"I tried that, and it didn't work"

An introduction to a few posts on humility in faculty development

Since I started writing this newsletter, I have discussed the overall concept with a bunch of people. “I’m attempting to address the things that come up in faculty development work but never get discussed because they are ‘beyond the scope’ of basic practice.” Several people immediately responded, “Oh, then you should write about the frustration that instructors and faculty developers feel when a strategy that is supposed to be effective doesn’t work in practice.” This phenomenon is certainly common. At one teaching and learning program where I worked, there was an instructor who came to many workshops and patiently waited until the end to share that he had in fact already tried the strategies that were shared in the workshop, but that they hadn’t “worked” to meet his goals and he wasn’t sure why. I think the “what comes after” learning about new pedagogical strategies is kind of “beyond the scope” for both instructors and faculty developers. We tend to operate under the paradigm of “evidence-based teaching,” or the idea that teaching can be improved by implementing methods for which there is empirical evidence of effectiveness. Some voices on evidence-based teaching have used what I feel is pretty strong rhetoric to argue that that effective teaching is essentially a solved-problem, and that we only need create the appropriate supports and training systems to implement “proven” methods.

This just doesn’t match my day-to-day experience, or many of the experiences of faculty I have worked with. In many cases, “evidence-based” simply means that there is evidence of effectiveness in some contexts. Though it may seem obvious, I think it is under-discussed that any given evidence-based method is simply not appropriate for or workable in a specific situation. Perhaps this opinion is related to my focus on the experiences of disabled and neurodivergent instructors: since I do a lot of thinking about what types of teaching methods or faculty development programs are more accessible, I also recognize how many of them are not, or are not for everyone.

“Evidence-based” is not the same as “mandatory”

Why might a certain teaching method not work for a given instructor? The primary reasons I have observed are:

1. It may present access issues for them to implement, or generally not align with their strengths and skills. Personally I am very sensitive to loud volumes and layers of different voices and sounds. For this reason, activities that involve simultaneous spoken group work are hard for me to facilitate, making some implementations of team-based learning or peer instruction difficult for me.

2. It may not align well with the needs of the particular group of students the instructor is teaching. A flipped-classroom approach may not work well for a group of students with significant variability in their ability to attend class.

3. It may require more consideration of context, accessibility concerns, and other inclusion and equity issues (for some more discussion of this, you might find my posts on some of the caveats to “active learning” methods and “access friction”).

One way I have dealt with this reality is to make sure that the idea of an “evidence-based practice” is not equated with any single practice being obligatory or mandatory. Anecdotally, and I am curious if readers agree, I have spoken to more than a few faculty members who interpreted the presentation of evidence-based teaching methods in CTL programming as arguments that not taking up these methods was akin to malpractice. Very happily, we are in an age of abundance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) as well as Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) - that is to say, there is evidence that many different teaching methods may be effective! Going beyond the idea that no one practice is obligatory for any instructor, it is important to also recognize that it would simply be impossible for any one instructor to employ all of the great practices for which there is evidence of benefit to students. Teachers do have to make decisions about what methods to use now and which to table, and a room full of teachers can all make perfectly good and totally different decisions about how to teach¹. This point leads me to try to adopt a stance of humility as a faculty developer. Of course I do strongly advocate for certain things (especially related to accessibility), but I try to recognize that each instructor I work with is dealing with a world of personal experiences, needs, student lives, and other factors that I may never know in full when they make their decisions.

A way to integrate and utilize humility in a case study

One of my favorite devices to use in case studies for faculty is a scenario in which an instructor tries to implement some advice or strategy that they got from a teaching and learning center program, and it doesn’t go so well. As an example, I recently wrote and presented a case study in which an instructor goes to a workshop on inclusive teaching with respect to neurodivergent students, but when they try to implement some of what they learned their students push back, requesting to return to the prior format. The participants talked about whether (if they were in this situation) they would press on and defend their decisions, or accept the student feedback and make adjustments. They ultimately fell all over the spectrum in terms of what they would do and how. I like this style of case study because it offers me an opportunity to demonstrate humility. I often get a laugh when I say that through this case study I acknowledge that sometimes you go to a workshop, implement some advice, and then have even more work to do. I also try to use this opportunity to highlight that I am a partner in navigating the messiness of teaching, not just in packaging the latest headlines of educational research.

In the coming weeks I am hoping to do a few posts on humility in faculty development. This is a topic I have been interested in for a while. One of my main reflections upon leaving my last full-time faculty development job was that there are incentives in faculty development to project certainty and offer solutions, even as there are rarely easy solutions in teaching. If you have ideas that you think would be interesting to explore, please let me know! As always I am very open to your feedback in the comments (if you are logged into substack) or on my contact form.

Image by Dim Hou from Pixabay.

1. Sometimes I call this idea “pedagogical pluralism.”