There’s a Revolution in Teaching, and It’s Even Being Televised

In reading Carl Wieman’s interview with Beth McMurtrie last week in the Chronicle, I share his wish that institutional leaders create even more formal reasons and opportunities for professors to invest greater time and energy into their teaching. But as I scan the landscape, I see strong reason for hope!

· Across CUNY, with its 250,000 students, Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez has made effective teaching a systemwide priority, through major initiatives like the Innovative Teaching Academy. It’s led by longtime innovators Cathy Davidson, Annemarie Nicols-Grinenko, and a prominent leadership committee, supported by CUNY dollars and major grants from Mellon and Carnegie.

· Leaders at Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), including Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James Hallmark and Associate Vice Chancellor Shonda Gibson, have networked every system campus to strengthen teaching centers, certify faculty in effective practices, and grow a culture that prizes evidence-based instruction.

· TAMUS’s networked approach is similar to Tristan Denley and Jeff Galle’s work across the University System of Georgia, with their strategic creation of faculty learning communities and recognition of outstanding scholarship on teaching. Denley, described as a “rock star innovator,” is now taking his leadership to Louisiana, as Deputy Commissioner of Academic Affairs and Innovation, alongside its Board of Regents’ determined Commissioner, Kim Hunter Reed.

· The Cal State system, with its 500,000 students, also credits investments in teaching and learning as part of why it’s still on track to meet Graduation Initiative 2025 goals, as noted by its system Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs, Innovations and Faculty development Alison Wrynn and CSU Institute for Teaching and Learning Director Emily Magruder.

· These developments and CKF-funded proof points strongly informed NASH Executive Director Rebecca Martin and SUNY Chancellor Emerita Nancy Zimpher’s prioritization of effective pedagogy and the work of faculty in their “Learning Imperative,” one of the five pillars in NASH’s new “Power of Systems,” a transformation agenda for public university systems, as recently reported by Inside Higher Ed and supported by Carnegie Corporation, Lumina, Strada, ECMC, and others.

These and other major efforts suggest that influential higher education leaders do understand that good teaching practices can be defined and learned; they see the nexus between effective teaching and stronger, more equitable student achievement and, as a result, are investing in faculty.

Statewide initiatives are particularly important given a system’s policymaking power, agenda-setting platforms, and control of the purse. But there’s institutional leadership too, among notable trend-setters:

· Purdue’s IMPACT program (Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation), developed by Frank J. Dooley, now Chancellor of Purdue University Global, has been hailed as “one of the most influential and transformative undergraduate education and student success change initiatives.” The Chronicle too dubbed it a “promising innovation,” as Beth has reported.

· The University of Southern Mississippi made teaching and learning central to its student success strategy — and is one of the few institutions to increase enrollment amidst national declines. Faculty are incentivized, supported, and recognized for time and effort spent strengthening their teaching craft. Plus, the impact is real. Provost Steven R. Moser and Executive Vice Provost Amy Chasteen announced last week that retention is up 3.7 percent, keeping hundreds of USM students in college, thanks to evidence-based teaching. The finding, alongside improved learning and narrowed equity gaps for Black students, even made the local, five o’clock channel 7 news. To boot, USM is an active member of APLU’s Powered by Publics, a network of 125 land-grant institutions, through which it is sharing its insights on teaching and learning.

The coronavirus pandemic also generated authentic demand among faculty to strengthen their online instruction, and institutional leaders moved quickly support this need:

· Every Learner Everywhere, led by Jessica Rowland Williams and among the nation’s leading advocates for effective online instruction and high-quality digital tools, funded the North Carolina Community Colleges and Ohio Association of Community Colleges to certify hundreds of faculty in online instruction, benefitting tens of thousands of students; faculty described the experience as “completely transformational.” These and other programs were recently cited in a “best practices” report published and promoted by ELE, APLU, and Tyton Partners.

· The Thurgood Marshall College Fund, thanks to support from the ECMC, Bank of America, and Sam’s Club foundations and the Partnership for Education Advancement secured by TMCF’s President and CEO Harry Williams and their driven Vice President for Advancement Amy Goldstein, is credentialing over 600 faculty at 14 public HBCUs in its “Excellence in Online Instruction” capacity-building program. A similar effort is underway with UNCF and Cappella.

Foundations, networks, and support organizations are part of the mix too:

· Strong Start to Finish, based at the Education Commission of the States and directed by Maxine Roberts, is the nation’s leading champion of dev ed reform. Its recently published “Success and Equity through Quality Instruction: Bringing Faculty into the Student Success Movement” provides a toolkit of practical advice for leaders, along with nationwide case studies showing how it’s happening in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and elsewhere.

· Complete College America, long the leading voice for more equitable college achievement, and famous for its student success “game changers,” is increasingly emphasizing the work of faculty and evidence-based teaching, as CCA’s President Yolanda Watson Spiva enthused to press and experts and its Strategy Director Brandon Protas has written. Similarly, Achieving the Dream is coaching teaching center directors.

· No less of an agenda setter than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is judiciously moving into this space, too. On a recent information session about its new HBCU portfolio (which starts with an initial investment of $2.5 million), Senior Program Officer Josh Baron explained that faculty, and their ability to teach well, are “as much a part of the digital infrastructure” as hardware and software. Another $1.5 million grant to ACUE (the Association of College and University Educators) will study the impact of evidence-based teaching in Gateway courses on faculty and student mindsets, teaching outcomes, and equity gaps, among ten trend-setting institutions including Georgia Southern, University of Houston, University of Hawai’i-Manoa, and Ivy Tech.

Plus, mission-driven partner organization are scaling effective teaching, nationwide:

· NISOD, led by my friend Ed Leach, and POD, guided by its executive committee of prominent teaching center directors, has seen growing demand for its conferences, webinars, and networking opportunities.

· Motivate Lab, an LLC, founded at UVA by my colleague Chris Hulleman (who also serves as a research advisor to ACUE’s Gates study), takes research on learning and motivation to scale, as is the company Lumen Learning, which procured innovations first developed with grant dollars and commercialized by Gail Mellow at Faculty Guild. Other examples include the Student Experience Project, partnered with PERTS, Education Counsel, Raikes Foundation, and six prominent universities; the SESMIC collaboration funded by Sloan to bring equitable teaching to STEM, which is not unlike UAA’s own leadership in STEM instruction with my alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, and others.

· I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the more than 400 colleges, universities, and higher ed systems that ACUE has worked with since our founding, providing support to more than 16,000 faculty to strengthen their instruction and earn teaching certificates that are increasingly recognized in hiring, promotion, tenure and for professional opportunities. ACUE’s 19 (and counting), large-n, rigorous studies show that students learn more, complete courses and persist from year to year in greater numbers, and achieve, equitably, at levels that are increasingly indistinguishable from their peers by race, ethnicity, and class, when taught by ACUE-certified faculty. It’s work made possible by mission-driven investors like the American Council on Education and Strada.

These and other activities, by the Dana Center, TPSE, AASCU’s SSI, Carnegie Math Pathways, 100 Faculty, OLC, OLT, the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework, here at home through ACUE’s endorsed Effective Practice Framework, and around the world by my friends at OneHE and AdvanceHE, (and more that I am sure I am forgetting or don’t know about yet), tell me that a movement is underway. It’s a movement that Wieman himself had a hand in making, for which I hope he feels a gratifying sense of achievement. Although interest in college teaching has come and gone over the years, this time, for all these reasons, I believe it’s different.

As I wrote to the Chronicle, I see the science of teaching coming to life — at scale — in classes at institutions across the country. Would I like this change to happen more quickly? Of course. Do I believe that every student deserves an education of the highest quality? Very much. Are incentives strong enough to encourage faculty members’ innate desire to be the best educators they can? Not yet.

But this is changing, too, particularly among community colleges, small private, and open-access baccalaureate and master’s institutions — which enroll the students who will most benefit from great teaching. It’s happening because our inchoate movement is successfully connecting the dots between faculty development, effective teaching, and stronger, more equitable student outcomes. Such appreciation for the value of great teaching is also redressing the “broader disillusionment” about higher education.

This change is not happening at fast as it should at the nation’s most elite institutions, where research should remain the coin of the realm. (Let’s be honest, too: they are selective enough to enroll students who will learn regardless of teaching approaches). But if ACE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (emphasis added) have anything to do about it, we may even see changes here, too.

I also see the exciting ferment of activity occurring in exactly the right way. It hearkens what my friend Holden Thorp, Provost of the Washington University in St. Louis, writes in Our Higher Calling, Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and Its Colleges and Universities. Thorp reminds his readers of “the partnership between American higher education and the public” that respects the freedom of researchers and turns to civil society and the private sector to take discoveries to scale, for the broader good.

This dynamic relationship, first articulated in 1945 by Vannevar Bush in his seminal report “Science: The Endless Frontier,” was later formalized in in 1980 in the Bayh-Dole Act (two names that hardly connote radical privatization). Thorp continues, this “uniquely American idea… spawned a set of relations among the academy, private industry, and government that forms the basis of a research ecosystem unequaled anywhere in the world… a hallmark of the partnership that values both the autonomy of the researcher and the impact that those discoveries can have in society.”

Carl’s discoveries at UBC and UC-Boulder are having an impact. They are flourishing in different ways through many, diverse initiatives. It’s happening in a way that is deepening interest among faculty, to strengthen their craft, and among administrators, who see the connection to student success and equity.

Optimism is an asset in its own right. We see what optimism does with our students, when we help them cultivate a motivating growth mindset. To my many colleagues, I thank you for your efforts and, just as much, your hope!

Post script: Title inspiration from Gil Scott-Heron’s legendary 1971 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” that has inspired generations of activists, protestors, and fighters for freedom.