(Well, one of them)

I’ve felt for a long time that one of the hardest challenges in higher education is how do we make teaching first years interesting? How do we put our brightest and best academics in front of our freshers to inspire and motivate them. Surely our students are here to be wowed by the people who conduct the cutting edge research, who write the textbooks, etc.?

I’ve tended to look at the problem from the perspective of the superstar academics. How do we make teaching first years intellectually and emotionally fulfilling for them? There will always be exceptions, but I’d argue that typically a conversation about your discipline with a final year or even postgraduate student is likely to be more rewarding than a conversation with a newly-arrived first year. I think that, irrespective of the personalities of the students, classes with more experienced students have a greater potential to be intellectually challenging and engaging for the academic.

Of course, there are likely to be many more lightbulb moments with first years, but there’s also potentially a lot more slog, a lot more liminal “module 101” content to get through. If you are motivated more by your interactions and the learning and teaching experience, that may be far less of an issue. If we’re honest though, most HE systems reward specialism in one or the other; superstar researchers who are also superstar teachers can be hard to find (& are of course to be hugely cherished when we do). I think my basic point stands: teaching large numbers of new students who are relatively inexperienced in your discipline is hard work and yet surely they deserve to be taught by our ‘best’?

But

Let’s unpick that a little. Yes of course if your superstar academic is ‘famous’ they ought to be wheeled out in front of your new students from time-to-time, but are they actually the best person to be teaching first years?

And I really, REALLY hate to type this. Possibly not.

In Hidden Potential: the science of achieving greater things, Adam Grant describes how Einstein turned out to be a pretty rubbish lecturer. His starting point and the starting point of his students was so far apart that they scarcely had any common ground in which to discuss physics. Students found Einstein impossible to understand and Einstein couldn’t express his expertise in a way that his students could engage with. I find this fascinating, it’s obvious that my limited Dutch lessons in the Duolingo app mean that I can only engage with the barest elements of a conversation in the Netherlands, yet it’s not something that we consider when thinking about who to put in front of new students.

Grant cites an interesting study (Figlio, Schapiro and Soter (2015). The researchers found in a study of over 15,000 students at Northwestern University, those students taught by the most experienced academics were less likely to choose modules in that topic in the next year and achieved poorer grades compared to students taught by less experienced academics.

Of course subject knowledge is important. But so is communicating that subject knowledge well and finding ways to engage your students. I have no doubt that brilliant academics can (& do) teach brilliantly, but it’s important to remember that being the world’s greatest (or 74th greatest) expert on a subject is a barrier to communicating it well. You may be seeing the whole of the moon; your first year students almost certainly aren’t.

see also “The Curse of Knowledge – how it gets in the way of teaching university students”

Photo Credit: Silhouette of a bird in the sky and full moon by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0