Hugo Schwyzer

From December 2006:

I want to get back to the topic of teaching and self-confidence. In yesterday’s post, I cited an article that claimed that 94% of University of Nebraska faculty considered themselves to be “better than average” teachers when compared to their colleagues. If the word “average” is to have any meaning at all, somethin’ must be wrong with their self-assessment. Even if the best teachers in the world are all to be found in Lincoln, it’s still more or less impossible for 94% to be “above average.”

In the comments, Sally writes

That’s really interesting, because I have a friend who does teaching evaluations at her university, and she says that grad student teachers consistently underestimate how good they are. She says that grad students will claim to be utter disasters in the classroom, and then when she comes and observes their teaching, they’re perfectly fine, if not particularly exceptional. I wonder if something changes between the grad student and professor levels?

Well, I know something sure changed for me between the grad school and professorial levels! My first teaching experience happened in the spring quarter, 1991. I was TA-ing a Classics survey course at UCLA. Before meeting my first section, I went to the bathroom in Bunche Hall and threw up; I was overcome with terror. I was not-quite 24, and though I had years of background in drama and was the son of two college professors, I felt like an utter fraud who was about to be exposed. And in my first few quarters of TA-ing, I had some awful moments that left me despondent. I would not have ranked myself highly, back in the day. So yeah, one’s confidence grows with time.

I’d also say that the degree to which one worries about being liked diminishes with time, and that helps. When I was a TA — or even in my first few years here at the college — most of my students were only a few years younger than I. I saw them as slightly junior peers, and it’s generally the case that we are particularly anxious to win approval from our peers. Being liked, being perceived as competent, being thought interesting; all of these were wrapped up together. Today, I am still very much concerned with being competent, and I am hopeful that I am still found interesting — but the anxiety about winning approval has dropped. And I find that the less anxious I am about winning approval, the more likely I am to have self-confidence. Part of self-confidence, at least for me, is rooted in a sense of one’s own skills; it’s also rooted in a willingness to be unaffected by the capricious judgments of others.

I don’t believe good teachers are born that way. Good teaching is like any other skill — it’s something we learn, and something we get better at with practice. When we’re novices, our anxiety about our teaching serves an important function: it spurs us to improve. One hopes that that anxiety will diminish with time. In a few, unfortunate instances, it is replaced with apathy; more often than not, it is replaced by a quiet confidence in one’s own mastery of the material and of the classroom. And of course, in most cases, we are eager to continue to refine our craft. Mastery is not the same as perfection, and in my case (and I’d like to believe in the case of most of my colleagues), we’re aware that we’ve got room to improve.

In the Price article, one thing he wrote really hit home:

Some college teachers try to avoid a real analysis of their strengths and weaknesses—
and working on the weaknesses—by deciding that they play a particular
role within their department, and that only some dimensions of good teaching are
relevant to that role. A veteran professor might decide that because other faculty in
the department use cooperative learning techniques and provide a variety of pedagogical
activities for their students, it is in his students’ interest for him to teach a “good old-fashioned college course,” featuring nothing but heavy doses of lecture, textbook reading, and traditional exams. Alternatively, in a department full of such veteran professors, a freewheeling young assistant professor might decide that her primary role should be to “model critical thinking in the classroom” by doing little other than discussing controversial issues.

One problem here is that, as discussed above, college teachers often don’t have
a clear idea of what’s going on in their colleagues’ classrooms and therefore have little
basis (beyond their own preferences) for choosing their roles.

Dang, I’m definitely the “veteran professor teaching the good old-fashioned college course”, at least when it comes to my Western Civ survey courses. I’ve made the conscious decision to emphasize good lecturing over other forms of teaching, largely because I am firmly convinced that lecturing has been woefully underemphasized. To quote myself from nearly two years ago:

I am sick and tired of having folks with doctorates in education (Lord help us) tell me that “lecturing is an outdated teaching style.” Well, it’s still a damned effective teaching style if it’s done well. I put a lot of time and energy into crafting articulate, interesting, lectures, largely because I believe that for most students, it remains the most effective and memorable way to learn. I do invite discussion and debate in some of my classes, and I welcome questions — but I cling tenaciously to the old-school notion that my job is to be an interesting, compelling, and provocative deliverer of information. (And along the way, raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.)

So, is my self-confidence misplaced? I don’t think so. Could I be a better teacher? Sure, of course. Am I better than my colleagues? I have no idea, because I’ve only seen a handful of them teach, and most of those whom I have seen teach were junior faculty early on in the tenure process. But in the absence of evidence, I’m happily confident that the majority of my colleagues are wonderful teachers, and I am happy to be “average” in their company.