What Ails College Teaching? November 18, 2008 By Peter Wood The Penn State Economics Department has seized one of the basic principles of Adam Smith—the advantages provided by a division of labor—and brought them to the classroom. Smith famously cited the manufacture of pins, in which one set of laborers produced the long pointy parts while another manufactured the pinheads. A successful pin required both, which calls into question the doormat that Fox’s Bill O’Reilly is hawking these days, emblazoned with the motto, “No Pinheads.” Hey Bill, pins without pinheads are just plain old needles. But I digress. The Penn State Economics Department version of the pinpoint/pinhead division of labor is to separate the bulk of teaching responsibilities from the tenured faculty. Instead, the students who sign up for the courses in macro and microeconomics take courses taught by “teaching specialists.” The teaching specialists have advanced degrees in economics but they are employed solely to teach large lecture courses—frequently addressing auditoria of 600 or 700 students. They are not expected to pursue research in economics, or to publish. Moreover, the division of labor doesn’t stop there. The teaching specialists are supported by a phalanx of undergraduate workers and graduate teaching assistants, who, in the words of one of the teaching specialists, form “a small army” to “assist with exam proctoring, homework collection, grading, in-class quizzes, and more.” A “Supplemental Instruction Leader” takes notes and holds review sessions. And another teaching assistant is “solely dedicated to coordinating group projects. An Alternative to Settled Mediocrity? The teaching specialist I am quoting is G. Dirk Mateer, whom I met at a conference last week put on by the libertarian-leaning John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in North Carolina. The session in which Mateer spoke addressed “Incentives for Excellence in Teaching,” which is to say that it dealt with one of the basic paradoxes in higher education: that a system ostensibly aimed at teaching the next generation of students tends to perform the task indifferently. There is a settled mediocrity in American college teaching, surpassed here and there by talented and energetic individuals, but seldom disturbed in its languorous self-satisfaction. On most campuses, mediocrity can rightly pride itself on being a whole lot better than the conspicuous dreadfulness of a handful of professors who dedicate themselves variously to the nine muses of bad teaching: Boredom, Mumbling, Disorganization, Confusion, Forgetfulness, Stridency, PowerPoint, Textbook, and Vacuity. The reasons why American colleges and universities founder at their most basic task are numerous. Faculty members are generally trained as graduate students to be subject specialists, not teachers. If they are so fortunate as to win a tenure-track academic appointment, their future depends far more on scholarly achievement than on success in the classroom. Scholarly success is a fairly visible thing—articles and books are peer-reviewed—but teaching is seldom subject to close evaluation by experts. Success (and failure) in the classroom are more rumored than seen. Many universities rely on student evaluations of teaching, which are typically a very poor diagnostic—although they do seem to register the particularly egregious cases. If a university does get serious about evaluating teachers, it is faced with the problems of setting standards across a wide variety of subjects, styles, and approaches. The challenges are not insurmountable, but they can be formidable. The university needs a rubric of evaluation flexible enough to illuminate both the giant introductory lecture course and the advanced seminar with a dozen students around the table; to comprehend the excellence of a chemistry professor’s chalk talk as well as a law professor’s Socratic questioning; and to weigh the professor’s performance in individual classes with his success in the course in providing students with something that will endure.Adding to these difficulties are the social dynamics of most colleges and universities. Very few faculty members are willing to intrude on each other’s classes by asking to sit in as observers. It is not uncommon for a faculty member to teach for years on end without having a single visitor. Tenure and promotion committees typically are more comfortable poring over student evaluations than they are in sending their members out to see firsthand how well a candidate teaches. In light of the numerous obstacles, colleges typically make half-hearted attempts to foster good instruction. Most employ some system of student course evaluations (usually at the end of the semester) and most present awards to acclaimed teachers (usually based on student nominations). Some colleges also offer programs for instructors who come forward asking for assistance to improve their classroom techniques. Some colleges in recent years have also adopted curricular reforms that are motivated in part by a desire to improve teaching. The return to core curricula, for example, puts a spotlight on the capacity of professors to demonstrate their command of canonical books that are often outside their specializations. In the opposite direction, the creation of freshmen seminars taught by senior faculty members summons their ability to teach material within their specializations to students who know little of the subject and who often come equipped with strongly-held misconceptions. Each of these steps has some value but they clearly have not added up to a broad-based emphasis on good teaching in higher education. We can contemplate this failure in several ways. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings thought that some regime of “outcomes assessment” would move higher education to take a more serious attitude towards ensuring that college students learn something useful to the marketplace. Her proposals never really took flight—for which there is much to be thankful. A strict system of outcomes assessment might indeed ensure that students master a certain kind of cut-and-dried content, but it would do little to restore the liberal arts teaching that has languished in the last few decades. And that brings us back to the Penn State experiment. The Penn State Economics Department, applying ruthless economic logic, diagnosed