Good Teaching Really Matters! Who Knew?
A few years ago, I started work on a doctorate in Education Policy, which I assumed would be the pinnacle of (and I use the term sincerely) higher learning. As in: seminars around important educational questions, smart and diverse colleagues, the intellectual challenge of my (already considerable) lifetime.
What I wasn't expecting was brilliant teaching. None of us were--and most of my grad-school colleagues were bent on university teaching careers themselves. We'd all spent plenty of time in higher education, and knew better. We were veterans of the 200-student lecture hall, half-completed readings, listless discussion, grinding out research papers whose sole purpose was a grade. This is not to say that I didn't have knowledgeable, talented professors--I certainly did. But I wasn't assuming they had a responsibility to engage me in learning or motivate me.
What brought this into sharp focus was a simulation we did in Pro Seminar, based on Bill Bigelow's Testing, Tracking and Toeing the Line: A Role Play on the Origins of the Modern High School. All first-year doc students in education did substantial background reading (including all the books on the resource list--and more), then were assigned roles with a clear socio-economic status. (I got to play a well-off white woman attending a contentious school board meeting.)
In an introduction to the project, Bigelow notes:
What we don't teach in school can be more important than what we do teach. When we fail to engage students in thinking critically about their own schooling, the hidden message is: Don't analyze the institutions that shape your lives; don't ask who benefits, who suffers, and how it got to be this way; just shut up and do as you're told....allow students to question aspects of schooling they often take for granted, such as