• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

It is a rare mercy to read papers with as much vision as these that do not invoke technology as the elixir for the improvement of teaching. Yet the assumption of much present activity, especially at George Mason, is that enhancing our technical expertise will impact our teaching dramatically. Huge resources at George Mason are thus being poured into technological enhancement. We might test the value of that by taking any of the pathologies Shulman identifies and ask exactly how technological enhancement could influence them. Technological enhancement, in my view, can only be robust if it welcomes many kinds of instructional design and if it has a strong conceptual framework congruent with that of the scholarship of teaching. 

What additionally might be done to foster teaching excellence and the scholarship of teaching which "takes learning seriously," and thereby change the culture? 

1) The gap between the teacher and the learner has to be bridged by the development of a common language about teaching which is sophisticated and not in thrall to a particular model of instructional design or to a system of student evaluation. 

2) Much more room and resources for alternative designs for teaching are required. We need to experiment with teaching outside the box of the doctrines we have come to think of as somehow fixed. 

3) We need to scrap our present method of student course evaluations and take the long haul to develop a system that can combine intellectual respect with our responsibility for public accountability. 

4) We need both liberation and permission to explore from our employers and administrators. Yet we also require liberation and permission from those of our colleagues who act as guardians and gatekeepers for particular kinds of dogmas about effective teaching written into bureaucratic requirements for the development of curriculum and syllabi. 

5) We need to figure out how technological enhancement can support new conceptions of excellence in teaching and in the scholarship of teaching. 

6) We cannot just start alternative systems without resources for a) our own development as teachers, b) devising means of accountability which match the language of the scholarship of teaching, and c) working on the scholarship of teaching ourselves. Nor can we do this without protection from accountants outside the walls and institutional inertia within them. 

Conservative teachers -- the nostalgics of Shulman's paper -- will misunderstand what is being said in this paper if they think it is some kind of plea for less rigor or lower standards. It is absolutely the opposite. Present systems actually permit, if not promote, less rigor for precisely the reasons Stenhouse adumbrates: we cannot effectively assess the true strengths and weaknesses of students within present patterns of evaluation. Nor can students evaluate their teachers in an intellectually respectable way. 

Whether I have got these right or not, these are the kinds of issues that should underpin the agenda of the George Mason Senate Committee on Effective Teaching. This would be a first small step to changing the "culture and infrastructure" which is demanded if George Mason is to be an institution committed not just to excellence in teaching but to its scholarship.