Essays onTeaching Excellence Toward the Best in the Academy A publication of The Professional &Organizational Development Network in Higher Education. The posting and use ofthis publication on your institution's WWW server is covered by an End UserLicense Agreement (EULA). By the terms of this agreement, the essay must belocated on a secure server that limits access to your institution's students,faculty, or staff. Use beyond your institutional boundaries, including thelinking of this page to any site other than this one, requires the expresspermission of the POD Network. To view the terms of the End User LicenseAgreement, click here. Why Professors Don't Change Loren Ekroth, University ofHawaii at Manoa Today's professors are challenged to teach a student population increasingly diverse in age, levels of academic preparation, styles of learning, and cultural background. Professors are now expected not only to "cover the material," but also to help students to think critically, write skillfully, and speak competently. To address the increased demands of evolving circumstances would seem to require changes on the part of college teachers. Yet many appear not to change in how they think about and approach their teaching. Organizational systems tend to resist change, and academic systems areno exception. Clark Kerr commented on the essentially conservative nature of colleges and universities: "About eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and seventy universities. Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways." (Kerr, 1982). Barrier #1: The Stability of the Situation A principal reason why faculty don't change their approaches to teaching is that the professional situations in which they work tend to be stable. For example, the physical settings and seating arrangements in which teaching takes place (some called "lecture halls"), the time schedules within which courses are structured, the institutional procedures for making curricular decisions, and the reward systems for instructional performance constitute guardians of tradition and barriers against change. A key stabilizing factor in the professorial situation is the academic discipline within which college teachers have been socialized. By the time faculty enter the professoriate, they have undergone an extensive and largely consistent "apprenticeship of observation" of what teaching in their discipline is supposed to be. In fact, Joan Stark and Malcolm Lowther of NCRIPTAL concluded from their recent study that the specific academic disciplines are the strongest influence on how faculty plan courses of instruction. It appears that there will be more similaritybetween, for example, chemistry professors at quite diverse institutions (such as community colleges and research universities) than between chemistry professors and literature or history professors at their own institutions (Stark, 1988). Barrier #2: The Self-definition of Professors What does it mean to be a professor in one's special field? The way faculty answer this question will have a determining effect on how they behave in the teaching situation. For example, do they define themselves principally as" transmitters of an organized body of knowledge"? Or perhaps as" facilitators and managers of student learning"? In the course of becoming teachers, academics acquire a definition of their professional selves. As Bakker (1975) says, "It is not too surprising that people like to apply definitions to themselves and to their fellow men, or that once established they try to keep them the same. After all, if people are to play a role relative to each other they need to know how they can predict the other's responses. Barrier #3: The Feedback Circle in the Classroom The college teacher steps into a teaching situation for which participants are prepared by years of observation and socialization. In all likelihood, the classroom or laboratory situation will confirm the professor's definition of what it means to be a teacher, and the way students act in relation to this teacher will exercise a powerful regulatory function on the teacher's behavior. For example, with rare exceptions, the teacher will control the channels of communication in the classroom. Students come to expect this behavior and may appear uncomfortable if a professor changes. Barrier #4: Discomfort and Anxiety Whenever professors take instructional detours from the familiar and expected, they risk encountering some awkwardness or anxiety. Like cyclists on wobbly wheels, they will understandably feel uneasy when trying the new, different, or unfamiliar. "Can I carry this off?" "How will the students react?" "What will my colleagues think?" are questions that may arise at the boundary of their emotional comfort zone. When professors stick to the "tried and true" methods within the traditions of their disciplines, such uncomfortable questions are likely to be much less frequent. One's familiar methods are, as Kenneth Eble observed, "as persistent as the bad habits of our youth." One of the habitual behaviors Eble noted was the tendency of professors "to be guided in techniques and practices by the routes of least resistance: to favor the lecture, to shun innovations and adjuncts to instruction, to reduce teaching chiefly to class preparation and delivery on as few hours a week as possible and at the most convenient times." (Eble, 1980). Behavior that is familiar feels comfortable, and what feels comfortable resists change. Barrier #5: One's Most Enchanted Listener The most traditional and revered form of teaching is the lecture. This form serves many functions, not least of which is that of establishing the professor as an expert, as one who knows. When professors "cover the material" by lecturing, they have an opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the subject and to explore in public some of the most interesting intellectual issuesthat attracted them to their fields. They get to wonder aloud. As they listen to