Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning

In today’s episode, we say a bittersweet goodbye to our wonderful podcast host, Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Executive Director Catherine Ross, as she will be retiring from Columbia in June. Catherine sits down with Amanda Irvin, Senior Director of Faculty Programs and Services here at the Columbia CTL, who will be taking the helm as our next podcast host, starting in the fall 2024 season. Catherine and Amanda reflect on their “favorite” dead ideas and episodes, as well as dead ideas that have yet to be discussed, and how this podcast has impacted our Center’s work internally.

We’d like to thank Catherine for her passion and leadership as our podcast host over the past four years, and for her unfailing dedication to changing higher education teaching!

This will be the last episode of Season 8 of Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning. We will be back in fall 2024 with Season 9. Thank you for listening!

In today’s episode we examine the systemic issues and dead ideas that underlie the hiring and supporting of contingent faculty. We speak with Kerry O’Grady, Director for Teaching Excellence at the Samberg Institute for Teaching Excellence at Columbia Business School. Dr. O’Grady discusses some of the “normalized” practices that often leave adjunct instructors with a lack of resources and support for their teaching. She then provides research-based recommendations that can help adjunct faculty feel more valued and empowered, as noted in her letter to the editor in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in response to an article titled, “Adjunct Professors Face a ‘Constant Struggle to Not Give Up,’ Report Says,” (October 26, 2023).

Resources

• “Adjunct Professors Face a ‘Constant Struggle to Not Give Up,’ Report Says” (October 26, 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education) by Amita Chatterjee
• “How to Help Adjuncts Not Want to Give Up” (November 29, 2023, The Chronicle of

Higher Education) by Kerry O’Grady

In this episode of 4 mini-interviews, we ask Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) staff John Foo, Jamie Kim, Rebecca Petitti, and Corey Ptak what’s been on their minds as they go about their work as educational developers. What dead ideas in teaching and learning are they encountering in their day-to-day work with instructors, in their reading and research? What are the underlying systemic issues perpetuating these dead ideas? And how are these developers addressing these challenges? Listen in to hear their responses.

Resources

• Columbia Science of Learning Research Initiative (SOLER)
• Columbia Office of the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grants
• "The Tyranny of Content: ‘Content Coverage’ as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It" (Petersen et al., 2020) in CBE—Life Sciences Education
• “Facilitating Change in Undergraduate STEM Instructional Practices: An Analytic Review of the Literature” Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011) in Journal of Research in Science Teaching
• “Four Categories of Change Strategies for Undergraduate STEM” (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011) in Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Higher Education
• “Chemistry and Racism: A Special Topics Course for Students Taking General Chemistry at Barnard College in Fall 2020” (Babb & Austin, 2022) in Journal of Chemical Education
• CTL Teaching Transformations Reflection from Rachel Narehood Austin

In this episode, we continue this season’s examination of graduate education, now looking into how institutions often overlook the need for preparing faculty to teach graduate students and graduate courses. We unpack the dead ideas that underlie this neglect with Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University, and author of The Chronicle of Higher Education article “Why is There No Training on How to Teach Graduate Students?” (May 8, 2023).

In this episode, we continue the conversation from our last episode on the topic of teaching development in doctoral education—this time from the student perspective! With co-host Caitlin DeClercq, Senior Assistant Director of Graduate Student Programs and Services at the Columbia CTL, we are joined by Columbia doctoral students Anirbaan Banerjee, Sara Jane Samuel, and Anwesha Sengupta. They share their experiences, thoughts, and advice on all things teaching development in doctoral education.

Welcome back to Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning! In our first episode of Season 8, we speak with Drs. Benjamin Rifkin, Rebecca Natow, Nicholas Salter, and Shayla Shorter about their article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Doctoral Programs Should Require Courses on Pedagogy” (March 16, 2023). Drs. Rifkin, Natow, Salter, and Shorter make the case for paying far more attention to developing teaching skills in doctoral programs. They share research they conducted to examine the “disconnect between what we are trained to do in graduate school and what we are expected to do in the college classroom,” and offer four next steps to better prepare Ph.D.s to teach.

Benjamin Rifkin is Professor of Russian and Interim Provost at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rebecca Natow is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, and Director of the Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies program at Hofstra University, Nicholas Salter is Associate Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Hofstra University, and Shayla Shorter is a Clinical Collaborative Librarian and Assistant Curator for the Medical Library at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Resource

• “Why Doctoral Programs Should Require Courses on Pedagogy” (March 16, 2023, Chronicle of Higher Education) by Benjamin Rifkin, Rebecca Natow, Nicholas Salter, and Shayla Shorter

While there is extensive research on the use of student surveys in the evaluation of teaching, the recommended practices are often not utilized. How does this negatively impact innovation in teaching? How do these evaluations perpetuate bias against women and faculty of color? What can we do about it? Today we tackle these questions with Joanna Wolfe, Teaching Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who wrote the January 2022 Inside Higher Ed article, “Let’s Stop Relying on Biased Teaching Evaluations.” Dr. Wolfe offers three helpful strategies that universities can implement to mitigate some of the potential harm that student evaluations can cause.

This is our final episode of Season 7 of Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning! We will be back in January 2024 with Season 8, continuing to unpack systems and systemic changes that are needed to improve higher ed teaching and student learning! Happy Holidays to all of our listeners!

Resources

• “Let’s Stop Relying on Biased Teaching Evaluations” by Joanna Wolfe (January 2022, Inside Higher Ed)

Josh Eyler, author and Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, recently posted a rebuttal on LinkedIn to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he wrote, “Grade inflation is a monster that is often trotted out by folks who wish that grades were objective, accurate measures for both learning and rigor in the course. They're neither.” Today we speak with Josh to unpack this provocative quote and other persistent dead ideas around grading and grade inflation.

Resources

• LinkedIn post by Josh Eyler
• How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (West Virginia University Press, 2018) by Josh Eyler
• “A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure” in Review of Educational Research (2016) by Susan Brookhart et al.
• Forthcoming book: Scarlet Letters: How Grades are Harming Children and Young Adults, and What We Can Do about It (Johns Hopkins University Press) by Josh Eyler

How can we improve teaching AND support all the instructors who teach science courses for undergraduates? Today we discuss this question with Marielena DeSanctis, President of the Community College of Denver, and Cassandra Volpe Horii, Associate Vice Provost for Education and Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University, who are co-authors of the article titled, “An Instructional-Workforce Framework for Coordinated Change in Undergraduate Education” (2023). Drs. DeSanctis and Volpe Horii discuss their framework—based on principles of justice, equity, and inclusion—which proposes treating all instructors (Visiting, Instructor, Teaching Assistant, Adjunct, Teaching Professor, TT/Tenured, Lecturer) as a unified workforce. Using the levers of governance, professional development, and reward systems, they offer institutions a path to significant improvement in the teaching of undergraduate science courses.

Resource

• “An Instructional-Workforce Framework for Coordinated Change in Undergraduate Education” (February 1, 2023) by Mark Lee, Cassandra Volpe Horii, Ann E. Austin, Leanne Avery, Marielena DeSanctis, Noah Finkelstein, Emily Miller & Barbara Schaal in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, a question was posed by journalist Beth McMurtrie as to whether or not institutions of higher education truly value teaching, and she offered a list of “red flags” that signal the undervaluing of teaching. In response, Michelle Miller, Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University, wrote a post in her “R3 Newsletter,” adding to McMurtrie’s list of red flags and offering her own. In this podcast episode, Dr. Miller discusses her list, which can be reverse engineered to serve as a helpful starting point for those who want to change the institutional culture around teaching at their university.

Resources

• “Teaching: Does higher education value good teaching?” (July 6, 2023) by Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education
• “Bonus post: Is your IHE truly teaching-focused?” (July 11, 2023) by Michelle Miller in R3 Newsletter
• Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (2014) by Michelle Miller
• Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (2022) by Michelle Miller