Time to Look at Teaching at CUNY
By John Garvey
It is clear that many students entering CUNY are not sufficiently prepared. Hopefully, the efforts being made by CUNY and the Department of Education to enhance the readiness of students who graduate from high school, accompanied by the new clarity regarding college readiness from the New York State Education Department, will result in increased readiness of students entering CUNY in the future. At the same time, it is essential to recognize that what happens in the college classrooms is absolutely central to the possibility of improving college graduation rates.
Many CUNY students do not make it to graduation because they fail or earn low grades in too many of their courses. While it is tempting to explain those failures as simple reflections of students’ lack of skill and knowledge (and/or lack of effort), we must be prepared to examine the quality of typical classroom teaching practices as well.
I believe that many remedial and introductory courses are characterized by inadequate attention to a research-informed theory of learning (and, more specifically, inadequate attention to students’ prior knowledge and
