Author Archives: marythuber

Changing Departmental Teaching Cultures

By Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings (Posted to the Bay View Alliance website, May 13, 2021)

What is a departmental teaching culture and how does it change?

This is an important question for advocates of pedagogical reform. Opportunities for individuals and small groups to learn and improve teaching are now widespread. Most universities have centers of teaching and learning that provide help for faculty in their role as teachers, and many disciplinary societies also sponsor workshops, conference sessions, journals, and other resources on field-specific pedagogy.

But one of the missing ingredients for the widespread adoption of new teaching practices is a supportive teaching culture—especially a departmental teaching culture—that welcomes and encourages thoughtful pedagogical exploration and exchange.

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Exploring the Landscape of Teaching and Learning: A Conversation with Mary Huber

By Doug Ward (posted to the Bay View Alliance website, October 30, 2018)

From the trenches, the work to improve college teaching seems interminably slow.

Those of us at research universities devote time to our students at our own peril as colleagues who shrug off teaching and service in favor of research earn praise and promotion. When we point out deep flaws in a lecture-oriented system that promotes passive, shallow learning, we are too often told that such a system is the only way to educate large numbers of students. We seemingly write the same committee reports over and over, arguing that college teaching must move to a student-centered model; that a system established for educating a 19^th-century industrial workforce must adapt to the needs of 21^st-century students; that higher education’s rewards system must value teaching, learning, and service – not just research.

In the end, few people seem to be listening.

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New Teaching Positions Up the Ante on Pedagogical Knowledge and Skill

New Teaching Positions Up the Ante on Pedagogical Knowledge and Skill

Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings

February 26, 2018

As higher education has grown and diversified over the past thirty to forty years, the professoriate has grown and diversified as well. One well known, and to many disturbing, aspect of this trend is the growing proportion of faculty in “non-career ladder positions, both full-and part-time,” hired specifically to do “instructional ‘heavy lifting,” (Finkelstein, Conley, & Schuster, 2016, p. 94). They are there to teach classes, not to contribute to knowledge about teaching or to the general improvement of teaching practice.

But we have been struck by an interesting countertrend—not yet visible in the statistics–that seems to have taken hold: the proliferation of different kinds of appointments that up the ante on–and value of–pedagogical knowledge and skill. Continue reading →

Leadership: It Takes a Village and Time

Leadership: It Takes a Village (and Time)

Pat Hutchings and Mary Huber

August 31, 2017

Why does it take so long for teaching practices to change in college and university classrooms?

Many faculty today are intrigued by new teaching approaches that have been shown to improve the quality and quantity of student learning. And many are experimenting with these approaches, finding ways to engage students more actively--for instance by organizing them to work in groups to solve complex problems, or asking them to apply and demonstrate their learning in community settings. Continue reading →

Talking about Teaching: Innovation and Collaboration

Mary Huber and Pat Hutchings

May 29, 2017

Changing teaching practices in a department takes time.

We often think of that challenge as allowing time for changes in teaching practice to take root and spread, but it also means finding time for constructive conversations about teaching and learning. Most departmental committees that oversee undergraduate programs involve only a small fraction of the faculty and deal with bureaucratic necessities like prerequisites and classroom space. Busy faculty–even those teaching sections of the same course, or successive courses in a sequence—don’t always coordinate. As a result, pedagogical innovation and collaboration lack the attention they deserve. Continue reading →