How to become a Better Academic? ProfHacking (Just ask Teach for America)

As ProfHacker.com rolls back into its regular production schedule next week, it seems like a useful time to offer a quick reminder of what the site’s aims.  While just about everyone who writes for ProfHacker is interested in, say, social media, or in the ways networked technologies are transforming higher education, we’re not a “tech blog.”

ProfHacker argues for several perspectives: that the condition of all improvement is experimentation; that a positive, let’s-give-this-a-try attitude is more productive than cynicism or excessive snark; and that too many aspects about our day-to-day work in higher education are based on hidden assumptions about what “everyone knows.”  Although disciplines are obviously different, and although schools vary widely, we have enough common tasks, challenges, and opportunities that sharing information and strategies can be profoundly useful.  Technology is a part of that, but it’s not everything.  As it says in the sidebar, our focus is (in alphabetical order) pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education.

I was prompted to draft this post in part by Amanda Ripley’s fine article in The Atlantic about “What Makes a Great Teacher?” (the url more demurely cites “good teaching”).  Ripley notes that Teach for America has been using a data-driven approach to evaluating who makes a good teacher, and then what specific practices contribute to good teaching.  Although these have been treated as a dark art, it turns out there are several key factors.  I want to call out two.

One of the most important predictors of good teaching is constant innovation:

They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

It’s not a question of “ok, let me pull out last year’s slide deck.” Instead, there’s a willingness, even during the academic year, to rethink how a class spends its time.

Another important predictor is attitudinal:

Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”—reporting that they were very content with their lives—were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers “may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students,” the study suggested.

This is a complex thing.  I would be the last person to suggest that people plaster a fake smile on their faces.  And given the dire budgetary shortfalls plaguing higher education, and the related crises in tenure-track hiring and in treating contingent faculty with decency and fairness, it would be stupid to encourage “contentedness” with the current state of higher ed.

Plus, everyone deserves a chance to blow off steam, and I’d be the last person to credibly deny anyone that chance.  (True story: The first time George and I spoke on the phone, after we’d known each other online for many years, he said “Huh. Your voice is kinder than I would’ve thought.”)  But, for this website, in order to facilitate our goal of open sharing and experimentation, a constructive, positive tone is what’s wanted.

ProfHacker isn’t a site about teaching only.  We’re interested in all aspects of academic life–and we think that experimentation and optimistic perseverance are good places to start.

(Image by Flickr user .Raffa / CC licensed)