3. Enhancing the Culture of Teaching

Contexts | Core Values | Case examples | Challenges and Recommendations

Contexts

A common conception is that research universities care more about research than they do about teaching. Consequently, it is assumed that undergraduates at such institutions are dissatisfied with the poor quality of instruction that they receive. Contrary to this stereotype, surveys conducted by the campus Office of Student Research over the past two decades have found that Berkeley students consistently rate highly the quality of faculty instruction. The most recent ratings from the Spring 2003 Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) show that 83% of freshmen and 87% of graduating seniors are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of faculty instruction, and 79% of both groups are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of GSI instruction. Strikingly, for both freshmen and graduating seniors only two percent and four percent respectively are very dissatisfied with the quality of faculty and GSI instruction.

However, the kernel of truth in the common conception may be the extent to which the university actively embraces teaching as a core institutional value and promotes a positive culture of teaching. Such an optimal teaching culture would include supportive institutional policies; opportunities for instruction in pedagogy; ongoing formative and summative evaluation of teaching and teaching programs; assessment of student learning; and a coherent infrastructure that supports teaching, preserves Berkeley’s tradition of entrepreneurship, and builds community through collaboration. The culture of teaching is shaped by what happens at the level of each individual instructor, by the climate in departments and colleges, and by the tone and leadership at the institutional level.

In this essay, the Working Group focused on institutional efforts affecting the culture of teaching, because such efforts are more systematic and more likely to have long-term impact, and because they address the spectrum of instructors (from GSIs to ladder-rank faculty). Thus, the Working Group reviewed the many programs on campus that focus on teaching and developed a list of Services, Programs, and Activities to Support and Improve Teaching. The Working Group also compiled Assessing Student Learning: An Informal Inventory of Current Berkeley Practices of strategies, techniques, and approaches currently being used to assess student learning at the course, departmental, and institutional level.

Core Values

Examining the campus’s current activities in the context of what it means to teach well and drawing upon the research literature (Bransford et. al., 1999; Brookfield, 1995; Cross, 1990; Hutchings & Shulman, 1999; Schoen, 1983), the Working Group developed a list of core values that guide good teaching at Berkeley, with the goal that these values, once widely disseminated, might in turn shape future efforts to provide a more supportive environment for teaching:

• Teaching and research are not antithetical, but mutually enhancing, forming one of Berkeley’s key strengths.
• Teaching and learning are broader than what occurs in the classroom; teaching and learning extend across campus and out into the community.
• Teaching should be responsive to contexts (discipline, subject, class). Some teaching strategies transfer from one discipline to another; other teaching strategies are better developed within a specific discipline.
• Learning to teach is a continuous process of development, including experimentation, ongoing practice, reflection, peer conversations, and assessment; to take place effectively, this process needs to be supported by appropriate programs and an infrastructure of communication and collaboration across departments, colleges, and programs throughout the campus.
• Learning is multidirectional and reciprocal; students learn from their teachers, from their peers, from course materials, and academic support services.
• Teaching requires multiple forms and levels of evaluation (including assessing the teacher’s teaching and the students’ learning).
• Teaching is strengthened by peer collaboration and review, collegial exchange, and communities of discourse.
• Berkeley’s decentralized, entrepreneurial teaching culture, in which programs can be developed to meet specific needs, is important, but so is stable support, ongoing communication, and enhanced visibility so that the campus community knows about and can learn from the array of programs, policies, and services.
• Teaching is enriched by Berkeley’s diversity of perspectives, approaches, ideas, and experiences, enhancing the intellectual vitality of the campus.

Case Examples

Berkeley’s entrepreneurial culture has resulted in many noteworthy initiatives. These programs vary in terms of audience, range, scope, intensity, and impact in improving teaching and the climate for teaching. Collectively, these hubs of excellence show that a variety of efforts, rather than a single centralized approach, can best meet the needs of a large and complex institution. The Working Group believes that Berkeley's decentralized, entrepreneurial teaching culture is appropriate as long as there are systematic horizontal connections (communication across the hubs) and a solid vertical anchor (a supportive infrastructure and common principles that encourage and enhance the varied hubs). The campus has made strides in the past decade in developing a culture that encourages teaching with excellence.

To illustrate the effectiveness of Berkeley’s approaches to improving teaching, the Working Group selected four programs to serve as case studies. These programs were selected because they

• exemplify many of our core values;
• have been in place for about a decade and so represent mature programs for which evaluation data are available;
• represent Berkeley’s varied approaches to instructional development, each showing a unique aspect of pedagogy;
• affect large numbers of students; and
• serve as models that have been replicated either on campus or at other universities.

These case studies are the Berkeley Language Center, the Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures, the Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Teaching and Resource Center, and the Service-Learning Research and Development Center.

Berkeley Language Center

Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures

Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Teaching and Resource Center

Service-Learning Research and Development Center

 

Challenges

These case studies demonstrate how successful teaching support programs can evolve within Berkeley’s decentralized culture. However, they have yet to reach their full potential, and to engage the majority of instructors rather than the minority. In addition to trying to determine ways to engage larger numbers of faculty in instructional improvement efforts, the Working Group identified the following challenges facing Berkeley:

• While we have a variety of programs devoted to supporting and enhancing teaching, they are disparate, not well-publicized, and don’t successfully counter the impression that the campus does not do much to promote good teaching.
• Communication across programs that address teaching is often lacking. Sometimes programs don’t know other efforts exist, making it difficult to learn from one another. An additional drawback in such decentralization is the possibility of duplication of effort.
• There are no systematic incentives, mechanisms, or strategies to encourage collaborations across programs.
• Assessment of student learning is not widespread.
• Without comprehensive or common evaluation procedures across programs, it is difficult to make global statements about the overall nature of the teaching culture or the overall impact of programs on teaching effectiveness and student learning.

Recommendations

To address the challenges listed above, the campus has several initiatives under consideration or development, a few of which are summarized below. Here the Working Group identifies recommendations to help move the campus to the optimal culture of teaching.

1. Improve overall communication among programs and strengthen the infrastructure. We want to continue to draw horizontal connections among existing hubs of teaching excellence and enhance our infrastructure, which forms the vertical anchor that supports a culture of teaching with excellence.

Current Efforts: One promising effort to address this recommendation is the formation of the Council of Academic Partners, a consortium of campus units that encourage, support, and enhance excellence in teaching and collaborate on joint projects.

2. Increase the visibility of programs that promote good teaching and faculty’s innovative teaching practices. The campus has traditionally disseminated information about new research findings based on faculty work. We want to give similar attention to teaching accomplishments.

Current Efforts: The Teaching Resources page on the Berkeley home page has been newly revised to help faculty and other instructors locate the full range of campus-wide teaching resources available to them. Efforts are also under way to highlight teaching innovation through the Berkeley NewsCenter and campus faculty/staff newspaper The Berkeleyan. Some noteworthy articles from Spring 2003 include a feature on a popular physics course for nonmajors, Physics for Future Presidents, and a profile of efforts to improve student learning in the large-enrollment course Psychology 1 undertaken by the seventh faculty Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education.

3. Continue supportive policy changes. Policy changes strengthen Berkeley’s ability to support teaching and reinforce its importance on campus.

Current Efforts: Recent policy changes include the revised Policy on Appointments and Mentoring of Graduate Student Instructors and the Academic Senate’s modification of the bio-bibliography—in which faculty annually report their teaching, research, publication, and service accomplishments for use in tenure, merit, and promotion review—to give greater prominence to teaching.

4. Make the assessment of student learning more central to the culture of teaching. The campus has little systematic data on student learning outcomes, and we are looking at ways to assess student learning better, building on the research literature (Astin, 1993; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991) and taking the Berkeley context into account.

Current Efforts: The Academic Senate Committee on Teaching is currently reviewing all course evaluation forms campus-wide as a first step towards a more systematic examination of how teaching and learning are assessed. Also, we have initiated discussions about student learning outcomes and assessment with two major faculty groups: the recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award and instructors of large-enrollment courses.

5. Improve record keeping, data collection, and evaluation procedures across programs. Gathering descriptive statistics (how many people participate in which kinds of programs) has been difficult. We also need to improve and to better coordinate Berkeley’s many institutional data systems to bring about better and more consistent evaluation procedures.

Current Efforts: The campus is developing an improved data system for reporting course and instructor activities.

6. Seek and make more prominent extramural grant funding for teaching and learning. While the campus has received grants for improving instruction, these typically are not as well publicized as grants for research. A central site such as a website featuring grants on teaching, improved communication among faculty developing and writing grant proposals to improve teaching and learning, and publicity on instructors who have received these grants could encourage more faculty to seek extramural opportunities.

Current Efforts: Discussions are under way to highlight extramural teaching and learning grants on the NewsCenter web page, to work with the Sponsored Projects Office to make faculty more aware of extramural grants for teaching and learning, and to develop ways to bring together faculty across disciplines to seek extramural funds. As an example of the campus’s efforts to actively seek more grants in this area, in Spring 2003 Berkeley received a Hewlett Packard Applied Mobile Technology Solutions in Learning Environments grant, which provides funds and equipment to demonstrate how nearly ubiquitous connectivity affects student use of online course resources and collaboration tools. The grant expands wireless internet access to most of the campus and targets new pedagogies developed for students in Anthropology 2, Chemistry 1A, and Statistics 21, which enroll over 5,000 students annually.

7. Target new faculty for teaching improvement efforts. We want to introduce our new faculty to Berkeley’s teaching culture and make sure they have the resources and support they need to develop a firm foundation of teaching excellence.

Current Efforts: The Distinguished Teacher Mentorship Program, begun Spring 2003, pairs new assistant professors with recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award. A newly launched President’s Chair Fellowship Program offers ladder-rank Senate faculty an opportunity to participate in a one-year series of workshops and seminars focused on teaching and learning, and new faculty have been especially encouraged to apply. Thirteen faculty have been selected to participate in 2003-04.

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