Why Pedagogy 'Experts' Are Wrong
Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical wisdom that comes with years spent in their specific disciplines, educating students.
Much in this story will be recognizable to faculty at each of the 1,200 colleges and universities that host a teaching and learning center in the United States. Work that was once considered the province of individual academic units has migrated to specialized offices populated by nonacademic staff with little (or no) knowledge of the fields whose educational practices they seek to shape, and who themselves spend more time in brown-bag workshops than in classrooms. This development should worry not just the faculty, but also the students they teach, and indeed, the entire society that entrusts these institutions to nurture an educated populace.
With many institutions looking to cut administrative bloat, teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block.
But navigating financial-aid regulations and preparing for planned network outages are unlike selecting learning objectives for a metaphysics course or deciding where to begin when teaching Shakespeare. The former sorts of decisions can indeed be addressed by generic administrative solutions. The latter can not.
Those of us who regularly use teaching and learning centers are usually looking for something in our field — specific colleagues to talk shop with, new thinkers to argue about, different interpretations of the texts we teach. But often, we're told instead to attend workshops about "inclusive pedagogy" or to consult with staff members who are conversant in the "Universal Design for Learning" framework. This is not just not useful to us. It's actively injurious to good teaching.
Faculty often feel judged or criticized when told that their courses need to incorporate "active learning" requirements or "evidence-based teaching practices." And they're right to feel this way: The implicit suggestion is that, as practitioners in their fields, they are not themselves qualified to evaluate the merits of their own disciplinary practices.
The research on the efficacy of pedagogical fads is also quite mixed. For years, the flipped classroom was championed as a powerful new teaching strategy that would dramatically improve learning outcomes. More recently, the case for flipped classrooms has been complicated. Similarly, it was once widely believed that students had different "learning styles" and that effective teaching required the adaptation of pedagogical strategies to each. We now know this to be overstated at best and nonexistent at worst.
But not every activity should — or even can — be outsourced. Consider decisions that parents make in the course of raising children. In deliberating about whether to send them to private school, or whether to allow them to start dating at age 13, or whether to require they attend church, parents do not simply reason instrumentally, finding the most efficient means of achieving preset child-rearing goals. They also seek to determine what their values are, what goals are worth pursuing, and what raising this particular child is all about. They identify tensions between the values they hold, they set priorities, and they make tradeoffs. This is part of what constitutes the activity of parenting. Were a couple to simply find a parenting consultant and then relentlessly defer to them, they wouldn't be establishing themselves as particularly dedicated parents. They wouldn't be parenting at all.
Something similar could be said about teaching. When I began my first job, I was determined to do it well. I read about different teaching methodologies. But as I learned more, I realized that there was no substitute for talking to the brilliant senior philosophers in my department — my colleagues — about the material that we both taught. These conversations were illuminating not just because they deepened my understanding of the texts themselves, but because they provided examples of what it meant to be genuinely engaged with philosophy: to live with the texts, to struggle with them, and to be changed by them.
In his new book The Score, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen identifies a phenomenon he calls "value capture." Value capture occurs when an institution's attempts to quantify or measure something of significance cause a person's rich, subtle values to become flattened and distorted — often so much so that those values transform into something alien or even hostile. While a teaching and learning center might market itself as a resource for more effectively pursuing the values that drive faculty into the profession, there's every reason to worry that its presence will lean instead toward the perversion and destruction of those very values.
Early in my teaching career, I faced the daunting task of teaching four 80-minute sessions on the work of the notoriously difficult Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I hit on several key passages that I didn't know how to teach because, first, I didn't know what about them would grab the students, and, second, I wasn't so sure I understood them myself. I turned to a colleague — a senior philosopher who'd been teaching Leibniz for more than 30 years. He didn't tell me about active learning or think-pair-share activities or best practices for engaging resistant learners. He told me about Leibniz — about which passages he found most interesting, which ones he found most puzzling, and why.
But more to the point, the time spent there can be clocked and measured. The number of visits can be counted. The number of workshops attended can be put in a spreadsheet. These metrics can then be reported in a faculty member's yearly professional-activities survey, which can then be included in his tenure dossier. These numbers allow for ease of comparison between teachers in different fields, allowing faculty members to monitor whether they're "keeping up" with their colleagues across campus.
The problem is not just that a teaching and learning center's guidance is less useful than my colleague's. It's that what I do with my colleague when I talk about Leibniz and what I do with my students when I share the material with them is part of what it is to teach philosophy. It's the sort of discovery and interaction that takes place in these moments that makes the whole enterprise valuable, and the more I'm drawn away from it, the less I'm actually engaged in the activity that I've been hired to engage in.
My suspicion is that if we did all of this, we'd recover the practical wisdom that comes with treating our individual departments as communities of expert educators — something we might not have even realized we'd lost, and something whose recovery would benefit the society that depends upon us to educate the young.
