I want to get back to the topic of teaching and self-confidence. In yesterday’s post, I cited an article that claimed that 94% of University of Nebraska faculty considered themselves to be “better than average” teachers when compared to their colleagues. If the word “average” is to have any meaning at all, somethin’ must be wrong with their self-assessment. Even if the best teachers in the world are all to be found in Lincoln, it’s still more or less impossible for 94% to be “above average.”
In the comments, Sally writes
That’s really interesting, because I have a friend who does teaching evaluations at her university, and she says that grad student teachers consistently underestimate how good they are. She says that grad students will claim to be utter disasters in the classroom, and then when she comes and observes their teaching, they’re perfectly fine, if not particularly exceptional. I wonder if something changes between the grad student and professor levels?
Well, I know something sure changed for me between the grad school and professorial levels! My first teaching experience happened in the spring quarter, 1991. I was TA-ing a Classics survey course at UCLA. Before meeting my first section, I went to the bathroom in Bunche Hall and threw up; I was overcome with terror. I was not-quite 24, and though I had years of background in drama and was the son of two college professors, I felt like an utter fraud who was about to be exposed. And in my first few quarters of TA-ing, I had some awful moments that left me despondent. I would not have ranked myself highly, back in the day. So yeah, one’s confidence grows with time.
I’d also say that the degree to which one worries about being liked diminishes with time, and that helps. When I was a TA — or even in my first few years here at the college — most of my students were only a few years younger than I. I saw them as slightly junior peers, and it’s generally the case that we are particularly anxious to win approval from our peers. Being liked, being perceived as competent, being thought interesting; all of these were wrapped up together. Today, I am still very much concerned with being competent, and I am hopeful that I am still found interesting — but the anxiety about winning approval has dropped. And I find that the less anxious I am about winning approval, the more likely I am to have self-confidence. Part of self-confidence, at least for me, is rooted in a sense of one’s own skills; it’s also rooted in a willingness to be unaffected by the capricious judgments of others.
I don’t believe good teachers are born that way. Good teaching is like any other skill — it’s something we learn, and something we get better at with practice. When we’re novices, our anxiety about our teaching serves an important function: it spurs us to improve. One hopes that that anxiety will diminish with time. In a few, unfortunate instances, it is replaced with apathy; more often than not, it is replaced by a quiet confidence in one’s own mastery of the material and of the classroom. And of course, in most cases, we are eager to continue to refine our craft. Mastery is not the same as perfection, and in my case (and I’d like to believe in the case of most of my colleagues), we’re aware that we’ve got room to improve.
In the Price article, one thing he wrote really hit home:
Some college teachers try to avoid a real analysis of their strengths and weaknesses—
and working on the weaknesses—by deciding that they play a particular
role within their department, and that only some dimensions of good teaching are
relevant to that role. A veteran professor might decide that because other faculty in
the department use cooperative learning techniques and provide a variety of pedagogical
activities for their students, it is in his students’ interest for him to teach a “good old-fashioned college course,†featuring nothing but heavy doses of lecture, textbook reading, and traditional exams. Alternatively, in a department full of such veteran professors, a freewheeling young assistant professor might decide that her primary role should be to “model critical thinking in the classroom†by doing little other than discussing controversial issues.
One problem here is that, as discussed above, college teachers often don’t have
a clear idea of what’s going on in their colleagues’ classrooms and therefore have little
basis (beyond their own preferences) for choosing their roles.
Dang, I’m definitely the “veteran professor teaching the good old-fashioned college course”, at least when it comes to my Western Civ survey courses. I’ve made the conscious decision to emphasize good lecturing over other forms of teaching, largely because I am firmly convinced that lecturing has been woefully underemphasized. To quote myself from nearly two years ago:
I am sick and tired of having folks with doctorates in education (Lord help us) tell me that “lecturing is an outdated teaching style.” Well, it’s still a damned effective teaching style if it’s done well. I put a lot of time and energy into crafting articulate, interesting, lectures, largely because I believe that for most students, it remains the most effective and memorable way to learn. I do invite discussion and debate in some of my classes, and I welcome questions — but I cling tenaciously to the old-school notion that my job is to be an interesting, compelling, and provocative deliverer of information. (And along the way, raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.)
So, is my self-confidence misplaced? I don’t think so. Could I be a better teacher? Sure, of course. Am I better than my colleagues? I have no idea, because I’ve only seen a handful of them teach, and most of those whom I have seen teach were junior faculty early on in the tenure process. But in the absence of evidence, I’m happily confident that the majority of my colleagues are wonderful teachers, and I am happy to be “average” in their company.
This is on some level very comforting; I am in my first year as a librarian, and I’m intimately familiar with that about-to-be-exposed-as-a-fraud feeling.
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You like lectures??? I’m surprised. I’ve always found lectures completely absurd. Why not just type the stuff out and hand it out in class? Or just email it. What possible benefit is there to have everybody sit in a lecture hall and listen to a guy talk?
I’ve had a few teachers & professors who were great lecturers, and it is really something great to have. I can understand why it might seem like there’s no point to it, but good lecturing brings topics alive in a way that a book or handout really can’t. If you’re an effective lecturer, Hugo, you’re a real treasure. (I only say “if” because obviously it’s impossible for me to know that just from your self-assessment.)
I suspect the statistics are skewed somewhat by people taking their own preferred pedagogical techniques as normative.
I have mixed feelings about lectures. With a good lecturer they can be very worthwhile, however most lecturers in my experience don’t have the talent or don’t make the effort to provide any benefit that we couldn’t have got from handouts.
Far too many lectures consist of the lecturer copying from his notes onto the board while reading them out, while the students copy word-for-word (which means we are too occupied with writing to have time to listen properly or think about what we are writing.) It seems a huge amount of duplicated effort.
I often see students with headphones listening to their iPod while copying. I was shocked when I first saw it, that they were not even pretending to be listening or concentrating on the lecture, but it makes sense really, there is no added benefit to listening to the lecturer…
As my students will attest, I don’t use notes. And I think I’ve got a fairly good sense of how to keep things lively.
In a survey like that, the question may be the problem. If someone asks you to rate your ability on a scale of “above average”, “average”, and “below average”, it *feels* like they’re actually asking you “good”, “fair”, or “poor”. If you feel confident in your skill you may think that answering “average” won’t show that, so you pick “above average”, by which you actually just mean “I feel good about my teaching ability”.
Of course it depends on the details of how they did the survey and the wording of the questions.
A whole bunch of jumbled thoughts…….
When I was a grad student, the school I attended reported the individual means, univeristy means, and department means. That helped to put things in a clearer perspective.
No I have a school that uses the worst evaluation form ever, including the question “was the course worth your money.” They can answer yes or no, and then the dorks calculate a mean for that question.
I tend to agree with the general trends in my evals. I looked up my rating on your favorite site rate my professor. LOL!! I think it is fair.
As a newbie professor, I feel myself becoming less concerned with approval, but lately I also feel like I’m in a bit of a teaching rut.
I also think we have to give a definition of a “lecture.” I have always thought of my style as lecturing, but I have had students repeatedly say, I like your class because you don’t just stand up there and lecture. I describe it as an interactive lecture. I also have the advantage of teaching really interesting subjects–Sociology of Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Family Sociology, African American Studies, Intro to Sociology. I think my job would be much harder if I was teaching math, chemistry, statistics, or any topic that a large number of students tune out.
Rachel,
I have pretty much the same teaching style as you (I’m part time at the local state U). Depending on the subject, my classes can be more or less lecture/interactive, but I do try to vary it a bit. I do get consistently good evaluations from my students (and I looked myself up on ratemyprof as well), but I also see that there is definite room for improvement. However, I teach physics and astronomy (students rarely take my classes as an elective, I usually get people who are non majors but need my class as a requirement for theirs) and I think it would much harder for me to keep my classes interesting if I were teaching something more in the social sciences/arts.
ks said,
“However, I teach physics and astronomy (students rarely take my classes as an elective, I usually get people who are non majors but need my class as a requirement for theirs) and I think it would much harder for me to keep my classes interesting if I were teaching something more in the social sciences/arts.”
LOL!! Do you care to elaborate? Are you saying because of the perceived demanding nature of the classes, you don’t get many people who really don’t want to be there? My comment wasn’t a dig on math, stats or hard sciences, BTW, but I think there are a relatively high number of students who completely zone out when they think about these subjects, but I suppose that’s a empirical question.
I know this is really nitpicky, but I figure that this –
— makes a sort of facile rhetorical appeal to mathematical definition that non-mathies frequently use, and is therefore fair game for a picky correction. It’s perfectly possible for 94% of the faculty members to be above average. Say those 94% teach at a level of, say, 5 on some scale. Everyone else teaches at 4. The average is less than 5 (it’s 4.94), and at 5 the 94% are clearly above average. It’s impossible for 94% to be above the median, or to be better than typical.
That’s pretty much exactly it. I always get comments near the end of the semester from students about how they really didn’t want to be required to take physics/astronomy, but they’re glad they ended up in my class. I do try to keep it interesting and interactive for them (which is way easier in physics than in astronomy), but I think it helps that I’m young-ish and a bit more energetic than some of the old guys in the department.
It is good to know that you put lot of efforts in designing your lectures. I know professors who get their powerpoints done by their TAs and just blabber infront of the students avoiding all the questions. What is the point of education if it not meant to teach students how to think? Teaching is not just a job, it is an art of shaping future generations. I am really happy to read that you and some other commentors do take it seriously.