Higher Education: Revolution Needed

The Problems

Executive Summary Design courseware with the best methods. Precisely define learning objectives. Teach teachers to teach. Measure meaningful outcomes. Sell seats in classrooms like travel agents sell seats on airliners. Reorganize nursing schools so that the seats in their classes can be sold in this way; not as elements of degree programs but as distinct units. Establish clearinghouses to handle these sales. State Boards of Nursing adapt curriculum requirements for the awarding of nursing degrees according to this model. State Boards authorize schools to award degrees to students who meet these criteria.

As long as there are no outright disasters, college and university professors bumble along with little or no feedback nor oversight. The few who teach competently are rarely rewarded or even recognized. Today, the rewards are for research. Teaching takes a distant second place. High profile publications -- not teaching -- are the path to tenure. Few give teaching the effort or insight it would take to do it well. Why should they? After all, the institution rarely pays them well, gives them few incentives to teach well, and provides few resources that would support them in doing so. This is the first problem: bad priorities.

Here's the second problem: we don't teach teachers to teach. Each teacher must reinvent it. Each teacher must figure out for himself how to do these processes. Over time each develops a few little tricks but there is no incentive to go any further. Of course, humans have been conveying knowledge, skills and culture to other humans for thousands of years. It is a mature technology. Yet the technology is not shared with the people who need it, the college and university professors. They are usually experts in their subject matter, the most important but not the only essential criterion. They know a great deal about French literature or nursing or physics, but very little about how to convey it. They have no idea how poorly they do their work. They don't even know this technology exists. Breakthroughs await. This is low-hanging fruit!

The Wrong Model

Why is the quality of the teaching in post-secondary education so poor? Why is there no pressure to improve? The reason is that, for the faculties and administrations of these institutions the system is working well enough. As long as publications flow, research grants are funded, donors donate, and tuitions are paid, the organizational goals are met. What happens in classrooms is a sideline. The experience being had by those on the receiving end (the students) counts for little and their input is rarely sought and even more rarely acted upon.

Some schools invite students to complete an evaluation form upon completion of a course. This is a step in the right direction but only a small one. It's inadequate for three reasons. First, by the time the information is received, it's too late to act upon it. Second, the questions that are asked are rarely the right ones. Quality decisions should be based on whether and how well the course objectives were achieved. Instead, these forms usually ask how well the student liked the teacher. Even incompetent teachers are often nice people, so students are loath to criticize. In any case, whether or not they found the teacher's personality appealing is irrelevant to achievement of performance objectives. Are the promised skills and knowledge being successfully applied and practiced? We rarely find out or even care. Third, I have seen little evidence that the loop is ever closed. The information in evaluation forms is never made public. Complaints about teachers yield few prescriptions for action. "Evals" are collected for appearances and little else. Unproductive classroom hours grind on unchanged.

The forces of capitalism that propel businesses toward excellence obtain only at the "front end" in academia. Resources are devoted to recruiting and outreach, to advertising and reputation, and to the manicuring of campuses. Once a student is accepted to a university and commits to a 2- or 4-year program, the "customer" is locked in. Short of dropping out, there are few ways the student can apply pressure for institutional change or even express dissatisfaction. At the "back end", the institution has little incentive to deliver quality.

A Better Model

What's it like to be on the receiving end of low quality education? As a student, as I sit in my college classrooms I crave the sensation of deeply absorbing what's being taught. I memorize when I must to score well on exams but I don't feel that I have really learned. I haven't worked with the information; I haven't made it my own. The way it's taught to me doesn't make that happen. My teachers don't know how. I want to master new methods, to prepare for a new career, to perform activities related to some skilled pursuit. Very little of what happens in the classroom is focused on getting me there; it's more like vague wanderings around the topic, and often pointless yet demanding busy-work.

Effective learning is an active process. Compare this to the traditional model -- the one that obtains in higher education today -- that I call the sponge model. Here, the teacher exudes information and the student must somehow absorb it as best he can. In this model, the teacher's only responsibility is to put the information out there. It matters little how the information is presented (endless Powerpoint slides are fine) and it's certainly not the responsibility of the teacher to consider whether the information is actually being assimilated at the receiving end. As long as the Dean is happy, it's good enough. And as long as people are continuing to pay tuition and eventually graduate, the Dean is happy. Actual learning along the way is a side effect. But not in an active learning model. This is a more modern model. It reflects the way people really learn. People don't passively absorb information like sponges. They must work with it, use it, see how it works and how it fails. The instructional designer (usually the teacher) must design and plan exercising activities that drive this process. Such activities can include brief verbal/discussion exercises such as, "Name some examples of what we're talking about," or, "Given the principle we've been discussing, why wouldn't [x] work?" More elaborate exercises involve case studies, essay writing, hands-on skill rehearsal, and so on. Effective teachers drive these active learning processes and the outcome is that real learning takes place. Tests and other evaluating activities confirm that learning has occurred, and that the skills have indeed been acquired, and reveal gaps that must be revisited. In higher education today, this is pitifully rare.

There is a body of techniques -- a technology for running an effective classroom -- that every teacher should know. For example, competent practitioners of instructional technology know that the explain-exercise-evaluate cycle of learning works best in five- to ten-minute cycles. A well-designed course has the teaching points identified, the exercising activities designed, and the method for evaluating them planned explicitly. Human brains learn best by participating in these short, complete cycles. However, in traditional college classes the cycles last not minutes but weeks or even months! The professor delivers a series of lectures and eventually the roomful of students takes an exam. Upon grading the exam it may become evident (if the exam was well-designed) what was and was not conveyed effectively. This process is dismayingly unproductive (very little information is conveyed) and at the same time stressful for students who face vast, vaguely defined requirements with no tuning for individual needs. By then it's too late to do anything about it. The exam occurs after the teaching is done, too late to remedy any gaps it may reveal.

Here is more about the active model. To convey a teaching point (derived from carefully-designed course objectives) there are explaining activities, positive and negative instances, media, Socratic techniques, and more. For the exercising part of the cycle -- where the real action happens (yes, the real work is done not by the teacher but by the student) -- the repertory of techniques includes writing, discussion, yet more Socratic methods, labs, practical skills rehearsals, and more. Finally, for the evaluation part of the cycle (which tells the teacher whether it's OK to proceed or whether it's necessary to go back and try another approach) yet more techniques are available including some of those already mentioned, and feedback from the students themselves. Nobody knows better than they whether they "got it". Ask them! (Yet more Socrates.) But don't ask, "Are there any questions?" Only closed-ended questions work for this purpose. For example, "Raise your hand if you can conjugate this verb," or differentiate this equation, or rule out this diagnosis, etc. Open-ended questions are easy but of little value. Closed-ended questions are the way to do the job but they require planning. A competent, well-trained teacher knows how to design closed-ended questions, and uses them as a standard part of his teaching process. He knows when his students are "getting it" and when they're not, and he knows it right away and nips problems in the bud.

In the corporate world, the instructors at well-run companies invariably receive kudos. The students always say how great the instructors are. They think it is something personal about each instructor -- talent, perhaps, or a persuasive and articulate personality. What they rarely divine is the carefully-designed infrastructure that enables these successes. This includes techniques for effective interactions with students and for delivering information in ways that ensure that it's being absorbed. The traditional teaching model is that the teacher does it all and it's the teacher's personality that makes or breaks the experience. But in a well-run training organization, personality is only one of many factors for success. Though the instructors do indeed possess considerable subject matter expertise, it's also true that they do their teaching jobs well because they've been well-trained. Why is this usually invisible? It isn't, if you know what to look for. But most people have not experienced being taught by teachers who are truly professional. Nor do they recognize when this professionalism is absent. They just have a vague notion that the class is difficult, or dull, or they're just not learning much.

A well-run college or university (I know of none) would apply methods including the following.

• Teachers are taught to teach. For example, such train-the-trainer processes as my Techniques of Instruction are mandatory before anyone is permitted to stand in front of a roomful of learners.
• Courseware and materials are developed according to proven principles of instructional design, applied as appropriate for each subject.
• Outcomes are continuously monitored, with tight feedback loops so that students' time is used well. Never should a roomful of students be required to endure a low-quality educational experience for an entire semester.
• Continuous improvement processes are standard. This includes frequent evaluations of performance and feedback driving fine-tuning of the classroom activities, and regular updating and improvement of materials.
• Support for excellence in the classroom comes from everywhere in the organization.
• Well-applied, technology enhances teaching quality. There's no excuse for not using a spell checker. More subtly, there's no excuse for shoehorning an entire course's content into tired Powerpoint presentations (with or without gratuitous clip art backgrounds). Media must be appropriate for content.
• Without clear objectives, it's impossible to have meaningful measurements of effectiveness or outcomes. The skills and knowledge to be conveyed by each course must be precisely specified. Given this, it becomes clear how to make these measurements. Was or was not each objective achieved? We promised you'd learn to calculate an integral, tune an engine, start an IV, research an author, evaluate a clinical trial. Can you do it? Can you explain it? Did we deliver?
• Even more valuable are longitudinal measurements. A year after collecting that sheepskin, is that nurse doing a good job using the knowledge and skills the schools claim to have delivered? If not, or if the nurse claims inadequate preparation, what must be done to close the loop, to fix what didn't work in the educational process?

A Radical Solution

• Let's sell seats in classrooms the way seats in airplanes are sold. Demand for flights with desired routings and schedules is higher so they sell out sooner. Similarly, classes in convenient locations, with accommodating schedules, taught by teachers with high ratings and in institutions ("vendors") with good resources would be in higher demand. For example, nursing students would prefer schools with well-equipped skills labs, among other factors.
• The clearinghouses that serve as brokers for these vendors would collect feedback and offer assistance (e.g. teacher training) that would help the institutions be competitive.
• Degrees would be awarded to those students who satisfy lists of objective criteria specified by independent (State-funded) licensing and accreditation boards. Meeting these criteria would require satisfactory completion of specified numbers of hours and demonstrations of skills and knowledge in defined areas but without restriction to specific institutions. For example, if you're getting a nursing credential, you must be able to start an intravenous drip but it doesn't matter where you learned it. You must have had some number of classroom hours and passed some exams but it doesn't matter in which school you did this, as long as it was accredited. Naturally, you'll choose from among the various schools in your area according to quality, convenience, and price. Classes taught by ineffective instructors will fill last.
• Schools will compete. Instructors who teach well will thrive. The others will evolve or be drummed out. Quality will rise.

A Realistic Solution

This revolution won't happen without pressure. Vaguely dissatisfied and poorly educated students have thus far proved inadequate as a catalyst. Academia has managed to remain relatively impervious to the forces that propel quality, to its detriment. Those forces could be marshalled to enable academia's primary raison d'etre, learning. Fundamental structural change is needed to create incentives for change.

When teachers learn to teach, academia will move beyond the sponge model. Their classrooms will become the sites of active learning processes. The techniques they will use to create the kind of classroom in which learning really happens are numerous and powerful. Exam results will no longer surprise. Evaluation forms will no longer be superfluous and pointless; they will become essential elements of a functioning feedback loop that yields continuous improvement. And, ideally, they will solicit expressions of gratitude for productive learning experiences. Best of all, because they will have been taught well, students will do well.

In the effective classroom, the teacher will conduct carefully-designed activities in which the students process the information in a variety of ways conducive to deep learning. Exercises, Socratic methods, and much interactivity are essential. Few teachers discover these things on their own. Let's give them some help!

The outcome will be students learning well. It's a revolution that needs to happen.