I’ve been reflecting on Jonathan Zimmerman’s article in Washington Monthly this week, Why Professor’s Can’t Teach, which focuses on some structural reasons why professors lack opportunities and incentives to focus on improving as teachers. I’m taking this and turning it slightly, because Zimmerman’s title focuses on the individual, when really this is a structural issue. As is well documented, political science departments at research-oriented universities don’t care much about teaching. Faculty are promoted because of their research record and grants; only in the most egregious cases are people denied for poor teaching. This results in a culture where teaching is ignored and dismissed, where those who focus their career on student learning are devalued, and where as a result, learning is anything but student-centered.
I think it’s long past time to demand real change within our discipline. With APSA starting soon, I hope my colleagues who get to attend will find time to chat about these constraints and consider joining my call for action.
There are two broad lines of effort that I’m focused on, but I know others will add to it.
Line of Effort #1: Train Grad Students in How to Teach
Let’s start with grad student training. As Ishiyama, Miles, and Balarezo (2010) and Stein (2024) amongst others point out, PhD-granting institutions rarely systematically train their graduate students in how to teach. Some offer an optional course, or access to workshops; others throw their students into teaching their own classes almost immediately to learn-by-doing; still others don’t even allow their graduate students to teach at all, punting that responsibility to the next institution. As Zimmermann notes, if you are lucky, you get a 3 day workshop on how to teach, compared with years of training in how to be a researcher. Given that most of the increasingly scarce academic jobs are at teaching-oriented universities (where applicants without any experience or training in teaching are not competitive candidates), that strong teaching is connected with retention, and that dwindling enrollments and retention can threaten the stability of those jobs, we need to find ways to push departmental programs to provide proper training and feedback to students while they are still in grad school. In this, I want to go beyond Paul Diehl’s (2021) call for an increased emphasis on pedagogy. It’s not enough to have an optional course or ask professors to hire their students as post-docs and give the training post-graduation.
A couple of options here for us to consider: first, why not think seriously about Lee Trepanier’s (2017) call to create a scholarship of teaching and learning subfield within political science? Let students specialize in this during graduate school, both so they can gain the necessary training and experience and to signal this while on the market. What would such a subfield look like, what would the reading list be, how would we measure success within the field?
Second, departments should step up to revise their graduate curriculums to require training in teaching political science. The APSA Presidential Task Force on Rethinking Political Science Education report strongly advocated for training grad students in pedagogy as well as research. In it, they note that at minimum departments should encourage students to take advantage of campus training opportunities, but could also adopt mentorship and apprenticeship models and create department-specific courses. The report notes that R1 departments don’t necessarily have faculty trained in teaching to offer such programming, but we have solutions for that: budgets for bringing in the many polisci SOTL experts that are out there, and funding grad students to attend teaching-oriented conferences (such as APSA TLC this February, or the upcoming Teaching Day at ISA). There’s also of course the option to value teaching experience and expertise in hiring new faculty, even at R1s. This is a solvable problem, but departments need to step up and change the culture around teaching as a first step toward addressing it.
Questions remain on exactly what the teaching side of the curriculum should look like. What should be the minimal training that grad students should expect on teaching? What are the key questions, methods, and experiences that should be addressed? How much teaching experience should students get, and in what forms? Should that vary by intended ‘pathway’ toward academic, public sector, or private sector work? It’s not enough to say that students should get at least a workshop or a course; we need to think seriously about what tools, theories, concepts, and approaches should form the core of that side of the curriculum. This is a ripe avenue for polisci pedagogy scholars to explore.
Line of Effort #2: Measures and Incentives to Teach Well
The second line of effort is in creating measures and incentives to care about teaching effectiveness. Many of us already care deeply about this, and independently work to become better teachers. Our scholarship may not change someone’s life, but our teaching truly can. But institutions, as Zimmerman points out, rarely put their money into supporting strong teaching. At the same time, we lack good measures of teaching effectiveness and impact, making it harder to differentiate–and therefore reward–good teaching. The institution level is beyond the scope of what I can offer recommendations on, so let me suggest two small ways in which polisci departments can try to work on this.
First, we need to improve our feedback mechanisms and evaluation systems. Most departments rely solely on teaching evaluations to measure teaching. This is wrongheaded, my friends, and a clear example of taking the ‘easy but bad’ path. Student evaluations have again and again been shown to be susceptible to bias, particularly on instructor race and gender, to be correlated with expected grade, and to incentivize instructors to decrease challenge and inflate grades. When evaluations are the only thing teaching effectiveness is judged by, that leaves our colleagues in contingent positions to be particularly susceptible to the whims of what are, in effect, customer satisfaction surveys that measure the student experience, or as Zimmerman mentions, ‘Yelp reviews’. Faculty should be applying the best of teaching and learning science not chasing now-removed chili peppers on Rate my Professor.
Why do we judge our research by peer review but our teaching solely by student review? This has never made sense to me.
So, my first call is for departments to adopt a more 360 degree approach to evaluating teaching effectiveness. Keep the Yelp reviews, as it is important to get a student perspective. But add to that feedback from expert teachers (award winners, or center for teaching and learning folks); departmental peers, and self-reflections. Combine this into a portfolio that can be used formatively as well as summatively, so that faculty can reflect regularly on how their changing has changed and improved. Simply going through that process of regular reflection taps into the same kind of metacognitive learning approaches we advocate for our own students.
Second, and perhaps most controversially: departments should consider requiring tenure-line faculty to engage in teaching-focused professional development as part of tenure and promotion decisions within the department. Perhaps this means presenting at a teaching conference, or attending regular workshops from the Center for Teaching and Learning; perhaps it means that one of their required publications has to be on teaching and learning in political science. If the structural incentives of promotion and tenure drive faculty toward only doing substantive research, then let’s change some of those incentives so that a small part of that energy is instead focused on research on teaching.
To put my money where my mouth is, I’m committed to working on these efforts myself, and i welcome discussions with those who want to join in. First, I just published my book, Teaching Political Science: A Practical Guide for Instructors, precisely to start to fill the gap left by institutions not providing this training. It outlines the areas I think early career instructors need to train in, and could serve as a conversation starter for others to critique, edit, and add to. Like many of my colleagues in the polsci pedagogy space, I’m continually engaged in scholarship designed to help teachers get the resources they need to be effective in the classroom.
Second, ever since Dani Gilbert called for an ‘IQMR for Teaching’ at the 2021 ISA in Nashville (which got a quasi-shout out in the APSA task force report) I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to make that happen–and to get the funding to keep the cost low for attendees. One effort in that vein is the upcoming ‘Teaching Day at ISA’ mini-conference that should launch at ISA this year, a collaboration between the leadership of the Education and Learning Section (ELIAS) the Teaching-Centric Institutions Caucus, the Innovative Pedagogy Conference Committee, and the ISA Program Committee.
Third, Tavishi Bhasin (of Kennesaw State, editor at JPSE, and co-author of the recent Palgrave Handbook on Teaching and Research in Political Science) and I are planning to convene a research group, hopefully at the APSA Virtual Meeting in February 2025, to work towards establishing what the ‘canon’ reading list would be for a Polisci SOTL subfield. If you are interested in joining that effort, please contact us.
Whether or not these specific ideas gain traction, I do think its time for us to demand that our departments do better by our students–both the PhD students who come to us to learn the profession, and to our wider student body who deserve to have great teaching. There’s a lot at stake here–we are the ones charged with teaching students about the role of government, participatory democracy, civic engagement, war, and peace. We owe it to our students to do all we can to help them develop their knowledge and skills in these areas. Let’s do what needs to be done to meet that mission.
ETA on 6 September 2024: I recommend folks give a read to Stein (2024), just published in JPSE, which finds that “interviews with faculty in 66 PhD-granting departments reveal that less than a fifth of departments require students to complete credit-bearing courses and a plurality require no pedagogical training.” This is additional evidence that while some departments have made strides towards increasing their offerings to students, pedagogical training is still not taken seriously as a part of graduate education.
