Do You Want Teaching Excellence?

Teaching excellence—what is it? How do you know when you have seen it? How do you measure it? How do you teach it? These are all questions that come to my mind when I think of teaching excellence.

A quick Google search found 21,300,000 English language hits for teaching excellence. Another interesting thing the search revealed was that most of the first few pages of hits were for university-based operations. Common names were the Center for Teaching Excellence, Academy of Teaching Excellence, Faculty Teaching Excellence Program, and Institute for Teaching Excellence, etc. (By the way, an excellent resource for teaching ideas is the Berkeley Compendium of Suggestions for Teaching with Excellence http://teaching.berkeley.edu/compendium/ .) So what does this all mean? I would sum it up by saying that apparently teaching excellence is a hot topic and many universities are trying to promote teaching excellence, and some are committing significant resources toward this effort.

So how do we know if we have teaching excellence? Our society today likes to measure everything, so can we measure teaching excellence? My reading of the literature says that yes we can, so then all we have to do is figure out how and what. For example, is it high grades, low grades or a nice bell curve for a class, or are grades irrelevant? How about student evaluations of teachers-surely we can trust the "customer". The problems with student evaluations would take several pages to delineate, but even with the problems connected with them, are they useless or can we use them in some way to measure excellence? Should we just use quantitative measures or are qualitative measures better? Can we use the same measures for the physics department as for the English department, or is there something inherently dissimilar about academic fields that require different measures? All of these questions and more must be addressed if we are to properly measure excellence. Not an impossible task but at times a daunting one.

Are there naturally born teachers? I would say yes, just as there are those who seem to have a naturally given gift or ability in a certain area. We can see examples in individuals who we consider natural leaders, scientists, engineers, great thinkers, etc. Does that mean that if you aren't "gifted" with the "teaching gene" that you can't be a good teacher? Many years ago from a source I have long since lost I picked up a formula about individual performance. The formula reads: Performance = (Aptitude + Training) X Motivation. All parts of this formula are important. The more natural aptitude you happen to have, the better. And training is valuable to add to your aptitude, but motivation is critical. We have all known students who were intelligent and were very capable of completing college work but they failed or quit. The especially frustrating ones for me were those who seemed to just lack the motivation. It is the same for teachers; we will not achieve teaching excellence unless we have the motivation to do what is necessary to achieve it.

Now I don't intend to denigrate the vast amount of research that has been done in the area of teaching excellence, but it seems to be like many areas that are researched in that the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know. That said, we do know a lot about what works and does not work but it takes personal motivation to study and apply it. That means it is up to each teacher to drink from the well of knowledge that we have and then apply it in our own classes and students. Think about it, are you really achieving teaching excellence or could you improve? You and your students deserve nothing less.