r 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, their responsibility ends, and the students bear the burden of figuring out how to learn from the lecture, regardless of how clearly or comprehensively the teacher presented the information.
I give many faculty workshops on how to improve teaching. Because of the faulty beliefs listed above, I know that many of the faculty who most need to hear what I say aren’t present because they don’t feel like it is important or applies to them. For teachers who hold these beliefs, teaching is often an unpleasant slog. There is a win-win situation that they are probably not aware of because they have never experienced it. When teachers support student learning effectively, both students and teachers have a much happier experience in class.
Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education, 52(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266
Hativa, N. (2001). Teaching for effective learning in higher education. Springer Science & Business Media.
Haught, P. A., Nardi, A. H., & Walls, R. T. (2016). Academic memories of school. American Journal of Educational Research, 4(11), 817-827. https://doi.org10.12691/education-4-11-7
Jansen, T., Meyer, J., Wigfield, A., & Möller, J. (2022). Which student and instructional variables are most strongly related to academic motivation in K–12 education? A systematic review of meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 148(1–2), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000354
Marsh, H. W., & Roche, L. A. (1997). Making students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: The critical issues of validity, bias, and utility. American Psychologist, 52(11), 1187–1197. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.52.11.1187
Stephen L. Chew, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Samford University. Trained as a cognitive psychologist, he endeavors to translate cognitive research into forms that are useful for teachers and students. He is the recipient of multiple awards for his teaching and research. Author contact: email@example.com.