In a guest column today, Matthew Boedy, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, discusses a possible new measure to determine whether faculty members on Georgia campuses are doing their job -- “activities of student success.”
If you search out the term, you will see it applied to a wide range of student services in K-12, but not so much in colleges. That underscores Boedy’s concerns about the Board of Regents applying a standard that is ill defined in a higher education setting where students are expected to take greater responsibility for learning.
Boedy is conference president of the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization that represents the interests of college and university faculty members.
By Matthew Boedy
In 2017, during the debate over “campus carry” - the law that allows concealed carrier permit holders to bring their guns into Georgia’s public college classrooms - I mused if it would change the trust I have for students.
Those worries seem minor compared to the ones now shared by myself and colleagues around the state concerning the impact of COVID on our classrooms. There are likely only a few students in our classes with a concealed weapon. But there are many, many maskless (and likely unvaccinated) students now.
It is a bitter irony that when I and other professors who work on Georgia’s public college campuses look out on our classes and we see smiles, we are sad.
Since fall classes started three weeks ago, I have pleaded with students to wear masks with no or little change in the percent of masks. Many of my colleagues have quit rather than do what I am doing: work in the emotional hellscape of a mainly unmasked and unvaccinated population.
What is the Board of Regents doing about that? Nothing.
Instead, at their meeting today they take another opportunity to fracture the already weak trust between professor and students by changing how professors are evaluated. Like all professors in Georgia, I am evaluated by teaching effectiveness and a combination of research and service to my colleagues.
This week the Regents - while continuing to abandon their responsibilities to protect those of us in the classroom - will debate adding a fourth category to those others: “activities of student success.”
What’s wrong with this? For one, no one knows how to define this standard.
Second, no one knows how it differs from teaching effectiveness. For as long as I have been a professor, my teaching effectiveness has been judged at least in part by student success. I am judged by how many students pass, how many stay in my course past a withdrawal deadline, and how many rate their education high after the course ends. That last element comes from student evaluations. Students reply on an agreement scale when asked if they achieved their learning goals or if they took responsibility for “their share of learning,” among other questions.
I always turn a cynical eye to that phrase about shared learning. Yes, as Georgia College notes in its description of faculty evaluations, our schools believe “effective assessment of teaching is entwined with assessment of learning.” But how does one share the responsibility for learning?
Whatever your answer to that, a semester doesn’t always end in success. Let me explain. If you know any good teacher, you know they are completely dedicated to their students. They will not only go the extra mile, they will offer extra credit, extra tutoring, extra time, extra energy, extra hours they could be spending at home with their own children. But if you know any teacher, you also know that they can and have moved mountains to set students up for success and yet many times, their acts of student success don’t translate into actual student success. This is why we call that dedication teacher effectiveness. They were effective at teaching but not every student became a success at learning.
Credit: Peggy Cozart
Credit: Peggy Cozart
For example, a college professor trusts their students to read the assigned materials. Now, we know from experience that many don’t. But then the professor faces a choice, a choice I faced this week. My students were assigned to read a 25-page essay and will over the next two weeks write their own essay about its central question.
I polled students on how many read the 25-pager. Let’s say there were more students wearing masks than who had read the assignment.
Were there any other acts of student success I should have done? No. Was I an effective teacher? Yes, I assumed this lack of reading and I adapted my lecture. Will students eventually read all those pages? Yes, if they want a good grade on their own essay. And I will give them every opportunity to do so as I assign that reading for the next week.
But I can’t guarantee success. I can’t get a student to succeed by any one or a collection of actions. I can only be the most effective teacher I can by responding to students.
With that in mind, what should we believe then about this new category the Regents have created and could pass at their next meeting in October?
The Regents are changing the scales of the classroom by burdening professors with more of the responsibility for learning. Not only must I be an effective teacher I must now also complete acts of student success that in some manner are acts students should take themselves to be successful. I can’t force students to read, but I am betting the Regents will find something more I can or should do.
I think that new imbalance will directly impact trust between students and professors.
To get anywhere near success, students have to trust teachers. They have trust not only that we are doing all we can to help them learn, but they have to trust we are not doing all they can to help them learn.
If we start to do their job, if we bear more of their responsibility, students will stop learning.
It’s like the old adage about teaching to the test. Sure, it is an act of student success. But is it learning?
I think students will distrust us for what will seem to them like letting them off the hook.
I’m not the old professor ranting about how it was tougher in my undergraduate days. I am not even saying my students are lazy.
I am merely the middle-aged professor who once taught high school and saw how much those teachers were burdened with acts of student success.
And yes, I think this new category comes from education bureaucrats with a history of ruining k-12 schools. Just as it took over that level of education, it is primed to do the same in higher education.
Learning happens in an atmosphere of freedom and trust. I trust students by giving them freedom, more freedom than they had in their K-12 system. They in turn learn to practice that freedom and so trust me as I help them become life-long learners.
Do I trust them to read the next assignment? No. And I shouldn’t. Not after this week. But I do trust them to learn, eventually. My most important act as a teacher is giving them freedom to learn, not success on a test.
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