Autonomy and Common Curricula

It’s Spring Break, so I’m catching up on reading some blogs. Today I wanted to highlight a post by Greg Ashman titled “The Secret of a Strong Department”. While his experiences are geared at the grade school level (equivalent to U.S. high school), there are some potential takeaways for college-level teaching.

Ashman kicks things off by describing how having well-constructed and detailed lesson plans handed to you when you are a novice teacher can be very helpful. This way you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There is nothing controversial or surprising about this. When I taught tightly prescribed curricula at the high school or pre-college levels, it was very obvious what I needed to cover and how much time I had to cover the appropriate content and skills to be taught. There was little flexibility and little room to deviate from the master plan – otherwise you would not prepare the student adequately for national-level exams (common in many countries outside the U.S.)

His example of a bad is to “give teachers a list of five vague themes to cover in a term and let them get on with it with very little guidance”. Ashman questions why this approach is perpetuated. Certainly there are departments that are disorganized, headed by folks who seem to be constantly behind-the-ball, and therefore instructions are both scant and vague. However the next two reasons he highlights are the main points of his post.

First, he argues that “when teachers claim that they need a certain amount of autonomy, this is related to flawed notions of what it means to be a professional.” The problem lies in how much autonomy. Certainly it is important for teachers to be able to respond to questions and facilitate discussion in class, and these may vary depending on the students and their level of understanding and engagement. The issue raised is that if a teacher is “not comfortable with a key part of the curriculum, and [has] enough autonomy to de-emphasize it… things might not get taught.” This can certainly be a problem for core concepts. The chemistry program in my department (like many others) is hierarchical in nature. If a student does not master (or is not taught) key concepts and skills, it is difficult to progress to the higher levels where the earlier core knowledge is assumed.

Second, Ashman thinks that really good explanations, really good reading choices, really good exercises, are few in number. Once honed, these can be employed repeatedly for each group of students. He thinks that students are “not as different from each other as is sometimes supposed.” He argues against fully scripted lessons, and suggests that if some key classroom activity isn’t working well, it probably should be changed for all instructors and all sections of the same class, and not just subject to one instruction’s whim. This semester our department has 12 sections of second-semester General Chemistry lab. The labs have been honed over the years to provide what we think is the best educational experience for our students, and we stick to the plan. (Certainly from a lab prep point of view, it is important to be doing the same experiment when you’re at scale.) There are minor variations in each section not in the actual experiments, but we’ve all recognized that the pre-lab questions, quiz questions, analysis questions, discussion/reflection questions, built up over the years, are well-chosen.

In the lecture sections, there is a little more variation in how we cover particular topics, but as a group we all decide on a common textbook and which chapters will be covered each semester. This year I’m covering the material in an order very similar to my fellow instructors. I do this most of the time but I occasionally deviate. Last year when I had a smaller Honors section of 25 students, I re-themed the class and covered the topics in a very different order. I still covered the core topics but I had plenty of autonomy to do so in a very different way. It was a lot of extra work on my part, but I generated a lot of useful class activities, some of which I have modified for my regular section this year. My department is also very good about sharing materials and we regularly talk to each other in the hallways about things we’re trying – those that work well and those that don’t. One very useful thing I did when I first became a faculty member was to regular visit my colleagues’ classes. I still do so, although less regularly than when I started out.

Ashman notes that “joint planning needs to be effectively led” and when done well is the “sign of a strong department”. While I happen to be in a department where this is true, I have also observed many more cases when this situation is not the case. With the recent upheavals in the world of higher education, many institutions (in the attempt to be more relevant and at least maintain their market share) are re-envisioning and revising their core curriculum. In a number of cases we are seeing more “joint planning”, certainly from an assessment point of view. There are also moves towards having part of the core be a common curriculum – that students should have a common yet distinctive experience is starting to be a selling point in admissions brochures, even if the reality behind the scenes is much messier. The administration becomes more complex, and segments of faculty will use the loss of autonomy argument. We are also seeing an eroding of faculty governance as administrations seek to be more “nimble to change”.

If you read Ashman’s post, I recommend skimming the comments too. Some of them are quite thoughtful. Much like other complex interconnected problems, there is no simple solution. But there is food for thought.