One place for professors and aspiring professors to start would be in developing the skills to give a good lecture/presentation. It's hard to understand why a person having this form of communication as one of his primary job responsibilities would fail to seriously work on improving the relevant skills.

Two things I like about this post:

1.) Its refusal to over-generalize (e.g., "the resistance to good teaching that permeates much--not all, but much--of the academy today"). (But I don’t like the implied association of "resistance to assessment" to "resistance to good teaching. ")

2.) What appears to be a backing away from the culture-war assumption that professors don't care about the canonical authors any more (e.g., "the millionth obscure monograph on Jane Austen or Shakespeare," as opposed to Spiderman comics).

Anyway, my own institution has for some time now been in the throes of the current assessment mania. We are (perpetually, it seems) in the process of "work[ing] together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well." Well, guess what? It's not as easy as it sounds, partly because it has to be done (and re-done) in conjunction with so many other things. First comes the production, by the entire campus, of the Institutional Vision and the Mission Statement. Then comes the development of institutional program goals, which have to align with the vision and the mission, and, on the academic side, with the area program goals, which likewise have to align with the vision and the mission. Then each department revamps its institutional syllabi to align each course's Student Learning Outcomes with the institution's area program goals. Each SLO has to be measurable and to be tied to an APG. The result is a set of nested Xcel files that show how, for example, how SLO-2 of Eng 203 contributes to APG1.2.a (critical thinking--ability to summarize), and to APG 1.3.a (aesthetic appreciation), and to APG 1.3.c (lifelong learning), etc.

And then, just when you think you are done and can get back to teaching your courses (four per semester), everyone has to meet again to try to reconcile the institutional syllabus's SLOs to the state's newly mandated guaranteed transfer protocols, which require the inclusion of additional SLOs, which like the others have to be assessed somehow, which means the assessment results will now be apples instead of last year's oranges. And later everyone has to meet again to cook up ways to demonstrate to the visiting accreditation team that not only are our SLOs aligned with our APGs, and not only are we assessing our SLOs (which we've been doing for years now), but we are also "closing the loop" of assessment by periodically reviewing the assessment results and incorporating what we've learned into our teaching and our program design. And then, because we're primarily a teacher-prep college, we have to do it again when we face the education program's separate teacher-ed accreditation.

And partly because certain humanities objectives are difficult if not impossible to quantify (what are the units of aesthetic appreciation? of lifelong learning?), and partly because none of us lit teachers are formally trained in the methodology of quantitative assessment to begin with, not being social scientists and all, the assessments we come up with are almost certainly not methodologically sound, which is to say they’re probably all but useless. (And how would we know whether they're useless or not, unless we assess our assessment?) Certainly if a graduate student in the human sciences were to take our "assessment instrument" to a dissertation committee and say, "This is how I propose to measure student learning," she would get laughed out of the room. (Imagine this student explaining to the committee that she developed the assessment by getting a bunch of humanists in a room for a couple of hours to talk about a subject about which they know next to nothing, and then adopting their conclusions by a show of hands.) But hey--it's an assessment, and our administration will be happy with it and in any event is certainly not going to shell out the money to have a team of assessment professionals develop something that is both relevant to our program and methodologically sound, so we'll just pretend everything's OK. The administration can show off a bunch of numbers and the faculty can go prepare for class.

I guess the point is that if a lot of us faculty are resistant to assessment, it's not only because we're so lazy and stubborn. It's also because some of us experience the assessment fad a little differently than Derek Bok theorizes it. To Bok, I suppose, it's just common sense. Like many a Five-Year Plan, it probably looks great on paper. But to us, it's more like Frederick Winslow Taylor meets Franz Kafka. (If only, if only we had a conservative champion out there, someone who would argue that the best way to improve teaching is to free us from this nightmarish web of conflicting bureaucratic and political demands and unleash our creative energies. If only “assessment” could get reframed as "regulation" or "creeping statism" or even “technocratic utopianism.” If only Ayn Rand would come back and write "Socrates Shrugged"....

But I did like this: "As a result of advancements in cognitive science...some such measures are already available." I know it’s not exactly what Bok meant, but the image that refuses to leave my head is of my students hooked up to electrodes on Final Exam day. I can even see the conductive jelly oozing out over the little shaved patches next to the mohawks and ponytails--as they open their exam booklets and I flip a switch to begin digitally recording how much I've deepened their aesthetic appreciation of Walden.

David, at my school some years ago we invited a chemistry prof, an assessment and student-learning expert and herald of the new dispensation, to visit as part of our pro-assessment makeover. His claim to fame was that he'd diligently and rigorously compared two teaching styles--lecturing and "active learning"--and found that the latter produced impressively better outcomes. I doubt this fellow would consider lecturing a primary job responsibility. Why should he, if the research shows that active learning facilitation is more important to student learning than lecturing? The primary job responsibility is to increase student learning as measured by an approved assessment instrument. Now, you might think that you know better than this expert. You might think that your years of experience give you a certain amount of insight not accessible to the assessment instrument--something that used to be called judgment, but under the new regime if you haven't actually measured the effectiveness of your teaching style against that of others, you don't know jack. And if you insist that you do, well, you're resisting.

Part of what's happening here is that no form of instruction, least of all such traditional forms as the lecture, can be taken for granted as effective no matter how well performed. A department chair can't simply observe a class session, note the depth and brilliance and cogency of the lecture and the focused attention and perceptive questions of the students, and conclude that any actual learning has taken place. That's not good enough any more. Only measurement counts. Judgment means nothing.

It seems to me that conservatives--at least of the Burkean sort--would see the problem with substituting external technocratic expertise for local organic judgment. The danger is that the machinery of assessment will transform academia to conform all too well to the criteria of its assessment, and only then will we discover that, gosh darn it, our assessments were after all rather too narrow in their conception of liberal arts education, and that we have lost certain elusive yet crucial qualities we wish we could recover.

But then, what do I know? I just work here.

Eveningsun, my point is simpler. If you lecture, you ought to work hard on the skills required to give a good lecture. If you pursue "active learning facilitation" (for which I hope a substantive definition exists) then you ought to work on the skills required to do *that* effectively. My point here is that there are professors--I'd guess 30-50%--who may work very hard at research and even at grading, personal interaction with students, etc, but have never systematically tried to develop their skills in communicating with a group.

Such people exist in business, too, but are perhaps more subject to mockery by peers and superiors than in academia.

I'll paraphrase David just a bit and say that "it's hard to understand why a person whose understanding of his primary job responsibilities is that they consist of lectures and presentations would fail to seriously work on improving the relevant skills." I remember that when I was in college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had professors who talked at us for the whole class period - or maybe talked down at their books, or at the chalkboard behind them. I think they thought that was what they were supposed to do. BORING. My organic chemistry professor stands out in my memory as a shining exception to this - he thought organic chemistry was cooler than heck and this came through his lectures. I have much more positive memories of organic than any other chemist I know.

I like this: "I can even see the conductive jelly oozing out over the little shaved patches next to the mohawks and ponytails--as they open their exam booklets and I flip a switch to begin digitally recording how much I've deepened their aesthetic appreciation of Walden." We were talking about this sort of thing at work today, actually. My brother majored in physics. He told me that he failed an upper-level class that he had to have for his degree, and had to re-take it. This bummed him out until he discovered that not only his professor, but the head of the department had also failed that class and had to re-take it. Okay, what's the point of this? Is it a sort of hazing? Because if the point was to teach this particular aspect of physics, it seems pretty clear that what they were doing wasn't working. It was too much material for one semester, or it needed some prerequisites that it didn't have, or something. But they preferred to leave it as it was - for a reason, or out of inertia? Who knows?

And my boss thought that in an upper-level math class the tests might be structured so that only the very most gifted math students could make A's and B's. In that case, the test is really an IQ test, not a test of what reasonably could be learned by the sort of students who were routinely admitted to that class - which I doubt the students would be told ahead of time.

So I wonder how often it happens that the teacher, alone or in concert with other teachers, steps back and asks, "exactly what am I trying to accomplish in this class? Is the purpose of this class to impart a body of knowledge, or to weed out the crybabies? And what are the tests I am going to administer supposed to measure? If I do an adequate job of teaching, and the students come prepared to learn, what will the grade distribution look like?" Is there a spot in your assessment chain (which looks like goal roll-down in the nonacademic world) for these questions?

Laura writes: "I wonder how often it happens that the teacher...steps back and asks, 'exactly what am I trying to accomplish in this class? Is the purpose of this class to impart a body of knowledge, or to weed out the crybabies? And what are the tests I am going to administer supposed to measure? If I do an adequate job of teaching, and the students come prepared to learn, what will the grade distribution look like?' Is there a spot in your assessment chain...for these questions?"

Absolutely there's a spot for those questions. We discuss these things quite a bit, actually. There's even a fair amount of consensus, for example, that our job is not to "weed out crybabies," and that it's OK if a composition class's average grade is 2.6 instead of 2.0 (because, after all, we eliminate the weakest students up front by giving a placement exam that routes many into "developmental" classes).

One big problem is that too often the answer to the question "exactly what am I trying to accomplish in this class?" is overly influenced by the "goal roll-down" (thanks for the term--I love it!) and by guaranteed transfer agreements, and the like. I imagine this problem is much more acute in the humanities than elsewhere.

My memories of boring professors jibes with yours. Overall I think teaching now is much better than in my student days (early 80s). None of my lit teachers ever suggested there was anything really important at stake in the study of lit--a deficiency I try to make up in my own teaching. (Lit theory makes this a snap, BTW.)

I read this post with interest. As a practicing physician (and medical school faculty member), it seems to me that you folks in "real" academia are experiencing something akin to what we have seen in medicine w.r.t. outcomes analyses that do, indeed, seem as though they were developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Franz Kafka nice one!). As with my own "industry", the burden is on you folks to define how what you do is somehow exempt from the sort of thing which is prevalent in other "industries". I can tell you that the public believes in meretricious measures of "excellence" and total quality improvement.

Of course, the next thing is to ask yourself why education - even higher education, given our advancing standars as a society - isn't a right; whether the light teaching schedules of those at elite institutions aren't insupprtable; and why higher education needs to be so costly, and why it should not be guaranteed at an affordable rate (not only at state schools, but at any private schools which accept public monies).

Welcome to the larger economy. Requirements for pedagogical certification and periodic recertification (what, you mean you're against that? Why? Explain to the public why it isn't special pleading.) That the recertification processes will be chicksh*t, and developed for mass use by for-profit academic entrepreneurs, shouldn't surprise you.

I'm just sayin'.

I was thinking of this post and Total Quality Management on the drive home today, as it happens.

Eveningsun, suppose this scenario: You are teaching a freshman comp class, which all incoming freshmen have to take unless they are in a remedial class. The outcome needs to be students who can write properly: proper spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, that kind of thing. Because your students can't bypass this class and must have it whether they need it or not, let's say that about 2/3 of them come in with these skills already because they had good English programs in their middle and high schools. Of the remaining 1/3, half will get it due to your excellent teaching. So at the end of the semester, the goals for this class are met by almost all of your students. Would you feel OK about giving out As to 5/6 of the class and Bs and Cs to the remaining 1/6? Or would you feel compelled to put extra stuff in the final, maybe extra elements in the grading rubric that you didn't actually cover, in order to get something as much like a normal distribution as possible?

No, I would not feel comfortable giving As to 5/6 of the class. This is partly because of the way we evaluate faculty here. Student evaluation numbers are accompanied by class GPAs, and the general consensus among chairs, retention committee members, tenure and promotion committee members, and on up the line is that the ideal is high student evals coupled with low average course grades. ("Wow! His students love him even though he's rigorous!") High average course grades make one's high evals suspect. ("He just gives his grades away!") Of course, I have tenure and I've made full, so I suppose if I wanted to I could grade all my courses pass-fail. But the institutional culture here definitely goes against giving As to 5/6 of your fictional comp class.

Were that culture and evaluation structure different, I would still wind up with something like a normal distribution (shifted upwards by the absence of the worst-prepared students). But that's not because I believe my job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's because I have a fairly well developed and I believe justifiable sense of what should count as "excellent," "good," "acceptable," etc. in a piece of freshman writing. And while things might be different at a school where all students are coming in with 3.9+ GPAs and SATs above 1300, at my school very few students will wind up producing excellent writing. So no, I wouldn't structure my grading in order to produce any particular distribution at all. The existing range of student abilities takes care of that already.

I would point out that at my school, the outcomes for Comp I go far beyond "proper spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, that kind of thing." They also include these:

--"to read effectively, accurately, and critically";

--"think independently, analytically, and creatively";

--"cultivate appreciation for diverse cultures, persons and ideas and increase their understanding of their place in a multicultural framework";

--"respond to the aesthetic dimensions of human experience in the field of writing, explore basic moral and ethical philosophies, and consider the place of writing in community involvement; and

--"develop writing-related technology skills."

It probably won't surprise you to know that the latter three objectives reflect the "mission roll-down" you mentioned earlier. There are also some unwritten objectives, including the idea, linked to the institution's need to improve freshman retention, that students' first semester of college not be like high school. We are asked to immerse students right away in intellectual excitement--and of course spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph organization are so high school.... The basic trend is to get grammar out of the freshman comp classroom and into the Writing Studio and Tutoring Center, which I think is all to the good. Students who don't need that stuff don't have to stew in their boredom, but students who do need it can get it. (Although many of the students who need it have low motivation and are unlikely to seek it on their own.)

One pernicious result of having so many extra learning outcomes is that students can be lousy writers yet do well enough in other areas that they wind up passing the class. The general assumption is that a kid who can't write for beans, yet has passed Comp I, must be evidence that some comp instructor has done a lousy job. But that's no longer necessarily true. Oh well.

The existence of so many outside sources of help (tutoring center, writing studios, etc.) tends to make grading more difficult. Even if a student has not cheated in the least, it can be hard to know how much of a finished paper reflects that student's own skills. We do want the needy student to get outside help, but we also want to know how well that student can write on their own. As far as I know, all my colleagues require a sit-down, handwritten final exam which can serve as a reality check.

When I read people like Bok I get no sense that they have the slightest clue about what teaching is like in my own neighborhood. I do agree with Erin that "in the humanities in particular, good teaching is the single most important thing a college professor can do." But to the extent that Bok's recommendations are just going to result in more layers of bureaucratic control and ultimately meaningless work that disrupt and complicate not only my and my colleagues' teaching but also our existing efforts to evaluate and improve that teaching, I would just as soon he go away. I'd much rather have him writing the millionth monograph on Jane Austen than technocratic calls for Taylorization like Our Underachieving Colleges.

Does that mean I'm against transparency and accountability? Nah. If he wants to, Bok can assemble his own team of researchers and take my students (after class!) and do all the assessing he wants, and if as a result he wants to tell me or my chair or my board or my legislature that instead of X I should be doing Y, then fine. I just don't like people suggesting (never, of course, explicitly) that I cut my own throat on my own time. I've got classes to teach, including one that starts in five minutes, so adieu.

I guess what confuses me is that I work with college grads all the time who cannot string together a sentence with a subject and a predicate, and who seem convinced that "any word with an 's' at the end must be in want of an apostrophe" to paraphrase Jane Austin. Yes, college grads. (Also college grads who majored in chemistry, who wince when I introduce calculations involving things like normality that they should have done in high school.) From the ultimately pragmatic view of a person who has to work with people who come out of colleges with degrees, I'd rather see a composition course in which those basic things are required, and where students all get A's because they leave the course understanding where you stick a comma.

"Explore basic moral and ethical philosophies" is composition? Really? I'm not arguing with you.
I wonder how subjective the grading might be in such a class, which as you say, might lead to decent grades from people who still can't write.

I do agree about not wanting people who got the high school stuff in high school to stew in their own boredom. I was able to bypass Freshman English and went straight into English Lit, which was a lot more fun. By the time my daughter got there they weren't allowing students to bypass Freshman English and her comp class required her to listen to stuff like "The 'I' pronoun is a way of validating the self from a feminist perspective". She anonymously marks up the posters that other students put up, correcting their spelling and grammar. They can't spell, but by golly they're validated, and they passed Freshman comp.

I think there is a rule that when people are commenting about other people's mistakes, they have to make them in the same comment. "Jane Austen" for pete's sake.

Yup, "Explore basic moral and ethical philosophies." I have no problem with focusing a composition class on ethical philosophy or any other topic--the students have to write about something after all, and they might as well pick up a little extra knowledge along the way. But a.) the topic should be determined by the instructor or the students, not by the institution's mission statement, and b.) mastery of the topic-of-writing should not be a goal; mastery of writing should be the goal. Once mastery of the topic-of-writing has been added as a goal, then the student can earn points by mastering that and the way has been opened for some students to pass the course without being able to write.

We're definitely in agreement that the basic goal of a writing class ought to be producing people who can write.

So might an English teacher who has taken on the task of teaching composition to incoming freshmen, and then is presented with these goals, reasonably ask what qualifies him or her to teach "basic moral and ethical philosophies"? If the teacher didn't, the students perhaps might reasonably ask that question on the teacher's behalf. And the student might further wonder whether the teacher's moral and ethical philosophy is anything the student needs or wants to learn.

My daughter's school recently was visited by Christine Todd Whitman. The dean who introduced her said that she was an honorary Democrat for the day, because he couldn't imagine a Republican speaking at that school. My daughter, who is a Republican, might wonder what that dean's goals for her basic moral and philosophical development could be. One understands that the dean is not teaching composition, but with goal roll-down and all, it could be a concern.

Well, I think the idea is not that students should be indoctrinated in "the teacher's moral and ethical philosophy" but that they should be introduced to basic concepts like utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, etc., which they can then use to think through their own ethical positions (or at least start to develop some). Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as the ethical philosophy stuff is subordinated to the writing instruction rather than being seen as a goal in itself. (Comp teachers have always had students write on the wide variety of topics typically contained in freshman comp readers, without formal training in those topics--but of course knowledge of those topics is not traditionally a "learning outcome.") If learning about the topic is a goal in itself the way to achieve it is to require an Intro to Philosophy course and hire people qualified to teach it. My guess is that doing it right takes more money than the institution has (or more than the legislature cares to appropriate, or whatever--our in-state tuition is $1,200 per semester). So we try to do it on the cheap. (Maybe that's part of running a college like a business: do more with less! eliminate redundancies!) The problem is too big a vision colliding with too small a budget. Perhaps also the problem is faculty too willing to "help out" with the Mission by letting extraneous outcomes creep into syllabi where they don't belong. Me, I'd love to have a real philosophy requirement (and much else that we currently lack) in the gen-ed curriculum, but if we aren't going to require the actual course I'd just as soon not list it as a learning objective at all.