Are You as Good a Teacher as You
Think?
June-July, 2007
Now there’s an article title that gets your attention…at
least it got mine. The article that follows this title (reference below)
is a bit depressing, but the points it makes do constitute worthwhile
reminders. The author offers three reasons why teachers might not be as
good as they think.
First, the author notes, “there is a great deal of evidence from
social-cognitive psychology that pretty much anyone who isn’t clinically
depressed systematically overestimates his or her traits and abilities
in a wide variety of domains.” (p. 8; and yes, the author does cite
evidence supporting this claim) And college teachers may be especially
likely to make such overestimations. Despite being surrounded by
colleagues, teaching is still a solitary endeavor. Without consultation,
faculty decide how to organize courses, what materials to include, and
what assignments and exams to give. What happens in classrooms is
observed by students but not regularly by anyone else. Meetings with
students occur in the privacy of faculty offices. Faculty work on course
preparation and grading tasks alone. “When we think about how good we
are, we tend to focus almost exclusively on our own efforts. The fact
that many of our colleagues, perhaps most, are working just as hard
escapes our notice.” (p. 8)
Second, teaching effectiveness may be overestimated because people have
a tendency to define goodness in some pretty self-serving ways. So if
you give entertaining lectures, then entertaining lectures becomes a
component included in your definition of good teaching. Likewise, if you
are able to establish rapport with students, then establishing rapport
becomes a key element in your definition of teaching excellence. The
point is, we define good teachers in terms of what we do well. We may
perform some teaching functions poorly but never address them because as
far as we’re concerned they aren’t ingredients of effective instruction.
Definitions so derived are eclectic and idiosyncratic. This means
someone who lectures well can still think he or she is a good teacher,
despite accumulating evidence that other methods better achieve most
learning outcomes.
Finally, the very feedback that should be creating accurate and balanced
portraits of teachers fails to do so. To support this claim, the author
cites evidence documenting how often the midpoint on evaluation rating
scales is not the average score. On a nine-point scale, for example,
7.22 may be the actual average. At most places where colleagues observe
and rate other colleagues, “average” scores are even higher. “These
kinds of student and peer evaluations tend to confirm our inflated views
of our own abilities. A better interpretation of your rating of six on a
seven-point scale, then, is that you have no extremely obvious
shortcomings. That’s a long way from being a superstar.” (p. 11)
Add to this the fact that positive feedback comes to our attention more
often than negative. Students pass out compliments; often they make just
as many complaints, but not to our faces. They are too worried about
their grades to tell us what they really think. When students do
complain (say anonymously on rating forms), we respond by questioning
how hard they worked and what they contributed to the class. A quiet
student who earned a C has no right to offer critique?
Making the same point from a different perspective, the author observes
that “college students are incredibly good at seeming to have learned
stuff.” (p. 12) They nod in class, don’t ask questions, and cough back
content verbatim on exams. He recounts how when he started incorporating
some cooperative learning formats, he saw students struggling for a
whole period to master content that he’d breezed though in 10 minutes of
lecture and had assumed students understood clearly.
So will coming to the realization that teaching prowess may be
overestimated be so depressing and demoralizing that faculty will give
up on their teaching, transferring energy to research or administration?
The author doesn’t think so, because once faculty reach this point of
weakness, there’s no shortage of resources, approaches, and techniques
for improving. “The difficulty is getting to this point. When we accept
the proposition that we’re not as good as we think, we’re already
considerably better than we were.” (p. 13)
Reference: Price, P.C. (2006). Are you as good a teacher as you think?
Thought and Action, (Fall), 7–13.
Copyright © 2007 Magna Publications. Reproduction in whole or in part
without permission is prohibited.
