Derek Bok & the Path to Changing Faculty Teaching Practices

Last night Liam and I attended a talk by Derek Bok, Harvard's president emeritus, hosted by the Spencer Foundation at the meetings of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver.  Due to a lack of Wifi and data service, I couldn't tweet the speech, which was probably good because we both got a little worked up. Here's a bit about why.

Bok is a thoughtful, experienced leader in higher education and I have long appreciated his efforts to get colleges and universities to pay attention to undergraduate education.  He's written a book on the topic, and found a set of Bok Centers on many campuses to try and get faculty involved (unfortunately, as he admitted last night, engagement in the centers is often low).

The main thrust of his speech was that professors need to get focused on rigorously improving undergraduate education because policy changes are bringing a reform agenda focused on student outcomes, and we'd best get prepared. We ought to do this, he suggested, by acting as the good researchers we are and attending to and creating new research on what works to improve student learning and graduation rates. We ignore those studies at our peril, he said, instead going about our teaching in un-informed ways -- lecturing, failing to use technology, failing to conduct formative assessments etc-- and it's partly because there's a dearth of good research on quality teaching in undergraduate education. It's time to wake up and embrace our role in the problems we "know" exist-- a lack of learning in higher education, students who don't study, and falling graduation rates.

His contentions were on the one hand laudable -- I'm always a fan of people who push the comfortable elite to wake up-- and on the other hand deeply problematic.

First, Bok spoke about the faculty as if we are a homogeneous bunch.  Only once did he mention adjuncts, and it was when he said they were the workforce of for-profits, which are organizations that do pay attention to pedagogy, according to him.  So my open question to him, and the first question asked after his talk was "It is increasingly the case that we research types are not 'the faculty' -- the faculty are the enormous number of part-time, contingent, and adjunct workers used by administrations to teach for cheap.  What are the implications of your argument for them-- and what are the implications for tenure?"   I don't think Bok really understood my question since he respond simply that they 'they' needed to care about good teaching too. (He also made some statements about the potential that the use of adjuncts reduces graduation rates and promotes grade inflation--things that I have commentary on but will take up another day.)

Well, part-time, contingent, and adjunct faculty do care about teaching practices -- and they are arguably more experienced than those of us who teach a few times a year.  They also know quite a bit about technology and contemporary teaching practices.  But the big difference between "us" and "them" is tenure, status, and pay. They teach very frequently with little job security, no perks like offices to meet with students, and for very little money.  They are not segregated to for-profits as Bok suggested, but are employed nationwide in all types of colleges and universities.  And they are the workers whom the accountability movement will hit first, hit hardest, and undoubtedly change forever.  

When it does, "our" response will have everything to do with tenure.  And it will have everything to do with the future of tenure.  If those without tenure respond in ways policymakers "like," then you can be sure that tenure will be deemed the obstacle to student success -- just as it has in k-12 education -- and will be under steady attack.  We tenured professors will be pitted against our students in a classic "who cares most about student achievement" false dichotomy, and that is the situation we must prepare for-- and work to avoid.  That is what I'd hoped Bok would address.

A few other thoughts.  I'm tired of the movement to improve undergraduate outcomes being led by people at institutions where everyone finishes college and money appears to grow on trees.  I'm not saying people at those schools don't care about these issues, but most  speak in ways that suggest they are out-of-touch with the 99.9% of the rest of us.  (There are big exceptions to this rule-- Bridget Terry Long is one.)   One could make the case that Harvard got us into this mess -- leading the arms race, raising the costs of attendance like it was going out of style, and setting up an idealized standard in the public imagination that could never be realistically achieved.  The more public higher education tries to be like Harvard in any way, the more our doors close rather than open-- leaving the vast majority of students outside in the cold, just waiting to be devoured by the for-profits.  Again, I'm so happy people at elite places care about these issues, but I wish that they would (at minimum) partner with people in settings where the real problems actually exist.  And I think that wonderful foundations like Spencer should elevate the stature and share the work of people whose research struggles in focused, daily ways with the reality of students dropping out of college and faculty working over-time and under financial constraints to serve them.

I also fervently hope that leaders like Bok will stop repeating shaky empirical research findings that cast undergraduates as fundamentally lazy and underachieving.  Throughout his talk, Bok showed a recognition of the importance of rigorous research in establishing cause and effect.  Yet he gave great credence to studies of student time use that have enormous problems with measurement error, failed to recognize the role of technology in changing both study and leisure time, and again imposed a homogeneity assumption on undergraduates.   Ask yourself, what if undergraduates were mainly a hard-working bunch, with a strong desire to learn -- wouldn't you still want to work harder to teach them well? Why do we feel we must establish a crisis by saying they are unengaged partiers, playing more and doing less?

Finally, I take issue with a point Bok ended with -- the challenge of measuring learning outcomes in higher education. When asked whether he agreed that some goals of higher education are more difficult to measure than others, he responded that that's "mainly because people haven't thought through the issues of measurement enough and aren't clear enough on what those goals entail."   While I agree there is too much hand-waving at broad goals, and we often aren't specific enough about what we want students to actually learn, I disagree that everything is quantifiable and readily assessed.   College today is a place where life begins to come together for students-- and that happens alongside textbook learning and is a key piece of faculty work.  Those successes should be recognized and we deserve credit for them.  But they will not be easily measured.

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Politics, As Usual

The recent decision by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to hold a news conference condemning Arizona's new immigration law was somewhat unpredictable, and according to at least a few observers, unwise. For example, Rick Hess told the Chronicle of Higher Education it wasn't "smart politics" to "baldly politicize the role of research." The Chronicle's editors fanned the flames further by titling its article, "Education-research group puts itself on the border of advocacy."

Oh, the horror--research and advocacy meeting, having coffee, perhaps even deciding to date. The children which could result are feared by PhDs everywhere, particularly those evil twins: Compromised Objectivity and Biased Conclusions.

Of course academia trains us to think, like Hess, that research is worthy only when fully divorced from politics. Our research questions should be derived from theory, stemming only from the reading of great books and dusty journals, and never from a desire to enter policy or social debates. Puhleese. Every research question is inherently political--we conceive and ask questions the way we do because we have a desire to know something. Knowledge is socially, and therefore politically, constructed.

I'm the first to admit that AERA is a deeply flawed organization, but aren't they all (Hess's included)? I think honesty and transparency are among the best qualities, and would much rather AERA's leaders and members take visible positions on issues they care about rather than pretend not to have opinions. Research lacks an agenda only in the most naïve of imaginations. But agendas lack research all-too-frequently. If AERA begins to use its members' work to create a research-backed agenda, that can only be a good thing.

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Effective Dissemination or Shameless Self-Promotion?

On Friday and Saturday I participated in an AERA/Hechinger Institute workshop for early career education researchers, designed to help us "learn the ropes" about disseminating and translating our work effectively. Bluntly-- I signed up for this thing because of my multiple forays into a world of blogging/Facebooking/Twitter and other forms of media interactions that have made me acutely aware of my communication limitations (e.g. how poorly I write sometimes, and how often I can't quickly convey what I really mean--see prior sentence as case in point). What I didn't sign up to do was to learn how to build my own reputation. (Sadly, the surprise among some readers is palpable...)

But I worried about this throughout the workshop. Getting quoted in the paper frequently can have unintended consequences, including making others think you want it to be all about you. This is probably especially true if anyone realizes that professors often have to reach out to the media in order to gain their attention-- despite reporters' stated interest in such efforts, they come across as too-eager-beaver. So why do this kind of workshop at all? Isn't it way too risky, putting myself out there like this?? In trying to think it over, I ventured back to what Deborah Lowenberg Ball said Saturday morning to our group, and to the cadre of folks attending Wednesday's Spencer reception as well. In a nutshell, she argued the following:

1. We need to become disciplined and effective communicators of education research. Right now, those in academia who speak out tend to sound like advocates, or border on unconfident or unclear about what we do and don't know works in education. Both contribute to a less-than-positive rep for Ed Schools.

2. If we don't take this on, others will- in fact they already are. Evaluation firms are a good example. They know how to talk about education but are rarely specialized experts in education. This does not mean they can't raise the big questions or go after answers, but it does mean that more often than not they miss many of the phenomena and problems particular to this social institution; simply because they spend less time with it.

3. Outreach is part of the university mission as a "public agent of education." If we in the academia refuse to engage in the struggle to share our expertise, we essentially cut off the world from what we actually do know about how to better educate kids.

So in sum-- after a long hard week at AERA, some of us spent time learning the ropes at Hechinger, figuring out how to speak to and with the media, policymakers, and practitioners not so we can enjoy seeing our names in print more often, but so that we can really strive to do our jobs. Those jobs include disciplined and effective outreach, and we'd fail if we didn't work at it.

The next time you see my name in print, I really hope you understand (a bit better anyway) my motivations. I thank Deborah for giving me, and so many others, a way to think through them.

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Media Coverage of Conference Papers

The edublogosphere is rife with coverage of AERA papers right now. So is the edu-print media.

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Remember, many academics treat the conference paper as a first, or maybe second draft. It's a chance to try out ideas in front of colleagues, not necessarily to present polished or even slightly polished work.

But when journalists write about conference papers, they often make it sound like these are vetted pieces of work. They're not. It's premature to draw conclusions from them, or make recommendations.

So here's my suggestion, particularly for the online media-- devote a column or section to "work in progress" and cover conference presentations there. That way your readers will be appropriately warned.

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