One of the rare silver linings of the early pandemic years was a sudden broadening of attentiveness on college campuses to student-centered teaching. Workshops on the subject attracted packed audiences (often on Zoom), and teaching-advice books flew off the shelves (especially on hot topics like humanizing online teaching). More faculty members than ever experimented with flexible deadlines, “ungrading,” and active learning, and many institutions temporarily expanded their pass/fail policies.
One hopes that at least some of those shifts will occupy a permanent spot in higher ed’s future. But this year? Not so much. Many teaching-center staff members I talk with report a sharp increase in empty chairs and ghosty Zoom rooms for the same offerings that used to be full. Those who listen closely are also hearing a growing weariness with teaching innovations that ignore faculty workload and burnout.
I encounter that sentiment whenever I give talks or run workshops at campus teaching centers. “My faculty are saying to me: I’m just done. Done!” said one such center director recently. “And these are my most dedicated, most student-focused teachers!” I see the same frustration reflected in social-media posts from some of my professor friends. And I read some possible causes in essays about growing student incivility in the classroom, and in scholarly work that calls for us to appreciate how women and faculty of color bear the brunt of such disruptive behavior.
In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings to such a degree — and gathering strength over time — that I’ve begun thinking of it as a growing backlash against student-centered teaching, at least in its most concentrated form.
My research, writing, and teaching has long focused on the emotional and motivational lives of students and on how to create a classroom environment that supports both their learning and mental health. So this mushrooming backlash gives me great unease. But I also believe that it holds important lessons for those of us who pursue the aims of “educational development,” a term that broadly covers the work of teaching-center staff members, faculty-development administrators, and pedagogy researchers. What can we, as educational developers, do when the path forward is unclear, the choices are many, and the folks we’re guiding are weary, frustrated, and beginning to dig in their heels?
Clearly it does very little good to shame faculty members for resisting new teaching practices that they worry would only add to their workload or worsen student incivilities. Instead I would like us to recalibrate the conversation about student-centered teaching.
Center the teachers, and trust their intuition and autonomy. We are always going to have to juggle competing needs of students and instructors. After decades of one-size-fits-all teaching, centering students meant recognizing their varied learning needs, providing tools for them to take a more active role in their own education, and humanizing higher education. It’s been a deeply needed and revolutionary corrective in the college classroom — and a movement in which I have proudly taken part.
But the time seems ripe for a complementary revolution, one that recognizes and respects the autonomy and bandwidth of teachers. Lindsay Masland, director of transformative teaching and learning at Appalachian State University, calls this approach “teacher-centered teaching,” and defines it as a Venn overlap of the practices of student-centered teaching with a faculty member’s key pedagogical values and personal context.
For every course you teach, you have so many choices to make. Exams or papers? How many of each? What types of questions? And on and on. I recall a 2022 talk by Michael Palmer, director of the teaching center at the University of Virginia, in which he gave a rough estimate of the number of choices an instructor makes in a typical semester: 15.9 million. He was both joking, and not.
You can’t possibly improve or innovate all of your teaching practices at once, so you have a lot of choices to make. Let your choices, Masland argues, be guided by your personal context and teaching constraints. Things like course load and class size, or the nature of your faculty position (tenure track or contingent), might influence how you decide to experiment in the classroom. Some strategies won’t work in large classes and some instructors might worry that their future employment would be affected by innovations that received negative course ratings from students. Identity-based characteristics like race, gender identity, or disability status are an important contextual factor that might shape your teaching choices. For instance, a white tenured faculty member may find that ungrading frees both the instructor and the students from the rigid power struggles of a traditional grading system, while a Black adjunct faculty member may feel powerless when the same practice results in student complaints and departmental censure.
Those of us advocating new teaching techniques also can’t continue to overlook (as we often have) that the needs of some students clash with the needs of others, and similarly, some student and faculty needs are in conflict. A good example is our pandemic-era teaching: Some students thrived with deadlines removed, while others floundered without that structure (most students probably learn best in the middle ground: “flexibility with guardrails”).
Sarah E. Silverman, a disability-studies scholar, notes that some teaching choices can make a course more accessible for one student and less accessible for another. She calls this tension “access friction.” For example, for many undergraduates, regular warm-up activities and small-group work can heighten a sense of belonging and engagement in the classroom. For some introverted or neurodivergent students, however, those same activities can be uncomfortable or even unmanageable.
In short, instead of telling faculty members to “center students in every decision,” we should be saying, “choose those student-centered practices that are most core to your values, context, and constraints.”
Stop treating everyday teaching practices as “harmful.” I’ve written about the student mental-health crisis in my latest book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health With Compassionate Challenge. It’s a research-driven argument for the importance of creating opportunities for students to rise to intellectual and emotional challenges from a grounding of security and belongingness. Notably, my book does not hold teaching practices accountable for either exacerbating or treating mental-health struggles, as both are, in my view, outside the scope of college teaching.
For sure, some faculty actions in the classroom can cause emotional harm — shaming students for their contributions, refusing to honor academic accommodations, or engaging in acts of bias and discrimination in the classroom. We need conversations and training to avoid such behavior. I also believe deeply in the importance and value of teaching-reform efforts, in working to create learning environments that are more equitable, intrinsically motivating, and authentic.
The problem comes when advocates of teaching reform cast judgment on prosaic, everyday classroom practices — such as lectures and multiple-choice exams — that aren’t necessarily damaging and can, in fact, be legitimate pedagogical choices. Try Googling “high-stakes exams”: Littered among the search results are phrases like “dangerous consequences” and “psychological toll.” In a conference talk I once saw high-stakes exams included in a list of possible traumatic experiences. As educational developers, we need to respect instructor autonomy and avoid reproach. After all, the degree to which you are authentic, caring, and invested in student success tends to matter more than which gadgets you choose from the teaching toolkit.
Using the language of harm to describe routine teaching choices is, well, also potentially harmful to instructors. I’m not typically haunted by magazine articles, but one that fit that bill is a January 2024 article in The New York Times Magazine about a spate of student suicides at a small private research university. The article recounts a night when the university’s dean of arts and sciences got a late-night phone call from the president alerting her to the fourth death of a student, and then went downstairs in the darkened silence of her own home and screamed. It is a scene that replays in my head in quiet moments.
I regularly talk with anxious instructors, on my campus and elsewhere, who fear that they aren’t doing enough for their students, and worry that some teaching choice they make (say, declining a request for a deadline extension) could be a tipping point for a student in the throes of mental duress.
That is too much weight for pedagogy to bear. It is too much responsibility for an overworked, underpaid professoriate; it is also outside our scope of practice. Most important, it isn’t true. The human psyche is not so fragile that taking a high-stakes exam can qualify as a trauma. Repeated intellectual challenges in a classroom can build self-efficacy and resilience, not wear it down, especially when offered in an environment of support and care.
Encourage faculty members to create intellectual challenges rather than logistical ones. One of the additional hats I wear in this life is president of the Friends of Drama association at my daughter’s high school. We recently wrapped “tech week” for the spring musical, which, for the drama-uninitiated, is the string of dress rehearsals leading up to the performances. It is a heady, messy, emotional, grueling week. We always start tech week, students especially, feeling like there is no way this will lead to a polished performance. And then it does. It happens in a setting of both challenge (using every bit of your effort and skills) and compassion (mutual connection and support).
I believe that a tech-week experience and a college course have a lot in common. At the close of both, you should feel that you have applied every bit of your skill in a collaborative effort that brings you a strong sense of competence and self-efficacy. Students need to experience the transformative power of facing an intellectual problem and rising to the challenge, within a setting of support. It’s not an either/or matter — creating a compassionate classroom or a demanding one — it’s both.
Importantly, we want to be sure we are creating intellectual challenges rather than structural ones (e.g., exams or grading curves explicitly designed to weed out “weak” students). In a May 2023 essay, “Why Calls for a Return to ‘Rigor’ Are Wrong,” Kevin Gannon, a professor of history at Queens University of Charlotte and head of its teaching center, urged faculty members to always be attentive to whether we are creating cognitive versus logistical challenges, and strive for the former. If we are raising logistical challenges — making it tricky or difficult for students to understand how to learn and succeed (and especially, if this is more true for some students than others) — then we’ve just built barriers, not created challenges.
Recommit to a culture of respect, autonomy, and nuance. On the institutional level, we need to reframe faculty development around a deep culture of respect for instructor autonomy and choice. And on social-media platforms, we must extend that same culture to how we discuss our teaching choices.
Most of us, if we’re being honest, can admit that our once-collegial discussions on Twitter about teaching and learning had soured well before a series of terrible business decisions turned the often-entertaining birdsite into the dismaying X. Any instructor who vented on Twitter about the stresses of teaching life could expect to be quote-tweeted and publicly shamed by a swarm of critics. It was routine to see condemnations of professors who taught lecture-heavy courses, cold-called on students, or based a student’s grade on a couple of exams.
Part of trusting teachers and paying respect to pedagogical autonomy means not putting in the crosshairs everyday teaching practices that may differ from those you find most effective, appealing, or attractive. If educational development is perceived as a place of indoctrination rather than spirited conversation, those chairs are likely to stay empty.
It is unclear whether, and where, the academic communities that once flourished on X will regroup and re-establish themselves. The staid and corporate-feeling LinkedIn has certainly been more active (and interactive) than in the past. Substack has its fans. I love Bluesky, though it can definitely be a bit strange at times. Mastodon had a moment that also seems to have since thundered past.
A path forward. On whatever platform replaces academic Twitter, let’s have nuanced, complex, practical conversations about teaching and learning. Let’s also respect an instructor’s freedom to decide what works best for their individual context. Here are just a few ideas that might bring folks back to the educational-development fold:
- Host events on sometimes-maligned teaching practices. At my previous institution, a faculty member who used lectures as his primary form of pedagogy sought a conversation with our teaching-center staff. He felt that lectures were unfairly treated in the teaching-and-learning discourse, and that that was a reason why professors from certain departments rarely attended our events. We held a dinner event where he gave a talk titled “In Defense of the Lecture,” and then was joined by three faculty members who used lecturing in innovative ways and briefly demonstrated their methods. It was a warm, rich evening of dialogue and debate over dinner.
- Invite speakers from a range of teaching perspectives. At my current institution a favorite (and well-attended) Zoom event was a Q&A panel on course deadline policies. Three faculty members who fell at different points along the flexible-to-strict continuum each spoke for five to eight minutes and then fielded questions. A panel with speakers who disagree — or at least, have varied practices — demonstrates the openness and respect for faculty autonomy that we should strive for as facilitators.
- Ask about burnout and bandwidth. If you’re in educational development, and a faculty member comes to you asking for help in improving their teaching, start the conversation by asking how much bandwidth they have. Then tailor your suggestions to the amount of time and energy they have to innovate.
- Then actually respect their bandwidth and workload. Look for ways to keep programming to a reasonable time commitment and scheduled to mesh with the rhythms of the academic year. Administrators: Whenever possible, provide stipends and/or course releases for more extensive programs.
Let us center our dedicated teachers in any conversations about teaching reform, yank the reins on judgment and shame, and acknowledge that teaching is an ever-evolving, ever-shifting dance that requires a deep appreciation of both teacher and learner. While we’re at it, why not forge a new social-media landscape with an appreciation of both nuance and kindness.
