ent evaluations are stable over time (Marsh and Roche, 1997). Even for classes where you may have learned a lot but found the class unpleasant, the negative emotional response is enduring (Haught et al., 2016). This belief is another form of rationalization. It excuses faculty from taking responsibility for improving their teaching. Furthermore, students who have a bad experience in a class may project that negative emotion onto the whole field. For example, students who have a poor experience in an introductory psychology course may conclude that they dislike all of psychology and the field has no merit.
- My teaching is good enough; there’s no need for me to improve. Weak students tend to show poor metacognitive awareness of their actual level of content mastery. They are grossly overconfident; they believe they have a deep comprehensive understanding of the material when their actual level is shallow and full of gaps. Poor metacognition and overconfidence occur in struggling teachers as well. They may feel they are giving clear, engaging, and accessible presentations, but the students do not find them so. The well-known Dunning-Kruger effect states that for any skill, part of being incompetent is not realizing how incompetent you are. Surveys of teachers find that an incredibly high percentage rate themselves as above average in ability or higher. Once again, this belief is a rationalization for avoiding taking steps to improve teaching.
- Teaching cannot be improved—good teachers are born, not made. Much has been made about the importance of a growth mindset for student perseverance and success. Growth mindset is the belief that one’s abilities can improve through one’s own efforts. By contrast, a fixed mindset is the belief that one’s ability, such as the ability to write well or do math, is inborn and unchangeable. A growth mindset is just as important for teachers as it is for students. Obviously, teachers with a fixed mindset about teaching skill will not work to improve. The research is clear that teacher training and professional development can improve teaching effectiveness.
- To teach well, all that is needed is good knowledge of the material. According to this belief, a Nobel laureate should be a better physics teacher than a community college faculty member with 20 years of experience working with first-generation students. In my view, this common misconception is among the most harmful beliefs undermining the improvement of teaching. It is a rationalization that excuses faculty from exploring the complex factors that influence student learning. In graduate schools, this belief justifies not training students how to teach, leaving them unprepared to teach well. Graduate schools pass this misconception on to the next generation of faculty, reinforcing a norm of teaching uninformed by pedagogical research.
- I need to cover most of the course curriculum in class. Hativa notes that this belief is pervasive among faculty. It prioritizes what the teacher presents over what students actually learn in a class. It doesn’t matter how effectively teachers cover a topic as long as they cover it in some way. This belief is often reinforced by curricula that specify what a course must cover rather than what students should know and be able to do after the course is completed. Teachers who focus on content coverage over student learning often engage in what I call defensive teaching. If a faculty member teaching a more advanced course complains about students not being adequately prepared, the teacher can say, “Well, I covered it in my class.”
- I use strict lecturing and do not need to change it. Lecturing is still the dominant form of teaching, but within the lecture format there are many ways to introduce engaging learning activities even for large classes. This faulty belief refers to one-way lecturing where the teacher declaims, and the students listen and take notes. It assumes that the teacher is the ultimate authority and students should absorb and adopt the teacher’s views. Once the teacher has stated something