Journal on Excellence in College Teaching

The isolated nature of teaching is a mixed state. On the one hand, it allows the privacy and intimacy of the individual classroom and supports the intellectual freedom of each professor. On the other hand, it can be lonely to work separately from colleagues. Unfortunately, the isolation of the classroom eliminates what can be useful feedback from peers and students. Colleagues in departments engage in research seminars, but it is unusual to hold a teaching seminar. Someone once said that in this respect teaching is like sex: There is no way to compare your work with that of others. Without knowing what their colleagues are doing in their classrooms and without independent student feedback, teachers cannot be certain how their efforts "rate" in facilitating their students' learning. Could we be doing something better? As Robert Burns wrote over 200 years ago, knowing how we are perceived can "frae mony a blunder free us."

An overriding quality of being a college or university faculty member is to be engaged in many areas: with the discipline, the campus, the department, and students. Yet engagement has multiple layers of meanings. It can be as simple as "appointment," "meeting," or "date." In a more romantic sense, it can be defined as "rendezvous." And, at its most complex, engagement can mean "commitment." How faculty members allot their time can determine the depth of their engagement in their different responsibilities--and the quality of the results. Best of all, interaction among these areas of responsibility can be used to further the learning of the next generation of scholars: our students. By bringing their enthusiasm for their subject into the learning environment, professors can engage their students in the excitement and issues of their discipline. In this issue, we showcase multiple levels of this engagement.

With the many changes in student population and course structures over the decades since the bulk of the present American faculty were students, it has become increasingly important for professors to understand how their students make judgments about their academic work. What beliefs and attitudes affect student behavior? How can a teacher stay in touch with student progress during a course? What will aid students to be better participants in classroom discussions? How can professors communicate with students from other language communities? How do students decide which courses to take? The authors in this issue provide information and recommendations to address these concerns.

In our "Message from the Editors" for volume four of the Journal (1993), we identified new trends in communication in college and university teaching. Expanding on the traditional teacher-to-student, one-way transmission of knowledge, we described emerging patterns of teacher-to-teacher, student-to-teacher, and student-to-student dialogues. The articles in this issue reflect those trends.

The notion of learning through solving or managing problems is not new, and it is possible to trace the origins of problem-based learning (PBL) back to early forms of learning. In the 5th century B.C. Protagoras (and later Artistotle), for example, trained students in the dialectic, in which students tried to reconcile oppositions presented in a thesis or problem, and Socrates used questioning approaches to help students to explore the inadequacies of their proffered solutions (Levine & Nidiffer, 1996). A more recent connection may be found in the work of Dewey (1938), who emphasized the human capacity to reconstruct experience and, thus, make meaning of it. Dewey opposed theories of knowledge that considered knowledge specialized and independent of its role in problem-solving inquiry. Dewey's work contributed to the concept of active and experiential learning as well as to PBL (Fuhrmann, 1996), and it has been argued that PBL fits broadly into the experiential learning tradition (Biggs, 1999; Savin-Baden, 2000).

There is a growing and respected national discussion about the relationship between teaching and research. These two vital parts of the academy are not mutually exclusive: the interplay between them forms the basis for the distinctive nature of the modern university and college. Rather than see them in opposition, there is new thinking which places both in a more inclusive view of scholarship. Within that context, a few nationally known scholars have begun to define a "scholarship of teaching." Foremost among them are Boyer, Rice, Shulman, Berliner, and Cross. Their work, focusing on teaching as an intellectual activity, complements the budding interest in learning among faculty.

Peter Beidler pointed out a few years ago that most people who become faculty were good at being evaluated in school, but did not become faculty because they particularly wanted to evaluate anyone else. In fact, he noted, some of the very characteristics that make some people good at getting high grades (such as ambition, competitiveness, and outstanding ability in the field) mitigate against their being interested in, or able to, grade others. As a result, many faculty find the evaluation of their students' learning (usually grading) the most onerous task of academic life.

Over the last 30 years, the role of teaching in academe has been ambiguous. At both established and developing universities, faculty attitudes and activities came to be shaped by the demands of, and rewards for, discovery scholarship. At two- and four-year colleges, heavy teaching assignments stifled pedagogical innovation. Faculty with an interest in teaching became confused and frustrated by the conflicting messages of mission statements and reward structures. In the narrow confines of discipline, specialization, and department, the community nourished by teaching disappeared.

Does teaching affect learning? is an important question if we are to focus our efforts to improve learning on innovations in teaching. We know that virtually nothing can prevent learning. Everyone-new babies, young children, adolescents, and adults-constantly acquires new information and tries to fit it into patterns that help make sense of the world. The difference between education and other activities is that teachers and professors attempt to guide the learning process, choosing what they think is important for students to know from the vast array of knowledge in their field, and selecting the approaches that most effectively help them communicate this knowledge.

New trends in college and university teaching (Cox & Richlin, 1993) develop as faculty innovate and evaluate to help their students learn. As we looked over the articles accepted for this issue, we were interested to find that several of them dealt with a subject not included in our former schema of emerging trends: namely, the important elements in student teacher relationships. This new topic led us to speculate as to why these contributors are investigating this area.

This issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching once again features the work, thoughts, adventures, and musings of some of the best practitioners of the scholarship of teaching in the United States and Canada.

Many of the articles in this issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching evolved from presentations given at the l993 College Teaching and Learning Exchange conference with the theme "Quality, Creativity, and Renewal." This conference, sponsored by the California State University (CSU) Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL), brought together more than 700 dedicated faculty members from California and various other states and nations to share the scholarship of college teaching. The conference was held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California, adjacent to San Jose State University, California's first public institution of higher education.

Lack of agreement on how to evaluate teaching has been one of the main roadblocks to recognizing and rewarding the teaching accomplish ments of faculty in colleges and universities. The perception has been that it is not possible to specify what constitutes good teaching, and, therefore, that no attempt should be made to judge instructors. Whereas scholarly productivity is measured by counting the number of publica tions accepted in peer-reviewed journals, teaching productivity cannot be measured in a similar way. As a result, teaching has been evaluated on an implicit ("I'll know it when I see it") basis. It is not that teaching has not been evaluated in higher education (after all, faculty have been hired, tenured, and promoted on the basis of their perceived teaching abilities); rather, it is that the criteria for teaching excellence have not been made explicit for either judgmental or developmental purposes. As always, we encourage readers to ponder, use, and respond to the contributions in this volume. The dialogue is entered and you are invited to participate.

Although the idea of collaboration and cooperation in education is hardly new, the use of two specific pedagogies, collaborative learning and cooperative learning, has rapidly grown in prominence during this decade. These two approaches to teaching are often confused because of the similarities in their names. Collaborative learning is the broader concept and may encompass any kind of collaboration between students as well as various other forms of collaboration, such as team-taught courses, learning community models, and other interactions between faculty and students. Many regard cooperative learning as a more structured, and hence more focused, form of collaborative learning. Others view collaborative learning and cooperative learning as lying on a continuum, with collaborative learning being the least structured and cooperative learning the most structured.

The articles in this issue report research and reflections that are at the forefront of several of the most important trends in the higher education classroom (see Cox & Richlin, 1993, for a full discussion of the new trends in college and university teaching). As the teacher-centered classrooms of the past are giving way, faculty are turning their attention from their own performances to the learning of their students.

Classroom research based on systematic evaluation of classroom strategies provides building blocks for the improvement of pedagogy in higher education. As each instructor evaluates and reports on how methods impact student learning, we are able to construct theories to be applied and tested in other settings. It is in this way that the scholarship of teaching--in fact, any scholarship--moves closer to providing guidance for both new and experienced practitioners. The articles in this issue all present models of classroom research on improving student learning.

Those involved in the higher education teaching-learning connection include students, teachers, administrators, and community members. As Cox and Richlin (1993) reported, the primary trend in the ongoing development of college teaching and learning has been an increasing complexity of interaction among those principals. Rather than communication being strictly from professor to student, our campuses now promote teacher-teacher, student-teacher, and student-student partnerships for learning, and the growth of service learning and internships now bring members of our surrounding community into partnership with both teachers and students. In addition, each college and university teacher is now being encouraged to communicate with himself or herself through reflection on his or her teaching goals, methods, and results.

The articles in this issue speak to three of the most important concerns we have as college and university teachers: providing useful assessment of our students' work, encouraging our students' critical and reflective thinking, and using the best tools available to help students improve their skills. These concerns lie at the heart of helping students succeed in the world beyond the classroom.

The articles in this issue are written by faculty from a variety of disciplines and institutions. The strategies they describe vary from giving weekly writing assignments to creating interactive multimedia technology to conducting marine biology research on Lake Baikal in Russia. What they have in common is that in each case the authors have involved students in improving the teaching-learning connection.

The articles in this issue continue the dialogue from Volume 7, issue 2, which reported research results and reflections gleaned from listening to our students. Whereas the articles in 7 (2) describe student questions, student voices, and student opinions, the articles in this issue focus on how college and university teachers have responded to their students.

Professors begin their careers as students, discovering and then falling in love with their disciplines. Often it is only by chance, rather than lifelong ambition, that the excellent undergraduate student becomes the hard-working graduate student, and then the fledgling college teacher. The development of instructors from trying to survive, to teaching skill development, and then to engaging in real collaboration with their students' learning is a journey that yields excitement and deeper commitment as time passes (Richlin, 1995). For example, new and junior faculty bring great enthusiasm for their subjects to the classroom, but learning to share this enthusiasm effectively with undergraduates is a complex undertaking (Boice, 1991). Employing faculty development strategies that build community and raise interest in teaching are effective in enabling this connection (Cox, 1995).

The articles contained in this issue demonstrate particularly creative ways that their authors devised to assess their students' learning and facilitate the ways in which they are able to learn.

This is the first time that the topic of social learning spaces has been featured as a special issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. In their book Learning to Make a Difference: Value Creation in Social Learning Spaces, Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2020) write, “We talk about a social learning space as a particular experience of engagement that takes place among people in pursuit of learning to make a difference” (p. 13).