{"id":290531,"date":"2018-12-18T06:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T20:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=290531"},"modified":"2018-12-18T06:00:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-17T20:00:54","slug":"teaching-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/teaching-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching first"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s Note: Originally published on Nov. 30, 2015. As we begin this season of reflection, \u201cTeaching First\u201d is worthy of another look as we focus on the first purpose of the university and the importance of staying true to our roots.<\/em><\/p>\n

Forward focus is essential.\u00a0Over the past four decades, many faculty and university leaders have begun to believe that\u00a0research and scholarly activity\u00a0are more important than teaching.\u00a0Graduate assistants, adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty may be excellent teachers, but they have a tenuous relationship to the institution by definition, and are paid like janitors, and in the best instances, plumbers. Tolerating this equates teaching to caring for dirty floors or fixing leaking pipes. This is not a diminishment of the janitor or plumbers who know their craft.\u00a0Instead, it\u2019s a failing of leaders and faculty who don\u2019t.\u00a0And universities struggle.<\/p>\n

For example, weak-kneed science abounds at too many universities, even purportedly good ones. The pressure to publish and its seemingly invincible measurability drives faculty to publish junk.\u00a0Academic conferences\u00a0with peer-reviewed (other scientists affirm the work\u2019s value) proceedings, Web-based journals with battalions of \u201cpeer\u201d reviewers, and willing faculty in the chase for tenure put out junk. I wish there was a better word for it. It is so pervasive that university leadership won\u2019t call it what it is for fear of upsetting the apple cart, or, equally disturbing, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Something is broken, and the basis of science, the idea of being able to replicate the finding of an experiment as reported, is in question.\u00a0John Loannidis, a medical professor at Stanford University,\u00a0makes the point\u00a0adamantly,\u00a0\u201c\u2026false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.\u201d\u00a0Way too much of what is published is junk.<\/p>\n

As a faculty member and university leader, I have participated in the perpetuation of weak scholarship for its superficial clarity in professorial evaluation at the expense of\u00a0measuring good teaching\u00a0because it is purportedly too difficult to measure. Yet we all know excellent teaching when we see it, and worse yet, we hold our noses and turn our heads winking-and-nodding as miserable teaching is passed off as something other than what it is: junk. The system is difficult to buck. The crime is simply understood: it is easier to assuage tenure protected poor teachers with the myth that even poor scholarship has more value when published than the negative impact of poor teaching.\u00a0Absolutely wrong. The\u00a0best research universities\u00a0are frequently recognized for excellence in teaching.\u00a0Quality follows\u00a0quality\u00a0and effective universities demand it in every aspect of work.<\/p>\n

The peer review process is blind. Unknown (blind) reviewers ostensibly weeding out bias, professional jealousy, favoritism and cronyism review the scholar\u2019s work. These\u00a0same principles\u00a0should be applied to teaching. When students subjected to weak-kneed teaching are willing to say so through teaching feedback instruments, and do so semester after semester, their concerns should be attended to with forcefulness akin to the gospel-like accolades of blind peer review. Instead, universities are often dismissive of consistently poor teaching evaluations, with the admonition that \u201cstudents\u201d are not fit to judge.\u00a0The result is predictable:\u00a0Junk science is heralded as valuable scholarly activity.\u00a0Junk teaching is ignored: Students don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n

A faculty member once came to see me regarding her teaching evaluations.\u00a0She was ecstatic about her \u201cmarks,\u201d and felt that this response from students was ironclad evidence of teaching excellence. The next semester she posted a significantly lower assessment of teaching prowess from her students. Her response?\u00a0Students \u201cwere just students\u201d and could not be counted upon to rightly judge her ability to teach. I said, \u201cJane (not her real name), how can the students go from experts to morons in less than 12 months?\u00a0You can\u2019t have it both ways.\u201d\u00a0Upon reflection, she concurred that her view of the students\u2019 ability to \u201cgrade\u201d her teaching was biased by the kind of grade she \u201cearned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Additionally, the focus on the value of scholarship is its impact on student learning\u2014teaching first\u2014and nothing else. Every proposal for a sabbatical, or request for university support for research, should require a\u00a0pedagogical impact report\u00a0estimating the influence of the intellectual work on teaching. <\/p>\n

Such interdependency is the mark of a great university.\u00a0Too many universities, worry about too much that has too little to do with excellent teaching. <\/p>\n

Predictably, they struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s Note: Originally published on Nov. 30, 2015. As we begin this season of reflection,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}