Redefining Teaching Excellence in a Strange New World

By Karin Hilgersom

One thing is clear about the start of the second decade in the new millennium in higher
education, and that is that the paradigm shift that emphasizes evidence of student learning
outcomes is complete. 2010 is the start of a decade where higher education accreditation
agencies have delivered to most colleges their “recommendations” pronouncing that
student learning outcomes best be measured by hard data. Trainings espouse the need for
“cultures of evidence” and clarity of student learning outcomes at all levels be made
public (course, program, degree), and these declarations have touched most colleges and
universities. By now, most colleges and universities have attempted to respond by
“fixing” past practice and doing what can be done to track our meandering students here,
there, and everywhere. Although I have no doubt that this work is beneficial, and has
certainly benefited the colleges where I have spent nearly all of my adult life, there are
moments when the outcomes movement takes my breath away—panic really; admiration,
not so much.

To explain my panic is also to point to the historical context of 2010—exponential

changes in technology have deep roots in our young adults who come to higher education
with expectations about knowledge, the quality of knowledge, and how it is produced.
Their perceptions and realities differ greatly compared with me at their age. It is the
juxtaposition of this digital divide and the outcomes movement in higher education that
brings me to a stricken pause. Is this crash of digital/technical reality and outcomes/
accountability an accident? Are faculty no longer in the driver seat? If faculty have lost
that spot, are they not concerned? My perception that faculty seem to lackadaisically
pondering the effects of this strange new world is disturbing, to say the least, because I
believe our nation will grow dumb and dumber because of our failure to act. Of course,
faculty are very busy working in the trees, and it is hard to find time and energy to ponder
the aerial view of the forest. I know this well, because I taught full-time for over sixteen
years. Nonetheless, my concern for my faculty colleagues deepens daily. From my view
I see faculty becoming subjects externalized from the learning process. Subjects that in
the minds of some may be rendered unnecessary elements of the learning process in the
not-so-distant future. The learning model can be boiled down to 3 components by leaders
in some states already: learner, internet, automated assessment that validates an outcome.
The “internet” element includes compressed pre-recorded video files, vocabulary and
conventions of a given discipline, and sporadic interaction—these tools already exist and
improvements will be exponential. The knowledge is there—just go and get it. And for a
relatively small percentage of our privileged and well-read population, this method works
relatively well. As for the other 90%, let’s just say, “Where are the faculty when you
need them?”
Resistance to the alignment of the digital age and of outcomes based accountability is
futile. In fact, embracing these new ways of viewing how people learn and how people
succeed career-wise is the first step to bringing the faculty role back into clear view. The
second step is the real challenge, and that is redefining who faculty are and what faculty
do in ways that not only embrace cultures of evidence in a digital age, but use these
features of our world to raise the bar for educators and their students, academically and
relationally.

College classrooms, led by faculty face-to-face or online, must emphasize synthesis.

Content coverage will be less the job of faculty and more the job of student outside of
class. College classrooms must be places where every student is recognized, deeply so,
and each learning style (weaknesses and strengths) charted by faculty. Faculty will need
to think about how each student thinks, and high interactivity with individuals will need
to happen with each and every student. This will be expensive, but worthwhile. Finally,
and perhaps this is the most radical argument made herein, higher education needs to
move from a culture where faculty are islands unto themselves to cultures where faculty
work together toward continuous quality improvement.

Collegiality needs to be redefined. Good collegiality needs to include the ability to give
and to accept constructive criticism from peers often, and this requires a strong desire to
guide one’s practice. It is so easy in higher education, once tenured, to rest upon one’s
laurels, to rely on tired pedagogies that have no place in the context of 2010. Easier still,
is the practice of keeping daily discussions of pedagogies with colleagues to a minimum,
and in some departments, these discussions are nonexistent. Could it be that the
protective and professional isolation enjoyed by the majority of tenured faculty is
responsible for the externalization of faculty in the learning process that I see percolating
in 2010? Students for the most part, will claim satisfaction with most of their professors,
but if they are the raw material that faculty are attempting to “shape” how can they know
what they are missing? Well intended administrators have few tools at their disposal to
“manage” the “average” tenured faculty member, and perhaps this explains movements to
eradicate tenure altogether (Florida state) or the growing reliance on part-time and full-
time non-tenured faculty. Don’t get me wrong, I support tenure, but I also support
significantly improving undergraduate education and from my administrative perspective
there are times when the tension between the two is so great, and the reliance on one’s
tenure rights so infectious and bombastic, that change for the better is painfully slow.

Truth is, faculty peers are in the best position to bring about the change that is needed.
Working together we can return faculty to the place where we need to be—the leader of
the learning process. And yet the reluctance to speak honestly with faculty colleagues
about obviously poor teaching methods, is powerful. In addition to cultures of evidence,
higher education needs to foster cultures of courageous collaborations. We need to feel
free to poke our noses in our colleagues business, not because we necessarily want to, but
because we want our students to get the very best education that we can collectively
provide. Aren’t two or three well educated heads better then one in this regard? Some
departments have done this, Nursing departments come to mind—so does life and death
—perhaps the reason why most nursing faculty take educational excellence so seriously.
Peers should freely and frequently discuss improvements, visit one another’s classes and
offer suggestions, share the rumors of bad teaching that we hear from pockets of students,
use anonymous digital tools to improve the work of teaching and learning. In other
words, the less we use our colleagues to improve what we do, the more we endanger the
higher education teaching profession. When we allow ourselves to be outdone by “U-
tube,” and by standardized for profit testing, we feed the decline of higher education in
general, and we fail miserably at doing what we proclaim to do best—teaching and
learning. What was that adage by Hilary Clinton, “it takes a village to raise a child?” It
takes a department to raise a student, collegial intrusion needs to be acceptable, and I’m
not talking official evaluation here, I’m talking about honest, dialectical conversations
that help good colleagues/friends hear what they need to hear, for the expressed purpose
of guiding teaching practice into the future.

This is truly a strange new world for those of us born in the age of black and white
television sets. Using our ability to think with the best of them (something college level
educators presume), and to think about shedding traditions that only cause our collective
decline, will be the key to leading this country through renewed processes of how we
practice the art and craft of higher education.