Each fall, UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz co-teaches a seminar for graduate students – professors of the future – called ‘The American Professoriate.’ The class focuses on the role of public universities. This year, he teaches with Matt Springer and Buck Goldstein from the School of Education and Dean Suzanne Barbour of the Graduate School. Students and instructors write regular reflections on higher education’s role. We share some of those here.

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By Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (October 28, 2021) – Good teaching is hard, and most universities don’t offer enough support for faculty to get better at it. Professors advance in their careers based largely on research, grants, and publishing within their field. Teaching is seen as a rewarding sideline at best, and a cumbersome distraction at worst.

Two standout professors at Carolina are working to change that. Over the last few years, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have become nationally known experts in student success, advocating a set of classroom reforms that bring a lot more structure to college teaching. They came to the American Professoriate class this week to give a new crop of UNC graduate students some practical advice on upping their game as instructors.

“Differences among students are not the problem,” explained Hogan, a professor of biology at UNC. “The problem is when learning environments and course designs lack structure. That’s when we see those differences turning into inequities.” That insight matters a lot at Carolina, where students clear the same selective admissions standards but still arrive with different levels of preparation. 

Unlike most highly selective public universities, UNC is still closely focused on educating home-state students. More than 80% of Carolina undergrads are from North Carolina, and the quality of K-12 schools across the state is … uneven. Some UNC freshmen arrive with loads of Advanced Placement credit from highly competitive high schools; some hail from tiny districts where the most rigorous class available was an intro course at a local community college. Both of those students may be equally capable, in terms of their potential for success in college, but they’re not equally prepared for those first few semesters on campus. 

“It really means rethinking your role to understand that the goal is teaching students, not sorting them,”  said Sathy, a professor of psychology and neuroscience. “You want students to grasp things, to get better at learning.”

That’s a different attitude than what a lot of professors have historically brought to their teaching roles. The sciences are infamous for “weed-out” or “gatekeeper” classes — big introductory courses like chemistry 101 or physics where generations of instructors have taken pride in how many students fail to pass. But Hogan and Sathy are convinced that a lot of those failing students are perfectly capable of mastering the material if they’re given the right guidance on how to navigate the classroom.

“Students know that they should study,” wrote Beckie Supiano in a 2018 profile of Hogan and Sathy for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “But that doesn’t mean that they know how. Memorizing definitions and parroting the textbook might have secured students A grades in high school. In college those habits might earn an F.”

To bring a class of 300 students up to speed on the habits of highly successful undergraduates, Hogan and Sathy embed very explicit instructions within their courses. Instead of being assigned a research paper that gets a single grade at the end, students might get assigned individual components — a thesis, an outline, a rough draft, revisions, and a final version — with each given a separate grade. That gives students more opportunity for guidance along the way, and helps teach the vital skill of time management. Instead of lecturing for an hour, Hogan and Sathy break up their classes with regular opportunities for student feedback — online polls, a five-minute break to scribble questions on a notecard and discuss them with classmates — to keep students engaged.

All of that demands more time and effort from the the instructor, which can be a challenge when scholarly priorities are focused on research. Sathy and Hogan would like to see the entire profession revamped to better reward top-tier instructors as well as productive researchers. “We need to see teaching that’s more like coaching,” said Sathy. “You need to make clear that your motivation as a teacher is helping students be the best they can be.”

Like professors across the country, many of the graduate students in the American Professoriate class spent time moving their classes online during the pandemic, forcing them to rethink how they approach teaching. “I’ve never seen so much collaboration around teaching before among so many colleagues,” Hogan told Higher Ed Works in an interview last year, when instructors were still scrambling to get their courses online. “Our teaching mission will be even stronger because of this experience.”

Change comes slowly to higher education, but this is how it happens — a few dozen future professors, already thinking hard about how to become better teachers.    

Eric Johnson works for the College Board, the UNC System, and occasionally UNC Chapel Hill. You can reach him at ericjohnson@unc.edu.