This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker, and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Welcome to Busted Pencils class and sensation,
fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education.
Johnny Lupinacci, so good to see you, my friend.
How are you doing all right?
It's the fall.
It's busiest time of the year for us teachers and coaches
and everything.
It seems like fall, everything speeds up to that like 5x,
whatever the normal time is.
So, but I'm happy to be here with you, Tim,
and so excited about our conversation today,
because we've been talking so much about, you know,
AI about all the different tools in our classrooms
and the different things.
But, you know, tonight's conversation
or today's conversation is going to be a real special one,
because there's just so much topics going on, Tim.
Yeah, no, so, so, so much.
And we say our guest right now, he had, you know,
I'll pitch it out there, a great article
Washington Monthly, why professors can't teach.
He's a professor, historian, and fierce critic
of higher education, misplaced priorities.
He spent his career exposing the flaws
and how universities value research over teaching
and pushing for real change in the classroom
from his groundbreaking work on college teaching
to his bold, bold calls for reform.
He's not afraid to shake up the status quo.
Now, let's just welcome two busted pencils, Jonathan Zimmerman.
Jonathan or John, as you keep telling us to say,
John, how are you?
I'm good. Thanks for having me.
Why professors can't teach?
Okay, this is the article that just came out here, you know,
last month, but you've been writing about this.
In fact, your book, The Amateur Hour,
what is it about?
Why are you attacking college professors for their teaching?
They're, they're awesome.
Come on, I'm Dr. Tim Slecker, Dr. Johnny Lupinacci.
We know we can teach by the fact that you call us doctor.
You guys rock.
Look, I can tell you that,
and I'm sure both of you experienced this,
we don't choose our headlines.
And why professors can't teach was not my choice
because if there are a million or so professors
to say that they can or can't teach,
it doesn't make a lot of sense, right?
They're great professors in the classroom.
They're terrible ones and most of us are somewhere in between.
My point wasn't that we're all,
that we all suck or we're all great.
It was that, to the title of my book The Amateur Hour,
we haven't actually professionalized the teaching function.
That is, for research, we have a set of professional canons
that we use to judge each other.
They're not perfect, by the way,
because no set of professional canons are,
but we're not going to jettison them
and just say, okay, all research is created equal.
That's really what we do with teaching.
We don't actually have norms for what good teaching is
and we don't have systems to enforce them.
That's why it's The Amateur Hour, right?
Not because we're all bad or we're all good.
Let's remember the best gymnast in my youth
with Nadia Komonechi and she was an amateur
because back then, professionals couldn't be in the Olympics.
So it's not about whether professors can or can't teach.
It's about the systems that we've created
or not around teaching.
I know, and we, Johnny and I have talked about this too.
We've had great guests from the Association of College
and University Educators, AQ, Jonathan Gurko
on to talk about the reality and the, quote,
the movement that they're trying to push into recognizing
high quality teaching in higher education.
Almost to the part of where some form of even saying,
could we mark this with a distinction
so that faculty can actually carry around
some type of credential that says, like,
I'm incredibly qualified to teach.
But let's go back though a little bit
to point out just for the listener right now to say,
wait, when did that not really become the issue?
This whole idea, because I can imagine
my neighbor right now saying, wait,
are you saying that potentially college faculty
have gotten to that position without having preparation
for learning how to teach?
I think pointing that out, John,
would be just kind of just helpful.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, let's look
about where I teach the University of Pennsylvania, right?
Recently ranked number 10 by US News and Report
down from six last year, not that I really care,
but obviously a very elite established
wealthy institution.
So to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
you have to show that you are a world class researcher.
All right, but if you're getting a PhD at Penn
which requires you to spend five to eight years
doing an in-depth primary research project,
at some point you'll probably be a teaching assistant.
And for that, you receive a three-day training.
So let's think about this, right?
So to get a PhD, you have to engage in years
and years of close training supervised by your directors
and you have to demonstrate that you have something
original and new to say, right?
And to answer a class from the Penn, you get three days.
Now, let me tell you, three days is better than zero days,
which is what some people receive,
but that speaks to exactly the problem, right?
The reason I am at Penn has nothing to do
with my attitude as a teacher.
I may be a great teacher
and I may be a terrible one.
I'm probably somewhere in between because most of us are,
but that was entirely irrelevant to my being hired at Penn.
Also, let me emphasize, I'm entering my eighth year,
I taught at NYU for 20 years before getting here.
And I've never had somebody observe me in the classroom
in a supervisory capacity.
I have had administrators in my classroom,
but that's because I invited them to talk
about subject A or B.
I've never had somebody come in and observe me
with an eye to evaluating my teaching.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that we don't place
an institutional premium on it.
Yeah, this is great, Jonathan.
And just for our listeners,
if you're catching this or you're like,
wait, who we have here?
We have Jonathan Zimmerman talking about the importance
of teachers and college learning to teach,
which is what we know by and large,
not often happening.
And I love your clarification, Jonathan,
you were saying about, you know, it's so common.
This is not just a blanket statement
about like, hey, professors out there can't teach.
There are so many.
I like how you said that, that following that,
they're pretty good at it.
But, but it's by happenstance.
It's by experience.
It's often by trial and error.
It's by seeking that out on your own.
And then the system that exists by and large
and thank you for sharing that with our listener.
Listener, if you want to ask a question,
you can always drop a call into the mailbag
608557, 8577, say something,
leave a comment or ask a question.
And, you know, Tim and Johnny will get to it.
And we like that you listen and that you provide
your feedback as well.
But Jonathan was saying a really important part.
As a college professor, I've been teaching
in the university setting now for,
I think this is my 25th year.
It's my 25th anniversary.
Not at the institutional mat.
I think going on a year 11 there.
But by and large, working with my peers
to get better at teaching is highly unrewarded.
It's something that maybe I do because, hey,
I come out of education, I'm a high school teacher
and I can pretty much tell my students
aren't quite learning or they are
and they're not learning what they could from me.
They're learning in other ways.
They're going out to resources on the internet.
They're getting, they're being students.
But they're not learning in an engaged,
active way in my classroom.
Or this has often happened in my teaching career.
The demographic has shifted a bunch.
Who's going to college has changed?
In a really exciting way.
And so I always say you kind of fall on one side or the other.
You're either falling on the side that says,
hey, the demographic's changing and this is a problem.
That's not us here today or most of our listeners.
Or you're saying, hey, the demographic has changed
and this is interesting and I need to get better at my craft
because the game is changing a bit.
And so this is exciting conversation to have
because there are places where you can go
to learn to teach in college.
And it's something we all have to do
from time to time.
It's spend some time honing our craft and staying caught up.
So I love this conversation, Jonathan.
Tim, I think we have so much more to talk about here.
But Jonathan, talk to us a little bit more about this.
For a lot of our listeners, they're like,
wait, you mean there's a lot of professors
who aren't that good at teaching?
Sure, I mean, and why wouldn't it be otherwise
when you think about it, right?
If what you're doing is ranking and evaluating
and hiring people based on how much they publish,
why would we expect the outcome to be different?
If you happen to be a good teacher,
people would admire you for that.
But it's not going to advance your career.
So I think it's unfortunate,
but it's also over-determined like the professors would say,
that is in its own horrible way, it makes perfect sense.
Let me just say two things though,
picking up on what Johnny said.
My book ends really in the early odds
and before this organization called AQ,
the Association of College and University Educators.
And I know you've had Jonathan Gorko,
the very able and imaginative director of that
and founder on here.
I think they're moving in exactly the right direction
because not only are they trying to provide training
for professors and how to teach,
but they're also trying to credentialize it, right?
That is, they're trying to create a world
in which having received an AQ training
and having shown that your instruction is improved
as a function of the AQ training,
that that becomes a benefit to you,
that becomes a CV maker.
Because one of the themes of my own book,
which is a history of college teaching,
is that moral suasion is not going to cut it.
Like just saying, God, this really sucks
and it should be different.
That doesn't make it, right?
I think people need skin in the game
and I think Jonathan and AQ are going
in exactly the right direction.
Let me also say that in some ways,
I misspoke when I said we don't have systems
for evaluating teaching.
There's one that hasn't come up yet
with his student evaluations,
that is student reports of that courses.
And I just want to say,
because I'm sure some of the listeners
are interested in this as well.
I'm a big supporter of student evaluations
and I also think they're not enough.
So I think they're important things that they can tell us
and we should ask students about them
to take some obvious examples.
Does the professor return work in a timely fashion?
It turns out that's a very important thing
for people's learning and we all remember that, right?
If you get something back soon,
you learn more from the comments
than if it comes back two months later
and you haven't thought about it in the interim.
Does the professor make herself
or himself available outside of class?
Also very important for people's learning
and also something the students,
as in the first case,
do they return work in a timely way?
Students very good at judging.
Is the teacher an effective instructor
or did I learn a lot from this class?
Turns out that the students are very poor judges of that.
We need professional systems to judge that.
When I wrote my history of college teaching,
I did not submit it to a group of college freshmen
to determine whether it had something important to say.
I submitted it to fellow specialists in my field.
So of course, we need student evaluations,
but I would argue that they're a necessary
and not a sufficient factor.
We do need them,
but we also need something on top of them
with his peer review.
Yeah, that peer review process,
you just made me think of so many different examples going
through as Johnny said his 25 years,
my close to 30 years in higher education.
And even the reality that Johnny and I both do come out
of quote that education background where we work teachers.
But even that though Jonathan,
and I've got a couple of things in my mind
so I'm going to keep them going.
But even the fact that,
and I bet Johnny will agree with me too,
there was an assumption even in my getting my PhD
where I got my PhD at the University of Maryland College Park
in the College of Education.
I didn't ever have,
as you said, a preparation in teaching
at the higher education level,
it wasn't something that was done.
It was probably more from the College of Education assumed
because you people used to be teachers,
obviously going over this teaching thing
is not something we need to do.
And at the time,
I didn't even see it as a potential drawback to my preparation
because I was being prepared to go out
and yes, do research,
but I was being prepared also to be an educator.
And I just think about that my own experience
that even in a College of Education getting a PhD,
the preparation wasn't focused on whether or not
I could then be a good teacher, it was assumed.
And that is a problem too.
So Jonathan, if you want to comment on that.
Well, I mean, I would just say that,
I think many people at Ed School's
have the same experience.
And I think part of the reason,
if we're talking about Ed Schools,
is that Ed Schools have lower status
in most research universities
because they're associated with the K-12 realm.
Right.
So it may well be that this was quite deliberate
on the part of your mentors, right?
Because if they were to emphasize your training
as a college teacher,
they would be reinforcing a kind of stigma, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, I've been coming researchers here now.
This is serious business, right?
That's exactly right.
I could see it right now that I won't mention any of their names
because they were awesome researchers
at the University of Maryland.
But Johnny, you're not in your head too on that.
I'm thinking of the people that were my trainers,
my mentors, the people that my dissertation committee,
they were very conscious on that campus
that they needed to every day propel this position of status
that we are PhD researchers on this campus.
And yeah, it was instilled in me too
that I needed to walk around and let people know.
We did real research.
Johnny, thinking about that, your own experience?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is a great conversation
to be having because it does a couple of things.
It refocuses for our listeners
and for our conversations.
The importance of teaching at all levels,
to learn something and to have a teacher
is a really important relationship
in that learning kind of environment.
The other thing is that we're talking about
most higher ed institutions in the United States
and we can name them all that we've either been at
or worked with kind of follow a traditional model
that is antiquated for what we know.
There are lots of creative ways.
So for our higher ed leadership folks
who listen to the pod here, let's be creative.
Let's take the information we have
and make some changes.
I think you can have both.
I think you can be a research forward institution
anywhere and also value teaching
for its very important role that it plays.
And to be more creative about that,
I've lived at least the last 11 or so years
that balance of like being at an R1
means being leaders in research.
Great, it also means providing great education
in that takes time that's largely uninsentivized.
So I'm not just saying like, hey,
give more money to the professors, it's also time.
Most professors in this country are on a short calendar.
They're on a nine or 10 month calendar
and they're expected to kind of either chip in
or get grant money to get that summer.
But be innovative, go 12 months,
do something like some of the international systems
have shifted to where they say, hey, you're on your round.
Sure you give vacations and things and time off,
but you're on your round and you're teaching
this percentage of the year.
Because it is hard to do both sometimes
when you're like off site, doing your research
or you're really buried in your writing,
that's really important time
and sometimes it can be complemented by good teaching.
But that's not always true.
And so having a good balance
between what our roles and responsibilities are as professors,
I think is really important
and it can be done if we're creative
and we incentivize it in really like really doable ways.
I really like what Johnny's saying about creative
because I would add that we need to be politically creative
and this is something I wrote about
in my Washington monthly piece.
So until I started researching that piece,
I didn't know that the Biden administration
had invested pretty heavily in college student retention.
They've been giving out these post-secondary success grants
that help students stay in school
by providing transportation, childcare,
advising and counseling, tech assistance.
And by the way, all these things,
I think are very worthy, right?
And they can also help people stay in school.
But you know what else can help people succeed in school?
Better teaching, yes.
And the post-secondary success grants that program,
as best I could tell, makes absolutely no mention of this.
We should be awarding grants to the institutions
that make a real commitment and effort
to measuring and evaluating teaching and to improving it.
And you know, that would be expensive, right?
Because what we found is, you know,
the best way to evaluate teaching is to send
a lot of trained observers into classrooms.
You know what that means, that means money, right?
I mean, things of value have cost.
And if you don't want to sustain the cost,
you probably don't value them very much.
You know, and it is the institutional focus too
that really has this in the leadership
when we say about this.
But, you know, I got a man so much going on here.
I want to talk about Jonathan Gerkko's quotations
where he said this idea of qualified to teach.
But I can, you know, I do want to point out my own past,
the two, which says there are institutions
that do recognize that.
So Jonathan, you know, my preparation as a PhD
at the University of Maryland College Park
was to prepare me as my advisor said,
you are going to be qualified to get a position
at an R1 institution.
You can decide not to do that.
And that's perfectly fine.
But my job is to prepare you for an R1.
I really wanted to go into teaching.
That was my passion.
And so I went to a teaching quote institution, not an R1.
And then I ended up at a Penn State campus,
not Penn State, the main campus,
where teaching was to focus.
And what you pointed out, and I will say,
the comprehensiveness on evaluating my teaching
on that Penn State campus required
constantly three different peer reviews of teaching,
quote, you know, guidance where they did it.
Yes, student comments mattered,
but it was part of this package of a commitment
to saying we want to know your teaching.
We want to see you teaching in all of your sections too.
And we've put together this process.
So this again, because if you're listening right now going,
but my campus really does focus on good teaching.
We know there are campuses out there
that make this effort, as you said that.
But there's not a way to then come back,
though, maybe potentially in higher education.
And this is where Jonathan really had this,
you know, he's saying about the politics.
Boy, but you want to get people going.
What if we had this quote qualified to teach credential
that was handed out to faculty on campuses,
what that would look like.
But then he also said, boy, if we got into this,
you could see a whole bunch of people going,
we don't know what that means.
We don't know what that means.
Sure.
Right.
And look, you know, the R1s don't really
want the kind of performance you're scrubbing to.
Right.
Because one of the things that Corbin Campbell found out
in her book, and by the way,
this is kind of the state of the art book
about college teaching.
She teaches at American University.
And the reason the state of the art is,
she and her research assistants spent a decade,
a decade, 10 years observing 732 instructors,
over and over again, at nine different institutions,
so every type.
And one of the things she found was that the average quality
of teaching was higher at regional state universities,
than it is at the flagship state universities,
and especially than it is at the privates
at the private research universities.
So, you know, those schools,
the flagships and the privates,
they do really well in the US news
and world report rankings, right?
Maybe they don't want a teaching ranking
that's going to diminish their status.
So, all these things are real.
Yeah, that ranking system, though, too, as you point out,
it can really, you know, what do we value?
And we know that particularly the US news
and world report ranking quality teaching.
No, it's still research, research dollars,
and we realize that.
I guess, though, too, when we're talking about this,
the reality that some institutions to own that,
being a great teaching institution,
this is where I like AQ, quote,
as they say, creating a movement.
And in fact, they do have a credential now
that allows people to claim an expertise in teaching.
And the point now, too, is how do we get institutions
to even say very, you know, very transparently and pointedly,
we believe in really great teaching, too.
We're going to ask that all of our future faculty
go through the AQ process to get that credential
so that we can have a common understanding
about what it means to be qualified to teach
on higher education campuses.
Yeah, well, again, I mean, I think this is really
a political problem.
It's not an educational one, right?
And I think, you know, to go back to what I was saying
about the federal government, you know,
I think that the federal government
should be incentivizing schools that do that, right?
That's the best way we could promote,
not just student retention, but diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
The best DEI program, better college teaching, right?
Because people who have less advantage
are more likely to wash out in the presence of bad teachers.
Somebody that are really, really good high school education,
they can get something out of a badly taught class, right?
But somebody with a poor high school education can't,
not nearly as much.
So the best DEI program would be better college teaching,
but to your question, Tim, how do you incentivize that?
I think the feds have a role here.
Look, they're already incentivizing providing childcare
and providing technical assistance, right, to students.
Why can't they do this?
Well, this, what we're talking about, would cost more.
There is no question about that.
And so that's where we get into the politics.
How much would we value it?
Well, it is.
Politics, priorities, how much do we value it?
And as you said, recognizing that retention,
let's go back to that metric, right?
Because there is a reason that, yes, retention
and graduation and completion, we know matters.
And we know it makes a difference in students' lives.
And we know that there are, as you said, there are these other things,
such as, you know, having a campus that understands your culture,
even diversity, equity and inclusion, you know,
aspects that really try to say, look, we see you,
we recognize you, we want you to complete.
But as you point out, though, too, one of the best retention,
and this is where AQ and Jonathan Garco pointed out,
actually, the research, their solid research
that says you want to increase retention,
increase quality teaching, and that will give it to you.
So the Fed has a research leg to stand on,
to say, here's why we're incentivizing this.
And in fact, we're going to say, here is money
through the Department of Education, right?
Right.
And look, I think this is one of the smallest things
that Jonathan and AQ have done,
which is invest in research showing
the real material benefits of this stuff.
You know, my grandfather came out of a social tradition
and he used to say, change starts from the stomach, right?
So if you want to change the world, you know,
leave aside all this high-faluten abstraction about this and that
and just explain to somebody how whatever you want
is going to be in their self-interest, right?
Change starts from the stomach.
And I do think it would be in the self-interest
of our campuses to have better teaching
because they'll retain more students.
And that's the lifeblood.
Tuition is the lifeblood of the American University.
Tuition's a lifeblood and then you point out though,
then too, you know, right now higher education
doesn't necessarily have a great public perception.
Whether that's truly earned or not,
we could point it this out.
But boy, if you want to change that perception around,
because we do know that parents and families
make a large investment going into lots of debt
to create this college opportunity for their children.
The idea that we as a higher ed institution
could step up and create better completion rates,
better retention rates.
I think that's the other incentive there is to say,
it helps us also tell our story
about why we're not these crazy socialist,
you know, indoctrination machines.
We're part of actually the ladder of mobility
for your families, for your, you know,
for the communities in which our college is operating.
We provide that necessity of strength and ability
for, guess what, people to graduate
and go out and get a job.
Right, and let me just say one of the thing, you know,
is part of her own work that I referred to,
Corbin Campbell.
She commissioned a survey asking Americans
what was the mark of a good college?
And the most popular answer was it has excellent teachers.
That was ahead of it as good researchers
or even, you know, that its graduates
earn lots of money, right?
So that's what the public is telling us.
We just haven't listened yet.
Oh, man, Jonathan, I think we could go on and on on this
because obviously we have a passion
for making college teaching better.
I mean, say this too, you know, if you're listening
out there and you enjoyed this interview
that we had with Jonathan Zimmerman,
make sure you do put something in our mailbag,
608-557-8577.
Make sure you do.
And as Jess, our producer always points out,
Tim, when you give the number, you're too darn fast.
Slow it down.
Thank you, Jess.
I got it.
608-557-8577 is the number to our mailbag.
Putting in some questions.
And the other part too, if you are in higher education
and you're listening to this,
we know the provost and the president's need
to hear this conversation,
to recognize and create that sense of urgency
of getting some form of whatever we're going to agree on,
qualified to teach, let's step up,
let's do, you know, Jonathan Zimmerman,
let's get together with Jonathan Gurko, ACU,
let's build a movement around great college teaching,
and let's allow our students who come to these campuses
to experience a passion and a gift
from those great teachers that are out there.
Boy, because we can inspire people to just be amazing
in Jonathan Zimmerman, I'll tell you what,
I am so happy that we had you on busted pencils,
and what we always like to say to our guests,
you have truly busted pencils, Jonathan Zimmerman.
I'm not sure how to interpret that,
but I'll take this a compliment.
Yeah, thanks for everything that you do.
Oh, thank you so much.
And busted pencils listeners, thank you.
Doing what you do all the time,
which is tuning us in and putting in the time
in the effort to make education something that we all value.
Johnny and I could not be more excited
about our partnership with ACU,
because here at busted pencils,
we're all about great teaching.
We've always believed that the best faculty
make the biggest difference.
And ACU's courses are designed to help college faculty
do exactly that.
We are thrilled to work with a program
that aligns so perfectly with our values.
Hey, and just because you're a busted pencils listener,
you get 20% off any ACU course.
Just use the busted pencils 2,020 at checkout.
That's busted pencils, all caps, 2,020% off.
And hey, man, you can start busting pencils with us.