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A philosopher takes on the “pedagogy experts”

Brian Leiter

Paul Schofield (Bates) makes the case against them at CHE.

(Thanks to Brian Skyrms for the pointer.)

UPDATE: Philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin writes:

As both a tenured philosophy professor and director of a teaching and learning center, I read Paul Schofield’s recent CHE piece, “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong,” with great interest when I saw it reposted on this blog today. I was thoroughly disappointed. 

So far as I can tell, Schofield sets up a straw man, with not the least hint of irony or self-awareness. Of course it’s bad when people are told what to do in the form of jargon-filled lectures by “experts” with no real experience in what they’re blathering on about all in the name of ticking boxes to receive merit raises doled out by career administrators more interested in their own advancement than anything resembling real education. This is even worse when those forced to do so are dedicated teachers in their own right with similarly dedicated colleagues with time, energy, and the relevant experience to genuinely help each other out. In general terms, it’s bad when X is done poorly and for the wrong reasons, and it’s even worse when this replaces and undermines the pursuit of X by those who do it well and for the right reasons.

Look, I too am constantly chafing at the ever-increasing “fetishization of the professional managerial class in general, and among those in higher ed in particular.” I also think that the notion of “value capture” is an insightful way of characterizing a deleterious phenomenon. But some of Schofield’s claims about the current state of higher education are divorced from reality, and his argument is plagued by a failure to acknowledge that not everyone engaged in trying to help others improve in the area of teaching is doing so badly–not even all those of us who are making a career of it.

Despite what things may be like at Bates College (or Harvard or Note Dame), where Schofield has experience, the reality is that many (if not most) instructors at colleges and universities were never trained, even informally, in how to teach (not even in their disciplines), don’t have colleagues well-equipped to help them get better, and even if they did, they don’t have the time to stop by their office to chat about Leibniz, or whatever. It is increasingly the case that undergraduates are taught by precariously employed, over-extended instructors, many of whom don’t even have offices in which to chat with anyone, colleague or student. I know this from experience, as I work with many people who fit this description every single day. They come to the programs my teaching and learning center puts on in search of the very things Schofield thinks such centers undermine, and which he had the privilege of gleaning from mentors and colleagues, all of whom presumably have private offices and helpful mentors just like he did.

The fact that Schofield’s preferred state of affairs—axe the teaching and learning centers and leave the faculty to exercise their hard-earned practical wisdom in the classroom—is sheer fantasy isn’t even the worst part of his argument.

Even if his description of the current state of affairs weren’t chimerical, his characterization of what teaching and learning centers do is unfair. He takes the worst attributes (which, to be clear, are certainly there to be found and not a total fantasy) and uses them to smear the entire enterprise. Just because some people call themselves experts, and yet have no expertise, or conduct abstract workshops focused on pedagogy in general, rather than helping the subject-matter experts hone their craft in disciplinarily-appropriate ways, doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as expertise in the area of teaching or no way to conduct a valuable workshop that helps people to teach better, no matter their discipline. It would be like taking a poorly argued piece written by a philosopher and using it as evidence that this discipline that prides itself on rigorous argumentation should be eliminated from the academy and that there is no way to impart general lessons on good argumentation. Obviously, this is nonsense.

Now, I realize that it may seem as if I’m simply taking this all too personally. So, I welcome readers of this blog to let me know what you see of value in Schofield’s piece. Or what you see as misguided in my critique. I’m genuinely curious.

I’m opening comments for substantive responses to either Professor Mitchell-Yellin or to Professor Schofield.

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9 responses to “A philosopher takes on the “pedagogy experts””

  1. Daniel Groll

    Schofield’s characterization of LTCs does not at all match my experience with the LTC at Carleton College. I don’t actually have much to do with our LTC, but that already signals a difference with Schofield’s characterization of them: there is absolutely no pressure — from the administration or from fellows professors — at Carleton to engage with the LTC (with one exception which I mention below). It is, rather, treated as a resource that people can use when and as they see fit. The overwhelming majority of the programming at our LTC consists of professor-led lunchtime sessions where people share their experiences trying different things in the classroom or with the curriculum. Our LTC also runs book groups (on higher ed, teaching, global issues etc); provides templates for student evaluations (Carleton doesn’t have official student evals); sponsors teaching circles where professors observe each other’s teaching and provide feedback; and runs a winter break workshop for first year teachers for people to share material, including concrete lesson plans, and to talk about the challenges of being in the classroom. This workshop is mandatory for all new profs (compensation is provided!), but it is — so far as I know — almost entirely free of the kind of pedagogy scholarship Schofield takes aim at.

    Our LTC is also headed by different professors (from all kinds of departments) for 3 year periods. So the people in charge are professors in their respective fields first and “general” pedagogues second (if at all).

    Reply
  2. Mahmoud Jalloh

    The elephant in the room—which I’m quite surprised Schofield didn’t lead with—is that education research is one of the worst instances of the replication crises. I am no expert, but I can just mention “learning styles” and the controversial career of Joan Boaler as exemplars. Obviously, if education research is mostly worthless, then there is no expertise for such centers to based on. There may be a practical expertise associated with teaching, but that accrues primarily to those doing the teaching. The maybe not-so-shocking but bad thing is that no heads have rolled either at such centers or, much more importantly, at schools/departments of education.

    My red-hot take is that education departments should be dissolved and pedagogical (or “didactic”) research should be done within disciplinary departments, like physics, chemistry, math, etc. This is largely the case in Europe. (This also often makes room for philosophers and historians of X in those departments.) Other education research is really just (even worse) psychology, sociology, or economics and should just be done in those departments.

    Reply
  3. V. Alan White

    My experience–as one who has been awarded recognition for teaching in national and state citations–is that there is no field of expertise in classroom instruction. There is only success achieved by gaining experience of what works over the course of a career. So I tend to side with Benjamin overall. In philosophy one great resource is the journal Teaching Philosophy which publishes any number of ways that teaching styles and methods can be useful. I published two articles there advocating for teaching Intro as a single-issue approach (mine using free will as the single issue) for example. The truth is that success in teaching is a combination of invention and personality that can achieve results–there is no given authority that can prescribe methods that in general make for effective pedagogy. We each just find our way–or just get out of the way.

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  4. Duane Long

    Schofield’s critique, and Mitchell-Yellin’s reply, both seem to hinge on an empirical question that would be quite difficult to properly answer – on average, are T&LCs actually useful for making people into better teachers? We would need a representative sample (say, from the U.S.) or samples (R1 universities, SLACs, community colleges) and an independently validated measure of improved teaching to know. In the absence of this difficult-(impossible?)-to-get data, I would suggest the following. I’ve only worked a few places, and all of those as teaching faculty, but in my limited experience, the more emphasis that was put on engaging in pedagogy training, the less valuable the training seemed, the less specialized to the discipline in question, and the more it was filled with things career administrators cared about. It was part and parcel of the administrative bloat plaguing American universities. Maybe Schofield is improperly focusing a critique of administrative bloat on T&LCs, but it seems at least as likely to me that T&LCs are, in general, emphasized just to the extent that they purport to improve objective, quantitatively measurable outcomes; the sort of thing bloated administrations love to be able to point to and put in their reports. Insofar as we do not have good evidence that they in general actually improve teaching, a default suspicion that most pedagogy training done by these places (at least at R1 universities, I should say, since that’s where I have had my experiences) is of little value to educators and mainly of value to bloated administrations seems warranted. I applaud any T&LC that does provide genuinely valuable advice or training in discipline-specific pedagogy, and I hope the administrative approach that allows such a center to function in that way spreads, but my suspicion that the money spent on the centers at many (probably most) institutions would be better spent on securing more tenure-track faculty lines remains strong.

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  5. Kenneth Pike

    I think Schofield has (perhaps without realizing it) buried the lede. Much of what he says is true, but it seems like his primary complaint is really this:

    > Soon, what were once thought of as the center’s helpful tips come to be treated as the college’s authoritative standards of appraisal and evaluation.

    It seems to me that making pedagogical resources available to instructors who need or want them is controversial just insofar as it (1) costs money that might be spent elsewhere (like office space for adjuncts!) and (2) becomes institutionally stultifying. Many such endeavors are indeed poorly managed (Mitchell-Yellin appears to acknowledge this) and so seem reasonably subject to a cost-benefit analysis. If Mitchell-Yellin’s retort is “let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” that seems eminently reasonable, but it would naturally behoove us to know what the metaphorical baby actually is.

    I think there is real benefit in reflecting on one’s teaching–as there is in reflecting on anything worth doing. To the extent that teaching and learning centers facilitate that, I think they have real and possibly quite significant qualitative value.

    The benefits of quantifying, regimenting, and “optimizing” pedagogy seem much, much more elusive. Certainly such efforts facilitate legibility in measurement-oriented tasks like assessment and accreditation. But I have never seen persuasive evidence that assessment or accreditation convincingly improve pedagogy–rather, these are processes structured to justify academic undertakings to external audiences (like potential students, and the people paying their tuition). My suspicion is that this has contributed significantly to the vocationalization of higher education, which in turn contributes to other pedagogical challenges. To whatever extent teaching and learning centers participate in (or worse, exacerbate) such developments, complaints like Schofield’s seem bound to arise.

    (To further complicate the issue, the quantitative things that teaching and learning centers sometimes focus on are also the kinds of things that a looming AI “revolution” in education will use to justify replacing human instructors entirely.)

    This is all bound up in very old arguments about the value of arguably “impractical” inquiry. Most of our students are engaged in a box-checking exercise that stands between them and their chosen vocation. We engage in related box-checking exercises of our own so that the lights stay on and our paychecks continue to clear. But it would be a tragedy to imagine the practical demands of our circumstances to be the telos of our endeavors. If a teaching and learning center can help instructors better inspire their students, personalize the classroom experience, inculcate the intrinsic value of inquiry, or otherwise qualitatively enrich the learning environment, that seems to me a worthy undertaking.

    But given the institutional demand for box-checking, I doubt the incentives generally run that way.

    (And while we are sharing our red-hot takes, I guess I would add that in the end, good teaching seems to me to be more of a talent–or personality–than a skill. I’ve heard it said that good teachers are born rather than made. This is presumably an exaggeration, but some people seem to have a knack for it, and sadly, some instructors really do seem incorrigibly terrible.)

    Reply
  6. Erik B

    I’ve found this exchange interesting, but a critical variable is being ignored: selection bias. At institutions with single-digit (or near single-digit) admission rates, we’re teaching students who would likely excel in almost any environment. Philosophy courses, in particular, attract those eager for exploratory, even meandering, lectures. Like a strength coach for an NFL team, it’s easy to be overconfident when your athletes are already elite. In that context, a Teaching and Learning Center might indeed offer little marginal utility.

    However, as Mitchell-Yellin notes, the utility is elsewhere. We must be thoughtful about preparing faculty and reaching students who lack the luxury of entering college pre-groomed for success in any format.

    Yes, the research base has gaps. But it’s counterproductive to assume we know nothing and that the endeavor is doomed from the start. Critique is part of developing any applied science. We put up with it in strength and conditioning, counseling, physical therapy, and anywhere else the data is messy and the variables are human. To be sure, there’s a lot of silly nonsense in these fields, but we don’t take it to mean we must get rid of them. Besides, the factors that influence student learning aren’t static. A T&L center can help us stay current with what’s changing and include faculty in lively conversations about how to address those changes.

    We don’t need to scrap these centers. Sure, it’s probably important that we wrest control of them from administration. More importantly, perhaps, we need more people like Mitchell-Yellin who can parse the research and offer nuanced and appropriately humble guidance. This is especially important for the students at the margins, who don’t have the advantage of an elite preparation, which often suspiciously overlaps with financial privilege.

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  7. Paul Schofield

    Since this article was published two weeks ago, there’s been a lot of pushback from people who run or work in centers for teaching and learning. Their dominant reply has been that the essay is divorced from reality and that the problems I’ve identified are either exaggerated or non-existent.

    But there were also a lot of *faculty* who responded by saying that their experience with such centers is as I described. The Chronicle published a rebuttal to my article, written by an education consultant, and it admits as much:

    “When I first read “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong” I was furious. I shared it across social media and vented various complaints in all directions. Quite a few folks agreed with my howls of outrage. Unsurprisingly I found many instances of people issuing their own takedowns, notably on LinkedIn.Then I received a lot of pushback from faculty members online . . . Many who shared Schofield’s views saw teaching and learning centers as part of larger university systems they disagreed with. Like Schofield, they understood such centers as pressing for pedagogies focused on metrics, rubrics, standards, and learning outcomes, which these faculty members disliked. They felt such rubrics came from on high, either from the generic “administration” or from specific senior figures (a dean, a vice president) and policies (accreditation e!orts). These discussants didn’t share my view of center staff as lonely, politically unprotected workers; instead they saw them as elements of institutional mechanisms imposed from the very top. Along these lines, a few interlocutors disagreed with me flat out on the powerlessness of teaching and learning centers. These faculty members reported feeling enormous
    pressure to take center programs, to collaborate with center staff. Some said they suffered administrative threats if they did not. members, Others echoed the essay’s emphasis on the need for faculty members to support faculty with their collective decades’ of teaching experience. They preferred not to work with teaching staff, whom they saw as having little to no such experience. Several focused on the metrics argument, telling me what they valued in teaching went beyond those measurements. They feared center-style teaching would gut their pedagogy.”

    I’ve received *a lot* of feedback that aligns with this. I don’t think that this settles the matter. But at the same time, I don’t think we should just dismiss my complaints as ungrounded in reality.

    But I also think there’s more to say here than just “well, I guess some people have good experiences with teaching and learning centers, while others do not.” Almost everyone acknowledges that there are legitimate concerns about corporatization of higher education, about administrators’ appeals to dubious consultants, about top-down management, and about power moving out of the hands of faculty and into the hands of senior staff and deans. Given these trends, the problems I’ve identified with teaching and learning centers are just ones you’d expect them to have. They are, after all, part of the same higher ed ecosystem, subject to the same incentive structure. So I just think there’s every reason to be skeptical when people who work in these centers assure us that things are ok, or that they will remain so.

    One impression I may have given with my piece is that I think all would be well if teaching and learning centers would just get out of the way. I don’t think that. I think we need a better culture of apprenticeship and mentorship. I just think the teaching and learning centers are a poor substitute at best, and detrimental at worst. Their existence gives those of us who should be doing more mentoring of our colleagues an excuse not to do it–I think new faculty are too often told to go visit the teaching and learning center by faculty who should be doing the mentoring themselves. But I also do think that these centers, in their desire to provide value that could not be provided elsewhere and that is legible to the administration, rely heavily on research that is quite bad (as Mahmoud Jalloh mentions above). I worry, then, that they end up disseminating a lot of information that young faculty trust but that will actually make them worse at teaching.

    Reply
    1. Ben M-Y

      Thanks to everyone who has chimed in over the past day. I’ve found the discussion really interesting.

      Paul: Thanks especially to you for weighing in. If I may, I have a couple of follow-up questions about your reply here.

      First, you say just now: “One impression I may have given with my piece is that I think all would be well if teaching and learning centers would just get out of the way. I don’t think that.” But in the article you say: “‘teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block. Leave the teaching to those who spend their days in the classroom.” I’m sorry, but it seems that you didn’t just perhaps give the impression that you thought it would be well if TLCs just got out the way. You explicitly called for them to be axed. Why would you pretend otherwise?

      Second, your comment here doubles-down on a false dichotomy that pervades the original article, namely, TLCs staffed by members of the professional managerial class vs. faculty. But this, as has been pointed out in comments here as well as other replies, is an instance of divorce from reality. Take the case of my own TLC. I am contractually full-time staff but have over a decade of teaching experience and tenure as a faculty member, and I have two other associate directors who are faculty with half-time appointments in the center. Or take Daniel Groll’s comments about Carleton, where the center is headed up by faculty on a rotating basis. Why insist on the false narrative that all TLCs are part of administrative bloat?

      Furthermore, I notice that your comment here studiously avoids addressing another (perhaps the main) criticism of your take: It draws from a particular(ly privileged) experience that is not at all representative of the higher ed landscape. Even if you have heard from many faculty that they share your concerns about TLCs and administrative bloat and value capture and whatnot (some of these are concerns I share, as mentioned in the comment of mine that kicked this off), why think that these faculty’s concerns are representative? If we are interested in accurate data (as all of the complaints about the quality of research in the scholarship of teaching and learning suggest we are), then we should be interested in it even when it doesn’t confirm our priors or subjective perceptions. To put a fine point on it: if you don’t want TLC folks to cherry-pick studies in defending their views, then you shouldn’t cherry-pick anecdotes in defending yours.

      Finally, you cast the view of those of us taking you to task as: “well, I guess some people have good experiences with teaching and learning centers, while others do not.” But this isn’t quite fair. A better catchphrase seems to me to be, as Kenneth Pike puts it, “let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.” It seems that you (and many others) have had bad experiences with ineffective or ill-intentioned or poorly run TLCs. But let’s not ignore that there are also many others who have had good experiences with more effective, well-intentioned and better run TLCs. Why call for axing TLCs, as opposed to reforming those that aren’t up to the task? More to the point: why not call for doing our best to make sure that the very neoliberal forces you correctly identify and worry about don’t infect (more) TLCs, as opposed to eliminating TLCs just because some of them have been infected?

      To repeat a point already made: There are many, many faculty who do not have the resources you do to help them do the job they love doing. TLCs are, for many, a cherished support. If we’re concerned about the way politics encroaches on the academy, your take seems to me to be exactly the wrong sort of over-correction. Right problem, wrong solution.

      Reply
      1. Paul Schofield

        “First, you say just now: “One impression I may have given with my piece is that I think all would be well if teaching and learning centers would just get out of the way. I don’t think that.” But in the article you say: “‘teaching and learning centers should be considered good candidates for the chopping block. Leave the teaching to those who spend their days in the classroom.” I’m sorry, but it seems that you didn’t just perhaps give the impression that you thought it would be well if TLCs just got out the way. You explicitly called for them to be axed. Why would you pretend otherwise?”

        I think it would be good if TLCs got out of the way, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. I think TLCs are an ineffective and possibly detrimental response to a problem that exists independently of their existence.

        “Your comment here doubles-down on a false dichotomy that pervades the original article, namely, TLCs staffed by members of the professional managerial class vs. faculty. But this, as has been pointed out in comments here as well as other replies, is an instance of divorce from reality. Take the case of my own TLC. I am contractually full-time staff but have over a decade of teaching experience and tenure as a faculty member, and I have two other associate directors who are faculty with half-time appointments in the center. Or take Daniel Groll’s comments about Carleton, where the center is headed up by faculty on a rotating basis. Why insist on the false narrative that all TLCs are part of administrative bloat?”

        I think there’s a spectrum. The more TLCs are like “a number of faculty want to come together and talk about issues concerning teaching,” the more I approve. The more TLC’s are like “We have these studies and expertise and authority, and we need to hire more people to impose the best practices we’ve settled on” the more I disapprove. I think there’s a trend toward the bad side of this spectrum, and I think the corporatization of academia encourages it. The more we trend toward the other end of the spectrum, the less we need hire (several?) people to run these centers as a full-time job.

        “Furthermore, I notice that your comment here studiously avoids addressing another (perhaps the main) criticism of your take: It draws from a particular(ly privileged) experience that is not at all representative of the higher ed landscape. Even if you have heard from many faculty that they share your concerns about TLCs and administrative bloat and value capture and whatnot (some of these are concerns I share, as mentioned in the comment of mine that kicked this off), why think that these faculty’s concerns are representative?”

        A lot of the faculty I heard from were not from particularly elite/privileged places. But more importantly, people who are extremely stressed because they have fewer resources available to them are *particularly vulnerable* to being taken in by ideas and by consultants who promise an easy solution. I’ve been clear about how I think CTLs rely on research that is bad. So I think that offering their counsel as a lifeline to those who are less privileged and who are overwhelmed only *seems* humane.

        “Why call for axing TLCs, as opposed to reforming those that aren’t up to the task? More to the point: why not call for doing our best to make sure that the very neoliberal forces you correctly identify and worry about don’t infect (more) TLCs, as opposed to eliminating TLCs just because some of them have been infected?”

        I think resources are scarce, and with entire programs and majors getting axed, we should focusing on hiring more faculty rather than spending more resources to figure out how to reform and improve centers for teaching and learning.

        Reply

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