDs who know the damn literature and who have contributed a thing or two to the field. That the MBAs and consultants be given license to screw with that in the name of recruiting and retention is an insult to those who teach/research in that area, and in the end the students get a mediocre package rather than an opportunity to delve into something (of course, it is up to the student how much they get out of the course, but that's neither here nor there...see yesterday's thing on the unteachables)
We have no problem with college classes being taught by new faculty who have no training to teach, no background in education (other than as a student) and no experience writing a syllabus. We say to the faculty member, "You'll learn the ropes" and to the students, "That's just the luck of the draw that you enrolled in a class taught by a newbie."
ReplyDeleteStandardization replaces the mentoring that rarely takes place at large schools. It ensures that students will finish the course having been exposed to the same material, allowing them to be ready for the next course in the sequence.
Yes, it makes it harder to inspire kids to stand on their chairs and say "Oh Captain, My Captain" to you. It also prevents colleagues from making the course too easy, either because they don't care or they want higher teaching evaluations.
I don't have any problem with administrators asking me, "What do you want students to learn in this course? How will you know if you met those goals?" If I can't explain it to them, then what the hell am I really doing here?
I'm actually somewhat jealous of those of you who teach at places where there is some attempt at standardization across course sections.
ReplyDeleteI taught (as a TA) for several years with one professor who had decided to totally redesign her section of what was supposed to be the introductory survey course in the Birdwatching department. Out went the intro-to-birdwatching textbook, and in came this professor's self-written, self-published, new-approach-to-the-discipline textbook. Which omitted about three-quarters of the subject matter typically included in the survey course. And which happened to be based on the 'fundamentals' of birdwatching that this professor acquired during her own education almost a half-century ago, when completely different (and long discarded) models of birdwatching were utilized. Oh, and the professor also required the students to do much more work than those in any other section of the course at this institution.
The students were chronically scared and panicked, as were the TAs to whom said students turned, as the professor merely supplemented her textbook with rambling lectures that did not relate to the course material. I would have been grateful had the department decided to stage some sort of intervention, but, you know, large department, senior professor with tenure . . .
Like Stella, I'm comfortable with page counts, which have been a central part of every composition/writing intensive class I've ever taught, and, in my experience, allow for a lot of flexibility in the application/interpretation. I've also taught on occasion with common textbooks, and like that much less, partly because my approach to the course is a bit unusual (which, yes, may be a problem). And I'd definitely rebel at a common syllabus (that might be my breaking point), though I can also see the value for a large intro course taught in many sections.
ReplyDeleteI'm ambivalent about the trend toward more assessment. At its best, I think it might be a useful opportunity to define what we want our students to learn (which I, like Ben, think is a reasonable and useful activity), while still allowing a lot of flexibility for individual teachers to try out different ways of meeting the common goal (perhaps measured by a common final instrument/project of some sort). But that requires a good assessment instrument, and an appropriate assessment process (preferably the people who teach the sections of the class getting together to evaluate each others' students without knowledge of whose students they are), and regular conversations about and adjustments to the process by the participants. In short, it needs to be a bottom-up, collaborative, labor-intensive, ongoing process, very much like the traditional process of creating and reassessing curricula in colleges and universities, which is very closely tied to tenure-based, faculty governance structures in which the majority of faculty do service. That's going to be hard to implement in institutions where most large intro courses -- the ones that are most in need of assessment -- are taught by contingent faculty. Given that reality, what I fear we'll actually get is top-down mumbo-jumbo "standards" that don't really measure anything, but can be interpreted by administrators in whatever way suits their purposes at the moment, and play the proverbial role of the tail that wags the dog.
What is fascinating me is that the courses I design online are becoming much more rigorous than the in-class shells I teach, where passive lecture and 25 minutes of reading are considered a fulfillment of the "9 hours of work per week" that a 3 credit class is supposed to require.
ReplyDeleteWe're facing the "standard syllabus" question right now. Some dept. members don't want us to even discuss it, but I like the idea of a syllabus template, especially since it should help adjuncts throw together a reasonable syllabus quickly.
ReplyDeleteThe template would be flexible, but it's not unreasonable to require all syllabi to include professor contact info, a statement about ADA accommodations with the phone number of the relevant office, a cheating policy, a breakdown of the grades (x% essays, x% quizzes, x% exams), and a rough calendar or list of deadlines for assignments and tests. Students appreciate these, and it's surprising how many proffies leave them out.
As for common learning goals and topics in each section, I'm with Beaker Ben, Contingent Cassandra, and CouldBeBetter. Whichever instructor a student gets for an intro course, the student should be assured of a solid intro to the central concepts of the discipline, and a meaningful grade. As decided within the department.
But sometimes it would help to have a little pressure from above. A tenured member of my discipline, senior to me, shows films almost every week (often telling students that he/she "doesn't feel like teaching"); lets classes out early consistently; seems unaware of cheating problems (perhaps because of hiring former students to grade tests); and often gets so far behind that students don't get classroom time on the final 1/4 of the topics until the last week of term.
I'd appreciate some top-down standards about sticking to a schedule and not phoning it in. It seems only fair to students.
We have to some up with a mission statement now. We already did the learning goals and outcomes and figured out how to assess this crap. But now we need a mission statement. WTF? Have any of you needed to do this?
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