So much to say here. We were classmates at Williams (I don't think I've ever commented, so I have no idea what identifying data shows up here, dcat, or my full name or whatever) and I am a History professor.
The thing about the research informing teaching idea is that while potentially overblown, it is research that keeps me on top of new work in various subfields that my research and teaching straddle. When I am working on a new book I realize the vastness of the literature that I thought I knew that I don't, and that can help immeasurably with especially advanced undergrads and grad students, but also in tinkering on the margins in my survey. I also think we are in the business of creating and disseminating knowledge, and research is important that way as well. Historiographical interpretations and gap-filling happens with greater frequency and volume in History than in many disciplines I suppose (history being everything that has ever happened anywhere, so there are a lot of gaps, to be flip about it).
A second point -- I DO think the "most professors have not been exposed to pedagogy" is way overblown. To emphasize your point -- most of us are pretty good at modeling behavior. Did I ever learn how to write a syllabus? Not precisely. But as an undergrad, MA student, PhD student, and TA I saw dozens and dozens of syllabi. If you get your first solo teaching gig, they don't have a template, and you are clueless? Doesn't some of that fall on you? Ditto getting a sense of what assignments work. Hell, my models are oftentimes still what I saw at Williams, albeit scaled down, since from my freshman year on I was basically taking grad seminars four classes a semester. And frankly writing lectures and discussions is ALWAYS trial and error. When I first taught I wrote out full-blown lectures. My survey lectures were 250 pages long. Now I go from an outline a fraction of that size, but I can only do that because of years of practice, of growing subject expertise, of growing confidence, and of an ability to improvise and recall and do all of the things that, I'm sorry folks, cannot be taught.
Finally: The "professors can't teach" nonsense is and always has been overwrought. Every one of the best teachers I have ever had save one was a PhD with little or no teaching training. And I had them for all of my degrees, whether from Williams or a research university. I have had bad teachers as well. But one of the worst was overtly not only trained in higher ed pedagogy, but that was literally their thing. I'll just note that at universities with Education Schools, those professors are not regarded as being any better at teaching than the rest of us.
I think your 2nd point neglects survivorship bias: The sort of people who not only succeed in higher education, but then seek even more higher education, and *then* work in higher education, are a small population who, yes, have gotten a lot out of the teaching that has been provided to them. That's not at all an argument that they know anything about teaching the vast majority of the students they will have in their courses.
To your 3rd point: There's a vast distance between "the way we prepare PhDs and then throw them into teaching and just expect them to figure it out isn't the best way" and "there are no such PhDs who are good teachers" --- providing counterexamples to the latter doesn't speak to the former at all.
Well, yes, I believe that the people who have both experienced and done the most teaching probably have the most to say about teaching. That's not "survivorship bias" any more than experience mattering in any other profession is "survivorship bias."
I grew up poor. I teach lots of first generation students. The idea that somehow those of us who operate in this environment blithely do so independent of our environments is absurd. "I was taught much less than you, and have taught much less than you so listen to me" is not an argument I'm going to spend that much time refuting. I'll leave that to the "do your own research" crowd. And yes, I suspect that I know more about the teaching that my sophomores need than my sophomores do. My sitting in a class on pedagogy 20 years ago taught by an Ed.D. who was not a better teacher than any of my professors in my Ph.D. field would not have helped one iota. And while I know experience is irrelevant, I can say this because the one even vaguely pedagogically-oriented class that I took in my graduate program stole precious IQ points. But then in topsy-turvy world, that experience too is irrelevant.
As to your second point about my third point, you are actually not arguing any point I made. First off, I explicitly reject this idea that we just throw PhD's into teaching -- in fact, my point is that, cliche aside, we do NOT do that, especially for anyone who did any TA work at all. But furthermore counterexamples are absolutely a legitimate and important form of evidence. But I can also point to years serving on tenure committees as counterexamples to this idea that PhD's somehow don't teach well and are not committed to teaching.
First: I apologize for my tone. I guess I'm responding to a certain tone that may not have really been there. Like in this comment, I'm not sure if you're referring to "an Ed.D." in a tone that I've heard many use before, as in, you know, a (worthless) EdD. No matter what tone was or wasn't there it didn't help for me to raise the temperature with mine.
I really don't think wondering about survivorship bias is some kind of topsy-turvy upside-down way of thinking. Isn't it uncontroversial that not all learners are the same? And then isn't it at least plausible that the rare few who become physics professors might learn physics differently from most other people? And so, then, wouldn't it follow that if those rare few use their "best" teachers as models, it might not correspond at all to what is "good" teaching in general?
But again, I want to sandwich that comment in between the bread of an overall apology.
I'm not the (potentially) offended party, but I appreciate the apology. I don't usually have enough traffic here to need to worry about decorum, but I had flagged this as maybe going in a bad direction.
I agree with the idea that "best for future physics majors" is not necessarily "best teaching generally." I often repeat the advice given to me by a colleague when I was just starting out, namely "Don't make the mistake of assuming that your students are like you were." The average student is definitely not approaching physics class the same way that I was when I was an undergrad, and that needs to be taken into account when prepping classes and all that.
That said, I've been in the game long enough now (this is my 22nd year as a professor) to have a pretty good independent sense of what our students are like, and what will and won't work. Which is why I can identify what techniques that work for other people with other student populations aren't likely to work for me, and save the time and effort involved in trying them and having them fall flat...
Yeah, I was a bit aggressive as well. No worries. It's the internet. But part of it is that if you are in academia there is probably nothing as sanctimonious and grating as, say, Twitter teaching threads, where staking out the most "student friendly" position means any criticism levied against you allows you to accuse people basically of hating students. Who knew that expecting students not to be on their phones at certain times in class was ableist?
My references to Ed.D. was probably a little bit of a jibe inasmuch as, again, there is literally no evidence that Education faculty are even a smidge better at university teaching than any other area in the academy, but I do value the work my colleagues in Education do with regard to K-12 teaching and providing bridges to college, in Special Ed and counseling, in early childhood ed and a whole host of areas. Indeed, in the best scenarios we work together. In Texas, students in public universities who want to teach, say, history or math, major in the subject area but then take various Ed courses that lead them to certification. In that sense there isn't a divide between us, we collaborate.
As to whether physics professors learn differently, I guess my response is, sure? But I will still bet all of the money in my pocket against all the money in your pocket that the typical physics professor has been exposed to lots more kinds of physics teaching than the typical non-physics professor and has thought about teaching physics a lot more than that. The insulting part isn't tone -- I'm a big boy, I can take a punch -- it's the implication that people who devote their lives to teaching physics or history or sociology haven't spent immeasurably more time thinking about ways of teaching physics or history or sociology than someone who does not teach physics or history or sociology. There is a level of arrogance involved in these assertions that it seems only professors face, though admittedly in the wake of COVID I would guess certain medical professionals would raise objections.
I would turn that reasoning around: It seems to me that pedagogy faces an arrogance that other disciplines do not face. The idea that someone whose expertise is pedagogy might, yes, have thought more about this than someone who teaches but also splits their time on another expertise, doesn't seem to me like it should be controversial.
Anyone can have a story like "My dad knew more about plumbing than any so-called plumber," but we don't take that story to the extreme of denying that plumbing expertise exists at all, or that trade schools add no value. Or to put it in an academic context, the docent at the local history museum might be an autodidact who really does have a command of history greater than most history PhDs... but we don't conclude that history PhDs are worthless.
But somehow teaching doesn't get that same treatment. We say "I had some great teachers who had no specific training in teaching, and moreover some of the so-called experts are terrible teachers" and that becomes the unsourced claim that "there is literally no evidence that Education faculty are even a smidge better at university teaching than any other area in the academy"* or the seeming denial that expertise is even possible, like in statements such as "frankly writing lectures and discussions is ALWAYS trial and error."
* Of course the reasonable response to me saying this is for you to ask me about the evidence. But it's such a big and broad claim that I don't even know how to counter it. Like if someone said "Where's the evidence that college science faculty teach science better than humanities faculty would teach science?" I actually don't know what evidence I would be able to provide.
Yeah, hard agree with that second-to-last paragraph. I'm a grizzled veteran of lots of physics/astronomy teaching conferences, and they're rewarding for me personally because I'm interested in getting better and trying out new things. I teach at a CC, though, so I'm not pretending to straddle two professional paths -- teaching really is my primary focus, and should be. I encounter lots of people, though, who (I say cynically) chase gimmicks in the hope that it will short-circuit the real work so they can get on with other professional interests.
There's an element to this as well that educational research informs teaching even more than "traditional" research informs teaching. And if one keeps abreast of the literature in all aspects of their work, they'll know what they can implement in their teaching just as much as what they can do in their research. (Also, teaching professors do a good amount of this educational research, so it would actually be detrimental to academia as a whole keep them from doing research in addition to teaching!)
Very much agree that the source of (professors who see themselves as primarily) research professors teaching badly is that they don't want to be doing it -- but if you have someone who isn't teaching very well, doesn't want to be, and would very much like to be left alone in order to do more research, what do we gain from forcing that person to teach anyway, even if the primary job of the university as a whole is to teach students? That's like saying "the primary purpose of the robotics startup I work at is programming robots, not admin tasks like making sure everyone has health insurance and keeping the fridge stocked, so our PeopleOps person [0] should have to program some robots, too" -- obviously we don't do this, because our PeopleOps person isn't good at programming robots and doesn't want to be, whereas I would immediately quit out of frustration if I had to spend literally any amount of time on the phone with health insurance companies on my work's behalf. It's okay for an institution that does multiple things (teaching and research) to have people who specialize in one or the other.
My case for hiring teaching-only professors and letting research professors not teach if they don't want to is mostly that I went to MIT, which does this: the CS department has a number of people with the job title "lecturer" teaching (mostly introductory) classes. Most of the lecturers whose classes I took cared *a lot* about making their class the best possible version of itself -- like Adam Hartz, who developed and supports the CAT-SOOP LMS [1], now used by over half the classes I took in undergrad that had homework that required writing software, and almost all of my lab classes. (I used it from the instructor side as a TA, too, and I can see why it's so popular -- for the specific types of classes it's designed for, it's really, really good.) There are also a lot of professors who both do research and teach classes -- even surprisingly big names teaching surprisingly low-level classes -- because they love the subject, care a lot about the class, and want to make it the best class it can be. (Maybe this drive for continuous improvement is more visible in EECS, which is a comparatively recent field where the introductory curriculum *isn't* very strictly codified and there's a lot of room for experimentation.) I'm not sure it's possible, or productive, to try to inspire that sentiment in researchers who don't want to teach and resent that it's taking time away from research.
[^0]: All startups past a certain size have this one person, who is in charge of everything that doesn't have to do with either working on the product or begging for more money. Their job title varies, because they are the office manager and the receptionist and the HR person and the benefits coordinator and the person who orders snacks for the company kitchen; this doesn't matter because there is only one of them and everyone refers to them by first name. This person is nearly always female and at sufficiently small startups may be the only woman there.
So much to say here. We were classmates at Williams (I don't think I've ever commented, so I have no idea what identifying data shows up here, dcat, or my full name or whatever) and I am a History professor.
The thing about the research informing teaching idea is that while potentially overblown, it is research that keeps me on top of new work in various subfields that my research and teaching straddle. When I am working on a new book I realize the vastness of the literature that I thought I knew that I don't, and that can help immeasurably with especially advanced undergrads and grad students, but also in tinkering on the margins in my survey. I also think we are in the business of creating and disseminating knowledge, and research is important that way as well. Historiographical interpretations and gap-filling happens with greater frequency and volume in History than in many disciplines I suppose (history being everything that has ever happened anywhere, so there are a lot of gaps, to be flip about it).
A second point -- I DO think the "most professors have not been exposed to pedagogy" is way overblown. To emphasize your point -- most of us are pretty good at modeling behavior. Did I ever learn how to write a syllabus? Not precisely. But as an undergrad, MA student, PhD student, and TA I saw dozens and dozens of syllabi. If you get your first solo teaching gig, they don't have a template, and you are clueless? Doesn't some of that fall on you? Ditto getting a sense of what assignments work. Hell, my models are oftentimes still what I saw at Williams, albeit scaled down, since from my freshman year on I was basically taking grad seminars four classes a semester. And frankly writing lectures and discussions is ALWAYS trial and error. When I first taught I wrote out full-blown lectures. My survey lectures were 250 pages long. Now I go from an outline a fraction of that size, but I can only do that because of years of practice, of growing subject expertise, of growing confidence, and of an ability to improvise and recall and do all of the things that, I'm sorry folks, cannot be taught.
Finally: The "professors can't teach" nonsense is and always has been overwrought. Every one of the best teachers I have ever had save one was a PhD with little or no teaching training. And I had them for all of my degrees, whether from Williams or a research university. I have had bad teachers as well. But one of the worst was overtly not only trained in higher ed pedagogy, but that was literally their thing. I'll just note that at universities with Education Schools, those professors are not regarded as being any better at teaching than the rest of us.
I think your 2nd point neglects survivorship bias: The sort of people who not only succeed in higher education, but then seek even more higher education, and *then* work in higher education, are a small population who, yes, have gotten a lot out of the teaching that has been provided to them. That's not at all an argument that they know anything about teaching the vast majority of the students they will have in their courses.
To your 3rd point: There's a vast distance between "the way we prepare PhDs and then throw them into teaching and just expect them to figure it out isn't the best way" and "there are no such PhDs who are good teachers" --- providing counterexamples to the latter doesn't speak to the former at all.
Well, yes, I believe that the people who have both experienced and done the most teaching probably have the most to say about teaching. That's not "survivorship bias" any more than experience mattering in any other profession is "survivorship bias."
I grew up poor. I teach lots of first generation students. The idea that somehow those of us who operate in this environment blithely do so independent of our environments is absurd. "I was taught much less than you, and have taught much less than you so listen to me" is not an argument I'm going to spend that much time refuting. I'll leave that to the "do your own research" crowd. And yes, I suspect that I know more about the teaching that my sophomores need than my sophomores do. My sitting in a class on pedagogy 20 years ago taught by an Ed.D. who was not a better teacher than any of my professors in my Ph.D. field would not have helped one iota. And while I know experience is irrelevant, I can say this because the one even vaguely pedagogically-oriented class that I took in my graduate program stole precious IQ points. But then in topsy-turvy world, that experience too is irrelevant.
As to your second point about my third point, you are actually not arguing any point I made. First off, I explicitly reject this idea that we just throw PhD's into teaching -- in fact, my point is that, cliche aside, we do NOT do that, especially for anyone who did any TA work at all. But furthermore counterexamples are absolutely a legitimate and important form of evidence. But I can also point to years serving on tenure committees as counterexamples to this idea that PhD's somehow don't teach well and are not committed to teaching.
First: I apologize for my tone. I guess I'm responding to a certain tone that may not have really been there. Like in this comment, I'm not sure if you're referring to "an Ed.D." in a tone that I've heard many use before, as in, you know, a (worthless) EdD. No matter what tone was or wasn't there it didn't help for me to raise the temperature with mine.
I really don't think wondering about survivorship bias is some kind of topsy-turvy upside-down way of thinking. Isn't it uncontroversial that not all learners are the same? And then isn't it at least plausible that the rare few who become physics professors might learn physics differently from most other people? And so, then, wouldn't it follow that if those rare few use their "best" teachers as models, it might not correspond at all to what is "good" teaching in general?
But again, I want to sandwich that comment in between the bread of an overall apology.
I'm not the (potentially) offended party, but I appreciate the apology. I don't usually have enough traffic here to need to worry about decorum, but I had flagged this as maybe going in a bad direction.
I agree with the idea that "best for future physics majors" is not necessarily "best teaching generally." I often repeat the advice given to me by a colleague when I was just starting out, namely "Don't make the mistake of assuming that your students are like you were." The average student is definitely not approaching physics class the same way that I was when I was an undergrad, and that needs to be taken into account when prepping classes and all that.
That said, I've been in the game long enough now (this is my 22nd year as a professor) to have a pretty good independent sense of what our students are like, and what will and won't work. Which is why I can identify what techniques that work for other people with other student populations aren't likely to work for me, and save the time and effort involved in trying them and having them fall flat...
Yeah, I was a bit aggressive as well. No worries. It's the internet. But part of it is that if you are in academia there is probably nothing as sanctimonious and grating as, say, Twitter teaching threads, where staking out the most "student friendly" position means any criticism levied against you allows you to accuse people basically of hating students. Who knew that expecting students not to be on their phones at certain times in class was ableist?
My references to Ed.D. was probably a little bit of a jibe inasmuch as, again, there is literally no evidence that Education faculty are even a smidge better at university teaching than any other area in the academy, but I do value the work my colleagues in Education do with regard to K-12 teaching and providing bridges to college, in Special Ed and counseling, in early childhood ed and a whole host of areas. Indeed, in the best scenarios we work together. In Texas, students in public universities who want to teach, say, history or math, major in the subject area but then take various Ed courses that lead them to certification. In that sense there isn't a divide between us, we collaborate.
As to whether physics professors learn differently, I guess my response is, sure? But I will still bet all of the money in my pocket against all the money in your pocket that the typical physics professor has been exposed to lots more kinds of physics teaching than the typical non-physics professor and has thought about teaching physics a lot more than that. The insulting part isn't tone -- I'm a big boy, I can take a punch -- it's the implication that people who devote their lives to teaching physics or history or sociology haven't spent immeasurably more time thinking about ways of teaching physics or history or sociology than someone who does not teach physics or history or sociology. There is a level of arrogance involved in these assertions that it seems only professors face, though admittedly in the wake of COVID I would guess certain medical professionals would raise objections.
I would turn that reasoning around: It seems to me that pedagogy faces an arrogance that other disciplines do not face. The idea that someone whose expertise is pedagogy might, yes, have thought more about this than someone who teaches but also splits their time on another expertise, doesn't seem to me like it should be controversial.
Anyone can have a story like "My dad knew more about plumbing than any so-called plumber," but we don't take that story to the extreme of denying that plumbing expertise exists at all, or that trade schools add no value. Or to put it in an academic context, the docent at the local history museum might be an autodidact who really does have a command of history greater than most history PhDs... but we don't conclude that history PhDs are worthless.
But somehow teaching doesn't get that same treatment. We say "I had some great teachers who had no specific training in teaching, and moreover some of the so-called experts are terrible teachers" and that becomes the unsourced claim that "there is literally no evidence that Education faculty are even a smidge better at university teaching than any other area in the academy"* or the seeming denial that expertise is even possible, like in statements such as "frankly writing lectures and discussions is ALWAYS trial and error."
* Of course the reasonable response to me saying this is for you to ask me about the evidence. But it's such a big and broad claim that I don't even know how to counter it. Like if someone said "Where's the evidence that college science faculty teach science better than humanities faculty would teach science?" I actually don't know what evidence I would be able to provide.
Yeah, hard agree with that second-to-last paragraph. I'm a grizzled veteran of lots of physics/astronomy teaching conferences, and they're rewarding for me personally because I'm interested in getting better and trying out new things. I teach at a CC, though, so I'm not pretending to straddle two professional paths -- teaching really is my primary focus, and should be. I encounter lots of people, though, who (I say cynically) chase gimmicks in the hope that it will short-circuit the real work so they can get on with other professional interests.
Good piece, Chad!
There's an element to this as well that educational research informs teaching even more than "traditional" research informs teaching. And if one keeps abreast of the literature in all aspects of their work, they'll know what they can implement in their teaching just as much as what they can do in their research. (Also, teaching professors do a good amount of this educational research, so it would actually be detrimental to academia as a whole keep them from doing research in addition to teaching!)
Very much agree that the source of (professors who see themselves as primarily) research professors teaching badly is that they don't want to be doing it -- but if you have someone who isn't teaching very well, doesn't want to be, and would very much like to be left alone in order to do more research, what do we gain from forcing that person to teach anyway, even if the primary job of the university as a whole is to teach students? That's like saying "the primary purpose of the robotics startup I work at is programming robots, not admin tasks like making sure everyone has health insurance and keeping the fridge stocked, so our PeopleOps person [0] should have to program some robots, too" -- obviously we don't do this, because our PeopleOps person isn't good at programming robots and doesn't want to be, whereas I would immediately quit out of frustration if I had to spend literally any amount of time on the phone with health insurance companies on my work's behalf. It's okay for an institution that does multiple things (teaching and research) to have people who specialize in one or the other.
My case for hiring teaching-only professors and letting research professors not teach if they don't want to is mostly that I went to MIT, which does this: the CS department has a number of people with the job title "lecturer" teaching (mostly introductory) classes. Most of the lecturers whose classes I took cared *a lot* about making their class the best possible version of itself -- like Adam Hartz, who developed and supports the CAT-SOOP LMS [1], now used by over half the classes I took in undergrad that had homework that required writing software, and almost all of my lab classes. (I used it from the instructor side as a TA, too, and I can see why it's so popular -- for the specific types of classes it's designed for, it's really, really good.) There are also a lot of professors who both do research and teach classes -- even surprisingly big names teaching surprisingly low-level classes -- because they love the subject, care a lot about the class, and want to make it the best class it can be. (Maybe this drive for continuous improvement is more visible in EECS, which is a comparatively recent field where the introductory curriculum *isn't* very strictly codified and there's a lot of room for experimentation.) I'm not sure it's possible, or productive, to try to inspire that sentiment in researchers who don't want to teach and resent that it's taking time away from research.
[^0]: All startups past a certain size have this one person, who is in charge of everything that doesn't have to do with either working on the product or begging for more money. Their job title varies, because they are the office manager and the receptionist and the HR person and the benefits coordinator and the person who orders snacks for the company kitchen; this doesn't matter because there is only one of them and everyone refers to them by first name. This person is nearly always female and at sufficiently small startups may be the only woman there.
[^1]: https://catsoop.org/website/docs/about