BY AARON BARLOW

Two posts on Facebook recently focused my attention to how we see ourselves in the classroom. In one, the teacher bragged that a student had shouted out that she was the most wonderful teacher ever. In the other, the teacher entered the classroom to find a student sitting at her desk and the class waiting expectantly to see what would happen. She sat down at a student desk and watched as the student led the class.

Personally, I would be embarrassed if the former happened to me and would never mention it to anyone, certainly not on Facebook. In the latter case, I hope I would do what that teacher did, though I don’t know if I would have the quick presence of mind.

A college course, as we all claim to know, is not about the teacher. It’s about student progress and growth. Teachers, then, should never aspire to stardom or even to generating an aura of excitement centered on themselves, certainly not one in which a student would spontaneously erupt with praise. Teachers should act as a countervailing force to what the rest of culture rewards so lavishly, the person at the center of attention. Our focus should remain on the students and their learning, not on becoming successful entertainers ourselves.

Sure, there’s a great deal about teaching that parallels the craft of the entertainer, but the goal should never be applause. As teachers, we entertain for a purpose, to built interest and attention in a subject, to further education, but that purpose has nothing to do with how well we are loved by our students. If a student explodes with praise, we need to tamp down our pride and ask (silently), “Did that help further the goals of the course?” If we think it did, we had better be able to describe how, exactly. Otherwise, we run the risk of our egos running wild.

And now the unfortunate kicker: All our institutions of higher education seem to care about these days is star quality. They encourage us to forget about teaching and concentrate on pleasing. This can be blamed, at least in part, on increasing use of and trust in Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) scores, but it also comes from the culture of celebrity that now permeates every profession in America.

There may not be much we can do about either, but we can make a concerted effort to make sure the quest for celebrity in teaching is yoked, at least, to real learning.

How can we do this? Not as we’ve tried in the past.

Over the past decades, peer evaluation of teaching has become little more than a way for departments to protect their own and drive out the unwelcome. We’ve tried, and failed, to evaluate teacher performance through quantitative testing, of course, and have learned that numerical comparisons between one teacher and another are not something that we can rely on. Using standardized testing for teacher evaluation, in fact, produces results as meaningless  as those of SET scores, which rank nothing but popularity. So, what do we do? How do we determine if teachers are doing their jobs and not simply promoting themselves?

Why not group faculty into teams of four or five within departments, requiring them to meet regularly on pedagogical issues, visit the classrooms of the others, team-teach during the semester, and take over the class of each of the others at least once a term? Make the students aware from the beginning of the semester that other teachers will be involved in the classroom so that there will be no surprises. Develop syllabi in consultation with the rest of the group, scheduling the participation of the others. This would provide a check on our own egos and make sure we concentrate on improving our teaching and not simply our standing.

Oh, and we could keep the doors of classrooms open as often as possible so that people could look in.

We could easily stop considering our classrooms as independent silos and could quickly start imagining each as part of a connected web. That way, if a student of mine stood up and said how wonderful I am, I could deflect, “Wait until you see Professor M, next week. She approaches things differently than I do, but I think you are really going to learn something when she is here.”

In a paper published in the proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, “Spreading Evidence-Based Instructional Practices: Modeling Change Using Peer Observation” by Valerie Peterson et al, the authors focus on peer observation as a vehicle for creating a more interactive model of teaching that would “build trust, establish instructional context, and provide formative feedback,” all things sorely missed in many contemporary university settings. I would go further, but peer observation arising from small groups rather than individual assignment could be an effective first step.

Group effort can keep us focused on the task of student learning and reduce our concentration on ourselves. By creating groups that include adjuncts and other contingent hires as well as full-timers are all levels with the explicit instruction that each individual is to be considered a peer, no one a ‘master teacher’ instructing the others, we can improve the learning in all of our classrooms. The process could be painful for many of us (including me), but our jobs are not about ourselves, cultural momentum notwithstanding. We need to grin, as they say, and bear it.

What I suggest here is a simple step and not even a new one, but its impact can be substantial—and it can be taken at small cost. Through it, we can learn that we are not wonderful alone and that we can even step aside for a student—something Paolo Freire and even John Dewey, among others, would have applauded.