The quality of teaching, more than ever, is seen as the all-important results area for colleges and universities. Most schools do a creditable job, but hardly anyone doubts that improvements are possible and desirable.
Last September’s report from Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education was particularly forceful in its case for improvement, citing declining literacy rates and poor preparation among college graduates; a lack of clear, reliable information about cost and quality; and an absence of accountability.
Boards should heed such criticisms and ascertain that their institution is thoroughly auditing progress. They must assure themselves and those for whom they exercise fiduciary responsibility that teaching quality is good and that processes are in place to maintain and improve it over time. To be effective, such processes must be systematic and rooted in solid evidence—not on anecdotes and wishful thinking.
Board members must make sure the process overcomes the natural inertia and defensive routines that exist in any organization. They must engage every level of the organization: the president and chief academic officer, deans, department chairs, regular and adjunct faculty, and the board itself.
Few boards would dispute the importance of teaching or their responsibility for exercising oversight over its quality and continuous improvement. Yet there is little consensus about how to accomplish such oversight. Many capable faculty members consider this a task better suited to professional academics. Indeed, few board members have the expertise needed to gauge teaching quality, let alone improve it, and most are rightly fearful of anything that looks like board micromanagement. Nor can they rely on established quality indicators or “black belt” quality experts as can be found in, say, a manufacturing organization.
Hence, most boards depend on such statistics as retention rates and graduates’ success in the job market, buttressed by assurances from administrators and testimony by and about the institution’s best teachers. Unfortunately, these traditional methods simply aren’t sufficient to discharge the board’s responsibility for monitoring educational quality. We’d like to offer an approach that is both effective and appropriate given board members’ expertise, time constraints, and duty to confine their work to the strategic level.
Board members aren’t the only ones who find it hard to oversee teaching quality. Presidents, provosts, and deans are in the same boat. Most want to do a good job, but the traditional ideas about teaching quality held by most academics are increasingly being recognized as inadequate.
Ask any accomplished academic leader about the best ways to ensure and improve teaching quality and you’ll probably hear variations on the following.
- Hire good faculty, where “good” includes demonstrated teaching competence.
- Consider teaching when setting annual salary increases and in making promotion and tenure decisions.
- Offer remediation to faculty who need help through a “teaching and learning center.”
- Offer awards for good teaching.
- Include rhetoric about teaching in the university’s mission statement and strategic plan, and attempt to change the culture about the importance of teaching.
Each of these approaches will contribute positively to quality, and some of them do in fact represent necessary conditions. But even collectively they are insufficient. It’s hard to imagine good teaching from faculty who aren’t competent pedagogues or whose college or university demonstrates indifference. And even the best teachers may lose their focus over time. The availability of remediation for faculty certainly helps, but generally only the very worst teachers avail themselves of the opportunity and even then usually under duress.
Awards celebrate exemplary teaching and send highly visible signals that the institution cares, but they affect the behavior of relatively few professors. Rhetoric and exhortation also send such signals, but they lack effectiveness unless the institution does something more—unless it “walks the walk” as well as “talks the talk.”
Most professors want to do a good job of teaching. Many became academics because they felt teaching to be a calling. Even those who entered the profession to become scholars or researchers usually care about their students. And even if those motivations were lacking, most professors want to avoid making fools of themselves in front of a class. Faculty learn to “profess” their fields as part of their doctoral training, and they feel an obligation to impart the field’s content to successive generations of students.
But several problems may be beyond faculty control.
Most professors are trained in content expertise rather than in the science of learning and the art of teaching. Most believe high-quality teaching depends mainly if not exclusively on rigorous and clearly presented content—a view that in its most extreme form holds that good research is all that’s needed for good teaching. Absent is systematic consideration of how students learn, how teachers can best facilitate learning with the particular kinds of students who populate their classrooms, and—importantly—how one can collect and process evidence about ways to do better.
Consideration of how to effect learning in the most efficient way—in terms of student time and institutional and faculty resources—is more than absent; it is anathema to many faculty. The idea that more or better learning almost always requires more spending, and therefore that faculty can do little on their own initiative, is deeply embedded in the academic culture. Yet the continuous improvement of teaching quality, where “quality” is defined in terms of student learning, requires ever more efficient deployment of the department’s existing resources.
Professors tend to view teaching as an individual instead of a collective activity—as a private matter between them and their students that is protected in all respects by academic freedom. Collective responsibility is limited to curricular design, and in some circumstances departmental or individual-faculty self-interest may outweigh consideration of what’s best for students. At some institutions, the idea that the student experience should be viewed in end-to-end terms and that departments should take collective responsibility for their members’ teaching performance gets little traction.
Professors have many responsibilities besides teaching—responsibilities that may inhibit efforts to systematically improve teaching quality. Such limitation is not inconsistent with the proposition that most professors care deeply about their teaching. Economists have a word to describe what happens: “satisficing.” Professors focus on teaching to the point where satisfactory results are achieved and then turn to other matters—matters that, in a research university especially, revolve around research and scholarship.
But really good teaching depends on more than satisfactory performance. Substantial numbers of faculty need to think hard and collectively about how to continuously improve their department’s teaching performance. Continuous improvement is imperative in research because of the pressure of peer-reviewed grant applications and publications. This is not nearly so true in teaching, where the lack of quality measures and collective accountability—coupled with satisficing behavior—allow less-than-optimal or even flawed regimens to be repeated year after year.
Mitigating these problems requires systematic and persistent interventions on the part of the college or university’s academic officers—interventions that should be visible at the board level. It is the quality and vigor of these interventions, not the quality of teaching itself, that provides the best leverage point for board oversight, and boards should expect to review the results of such efforts.
The interventions need to impart knowledge about how to improve teaching and instill a sense of collective responsibility at the department and program level for doing so. This can be done by eliciting structured conversations within departments, with particular reference to five areas: (1) educational objectives for the major or general education; (2) mapping specific objectives into curricula; (3) finding or developing the best possible teaching and learning methods; (4) finding or developing the best possible methods for evaluating the quality of teaching and learning; and (5) assuring the day-to-day quality of teaching, including for adjuncts.
Such conversations and the improvement efforts that flow from them are coming to be called “Academic Quality Work,” or AQW for short. In addition to the five “focal areas” of AQW, the conceptual underpinning includes performance criteria such as focusing on student learningprocesses; striving for coherence among objectives, curricula, teaching methods, and assessment; and continuous improvement.
The University of Missouri System and the Tennessee Board of Regents have stimulated significant improvements through an approach called “academic audit,” as described in the sidebar on page 27. Like its cousin the financial audit, academic audit assesses the institution’s academic work and subsequent reporting about quality rather than the quality of outcomes, per se. Such assessments are inherently easier than measuring output quality, and the methodology is entirely accessible to board members.
Boards can better understand their institution’s AQW by reviewing the processes used to review academic programs. If no such audit has been conducted, the board can properly ask the president and provost whether they know how well the AQW functions are being performed by deans and departments— and perhaps quietly suggest that interventions aimed at improvement and assessment should be forthcoming.
An academic audit is a useful tool for any college or university, and there is no doubt that better AQW will, over time, improve the quality of teaching. Boards have an obligation to engage their institutions’ academic leaders on this subject. That’s because a lack of knowledge about quality work almost surely means that the interventions needed to effect continuous improvement are not underway.
Our experience shows that academic audit is embraced by faculty and administrators alike wherever it is seriously tried. Boards have an obligation to press for such teaching-improvement initiatives.
Auditing Academic Quality In Missouri and Tennessee
The University of Missouri System, like many institutions, used traditional program reviews to improve the quality of the educational programs. Yet these efforts rarely elicited soul-searching examination or improvements in the quality of teaching. They did not encourage departments to identify their weaknesses or areas where improvement could be effected.
Self-studies often were written by department chairs in isolation, and review-team reports frequently moved up the organizational hierarchy without any real engagement. The reports’ conclusions tended to be predictable and less than helpful: “Performance could improve if the department were given additional faculty lines, increased operating funds, and more or better facilities.” While perfectly plausible, such conclusions had the effect of absolving departments of the responsibility to improve teaching quality without more money.
To remedy this situation, university officials implemented an academic audit on a pilot basis for one department on each of the university’s four campuses. Short workshops for faculty described the audits and, more important, the concepts of Academic Quality Work. Teams of faculty auditors were recruited and trained and were encouraged to emphasize the collegiality of the audits. Indeed, the whole process at the University of Missouri can be characterized as highly informal: peers meeting for structured discourse about improving the quality of teaching and learning, where all shared a common sense of responsibility. The University of Missouri has been conducting academic audit reviews for five years and has worked to improve the process each year.
Academic audit at the University of Tennessee initially involved 40 departments and programs on 12 of the system’s 19 campuses. As in Missouri, the process involved workshops for faculty in participating programs, a self-study, auditor selection and training, and preparation of the final audit report.
Self-study preparation has proved to be particularly fruitful in promoting faculty discourse around the following questions: What are we trying to do? How are we doing it? Who is responsible? How do we know we are succeeding? How can we do better? Focusing on these questions rather than the formalities of self-study, site visit, and audit report lifted the exercise from an administrative hurdle to be scaled to a not-to-be-missed opportunity for improvement.
The Tennessee Board of Regents has received academic audit reports regarding 102 programs encompassing all degree levels since 2004–05 and is very involved in the monitoring the process. Testimony from departments and individual faculty has been highly favorable, and few doubt that teaching quality has been significantly improved. The audit process is a component of the board’s strategic plan, and regents receive periodic progress reports on the audit’s various benchmarks.
Finally, four regional forums are conducted each spring at which campus presidents provide the board with an annual update on institutional strategic plans and a report on the impact of the academic audits.
