You are no doubt aware that universities and colleges are reorganizing to better cope with a variety of challenges facing higher education.
Against that backdrop, let’s explore the strategy of building a culture of exceptional teaching as one helpful anchor that can be a guiding force in turbulent times.
Based on my teaching experience at Baldwin Wallace University, where we have experienced a holistic restructuring for the future, I believe that a unique mix of teaching orientations builds a culture of exceptional teaching.
I am also inspired by what I discovered in a five-year research study. That investigation found that greatness, in any profession, consists of two aspects — a performance excellence component plus a unique transformational component.
The performance excellence component is the essential knowledge and skills necessary for effective performance in any type of work. This could mean being effective in meeting sales or manufacturing targets, maintaining technical accuracy in accounting, conforming to quality benchmarks in service jobs, etc.
In teaching, this could translate to successfully imparting the material in textbooks to help students acquire the “subject area” knowledge in any discipline. This expectation of teaching is a foundational requirement at any university.
However, creating a culture of exceptional teaching involves mindfully staffing the university with some “gourmet faculty” who are uniquely gifted in terms of their electrifying passion, versatility in reaching a diverse body of students and unleashing their intrinsic creativity.
Such faculty are often bohemian pathfinders who can energize a room of students, just as a single candle can light 300 candles without losing its incandescence.
Great teaching environments take particular care in retaining “gourmet faculty,” as they are a rarer breed, statistically speaking.
Such faculty, sprinkled across every campus known for excellence in teaching, may help defy the “plateauing” and burnout patterns so common among educators.
These passionate teachers have the capacity for what the comedian George Carlin called “vuja de” (the opposite of deja vu), in that they can teach a topic for the 1,000th time with the “fresh eyes” and enthusiasm as if they were teaching it for the first time.
Often, such faculty have earned a regional or national reputation in their professions and are widely known to students for their originality, creativity, inexhaustible energy and a contagious passion.
The presence of “gourmet faculty” can be contagious and can differentiate a “great” teaching environment from a “good” one.
One of the errors in higher education in the United States was to equate quality with standardization. In manufacturing, quality is synonymous with consistency and uniformity. But in knowledge work, we want everyone thinking differently and bringing different perspectives.
We must therefore celebrate variances, rather than just standardization. Encouraging instructors to teach to their unique strengths will ensure that all types of faculty feel supported.
Students need to possess the knowledge and skills for earning a living. But they also need a courageous spirit, an original imagination and radical creativity for surviving a volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
These competencies are best nurtured and unleashed by “gourmet faculty.”
Colleges and universities that survive and even thrive through the headwinds confronting higher education must balance the pursuit of restructuring for economic viability with building and sustaining a culture of exceptional teaching excellence.
In a fiercely competitive environment, merely claiming general “teaching excellence” may not be enough. Supporting excellence that is transformative, diverse and vibrant is the need of the hour.