The ‘Quiet Revolution’ in College Teaching
By Debra Humphreys
Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the number of individuals with high-quality credentials beyond high school. This is the first in a series on what it will take to assure that the pathways to those credentials are designed to assure the quality of the educational experience and equitable access to the real benefits of high-quality credentials.
A “quiet revolution” in college teaching appears to be growing dramatically thanks to a genuine desire to serve today’s students better and greater calls for accountability in higher education, but now we must ensure the benefits of these more effective approaches are shared equally by all students.
Innovative college educators have experimented for at least a decade with “high-impact educational practices” or HIPs, that often involve learning by experience and genuine problem-based inquiry instead of rote instruction through content-based lectures.
Hundreds of faculty and academic leaders recently met at California State University-Dominguez Hills to share best practices and explore ways to define these practices, build the evidence of their impact, and serve more students with them.
Individual schools and entire state systems have begun to adopt and track the impact of HIPs, especially on students of color, low-income students, and first-generation students. This movement may now be at a tipping point of influence, so it’s time to ask: Can we leverage this moment to bring the benefits to all students?
In general, these practices share several powerful features, starting with clear performance expectations and requiring:
- Concentrated effort by learners over extended periods of time.
- Applied, hands-on experiences and engagement with learners in collaborative and complex problem-solving, often in real-world settings.
- Engagement with content that is relevant to students’ own lives and to their aspirations for work and community impact.
- Reflection on how students are learning, and public presentations of students’ own work.
A recent article by George Kuh, Ken O’Donnell, and Carol Geary Schneider, “HIPs at Ten,” reflects on 10 years of this “quiet revolution” in teaching and learning. They describe the powerful research suggesting the positive impact of these practices, but also note that inequities remain in access to them.
They explain “the sobering reality…that participation in HIPs remains inequitable, with first generation, transfer students, and African American and Latino students least likely to participate” in many of the most powerful forms of HIPs. We also know that not all these practices labeled as “high-impact” are designed well enough to produce the outcomes we need for today’s students.
Why then are we at a tipping point for assuring the quality of these practices, scaling their implementation, and using them to close achievement gaps? And, why is it so essential that more people understand this revolution?
By way of an answer, consider the growing skepticism about the value of higher education. A survey last year by the data science company Civis Analytics found that more than 4 in 10 Americans believe that, “for most high school students, pursuing a college degree is not a worthwhile investment because it will lead to student debt with little chance of finding a good-paying job.”
Economic data give weight to the opposite conclusion, especially when the discussion concerns all quality postsecondary learning: Gaining a diploma or high quality credential beyond high school is still the best possible route to a job that supports a middle-class lifestyle.
Beyond the skepticism about the value of college degrees, we know that there are shameful gaps in which groups actually earn credentials beyond high school.
The recently updated Lumina Foundation Stronger Nation site reveals, for instance, that while nearly 47 percent of white Americans hold postsecondary credentials, only 30 percent of African Americans and only 22 percent of Hispanic Americans have them.
Closing those equity gaps requires work on many fronts, but we can see signs of success already, in the experiential programs designed to help students see the immediate relevance of their learning to their own lives and to their aspirations for the future.
More progress will come, especially if we remember the fundamentals. Scaling the use of more effective teaching and learning approaches requires that we:
- Define and then assure that the core dimensions of quality teaching and learning are included within all students’ pathways.
- Design new teaching and learning approaches so that they are aligned with today’s students’ lives.
- Incorporate into the curriculum the assets that today’s students bring to their learning journeys.
- Track the impact of new approaches to be sure that they are working for all students including for those from different racial/ethnic groups.
This agenda requires a partnership — of learners, their families and supporters, faculty members and other educators — and of those empowered to affect change directly. One powerful step would be for leaders in states and in large public systems to start tracking student participation in, and the impact of, these more engaged learning practices.
The details will take time to sort out, but in an era of “big data” in every walk of life, it’s clear we can gather the information necessary to design pathways to success.
We know this takes time. Real improvement requires systemic disruption on a level not seen in generations. But this movement has advantages: Learners increasingly aware of what success means; institutions and policymakers seeing the unmistakable signs of change and the urgency of action.
The time to act is now, many have decided. The quiet revolution is here.
Debra Humphreys, Ph.D., is vice president of strategic engagement for Lumina Foundation, leading the foundation’s stakeholder engagement and strategic communications work, while also providing direction for Lumina’s work on postsecondary education quality.
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