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February 2006

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From:
Jim Greenberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Teaching Breakfast List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 9 Feb 2006 08:03:59 -0500
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Tbers, 

"In unguarded moments with close friends, we who
teach will acknowledge a variety of fears: having
our work unappreciated, being inadequately
rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we
chose the wrong profession, spending our lives on
trivia, ending up feeling like frauds. But many
of us have another fear that we rarely name: out
fear of the judgment of the young."

The lengthy post below looks at how to help faculty
deal with fears about making changes in their
teaching. It is from Chapter 9, Preparing Faculty
for Pedagogical Change: Helping Faculty Deal With
Fear, by Linda C. Hodges, Princeton University,
in To Improve the Academy, Resources for Faculty,
Instructional, and Organizational Development,
Volume 24, Sandra Chadwick-Blossey, Editor. ISBN
1-882982-89-4. Copyright © 2006 by Anker
Publishing Company, Inc. 563 Main Street, P.O.
Box 249 Bolton, MA 01740-0249 USA.
www.ankerpub.com

 PREPARING FACULTY FOR PEDAGOGICAL CHANGE:
HELPING FACULTY DEAL WITH FEAR

How receptive faculty are to changing their
pedagogical approach is a complex issue, but one
factor that impedes change is the fear of taking
a risk. Underlying this fear may be the fear of
loss, fear of embarrassment, or fear of failure.
Addressing these issues can empower faculty to be
more innovative in their teaching. Drawing on
research literature, personal teaching
narratives, and my own work in faculty
development, I discuss some of these underlying
fears. I then offer concrete strategies for
working with faculty to enable them to overcome
these emotional barriers and embrace change.

Introduction

One way to ensure a lively, even heated, debate
among college and university faculty is to turn
the conversation to the newest pedagogical
strategies. Teaching approaches such as
collaborative learning and problem-based learning
have been extolled by some as ways to develop
students' critical thinking and problem-solving
abilities and to increase students' engagement in
their learning. But these techniques have also
been seen by some as trendy, resulting in little
more than an increase in the students' "feeling
good" factor and a decrease in content covered
and knowledge retained by students. These
concerns may be countered by those who adopt the
constructivist's view that knowledge cannot be
transferred intact from lecturer to listener but
must be actively created in part through
interactions with others. Other educators point
out challenges in some of these student-centered
approaches, however, such as the danger of
misconceptions promoted by group work and the
difficulties in transferring content learned in
highly contextualized formats such as
problem-based learning. Often the difficulty of
assessing the effectiveness of various teaching
methods punctuates these discussions.

If we start probing in these conversations, we
may find that skepticism is expressed not only
about those strategies that may be considered most
nontraditional, such as problem-based learning,
but also for more conventional teaching formats
such as class discussions or student-led problem
sessions. And, conversely, proponents of highly
interactive formats may devalue any form of
lecturing. How receptive faculty are to the
perceived value of pedagogical strategies is a
complex issue that depends less on how compelling
the data are in support of these approaches and
more on what teachers believe about teaching.
Teachers' beliefs is an important topic in
educational research, as are studies on how these
beliefs may affect practice (Hativa & Goodyear,
2002). These beliefs need not be static but
evolve over a teacher's career depending on
experiences and the ability of the teacher to
reflect on those experiences. Even then, the
impetus to change one's teaching practices based
on experience and reflection is affected by both
intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. For example,
an intrinsic motivation may be how much teaching
generates a personal sense of satisfaction and an
extrinsic motivation may be how teaching is
rewarded in our professional career.

Although certain critical impediments to faculty
undertaking new pedagogical approaches are
institutional and thus extrinsic, those that are
most readily addressed are personal. A
prerequisite step to the willingness to teach
differently is the reflection on practice. Yet
reflective teachers may not change the approach
they take in the classroom, even though they
themselves perceive a need for change based on
student feedback, student performance, or their
own sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
As we work with these faculty to improve their
teaching, we may face resistance that is hard to
decipher. We cannot begin to uncover the range of
experiences that faculty have that shape their
beliefs about teaching, nor to understand each
teacher's psychological, philosophical, and
emotional underpinnings for their practice. Yet
one factor that has been shown to stand in the
way of teachers changing their practice is the
fear of taking a risk (McAlpine &Weston, 2002).
Addressing this fear can help faculty become more
receptive to introducing innovation and
flexibility in their teaching. In this chapter I
outline some possible reasons for this fear, and
I offer suggestions that can help them push past
this emotional barrier.

Underlying Fears

Several eloquent personal narratives of teaching
exist that highlight a professor's fears and how
they have shaped life and career. Elaine
Showalter (2003) in her memoir-handbook, Teaching
Literature, devotes an entire chapter to teaching
anxiety and categorizes it into seven types
depending on its source: lack of training,
feelings of isolation, tension between teaching
and research, coverage demands, performance
issues, grading challenges, and student and peer
evaluations. She highlights fears involved in
teaching literature, pointing out that "we
believe that what we say in the classroom reveals
the deepest aspects of ourselves" (p.3). This
fear of exposure may take many forms and may be
more acute in the classroom than in other public
arenas because instructors face this audience day
after day. Perceptions of mistakes, inadequacies,
even character flaws, reenter the classroom daily
with one's students, to be compounded by each new
infraction.

In his insightful and moving account, The Courage
to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) echoes what
research and our own experiences tell us:

In unguarded moments with close friends, we who
teach will acknowledge a variety of fears: having
our work unappreciated, being inadequately
rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we
chose the wrong profession, spending our lives on
trivia, ending up feeling like frauds. But many
of us have another fear that we rarely name: out
fear of the judgment of the young. (pp. 47- 48)

Palmer notes how these fears can lead eventually
to stagnation and cynicism if faculty fail to
interpret their experiences accurately or, we
might say, fail to reflect productively on those
experiences.

Unlike Palmer and Showalter and a few other
narrators, to many faculty fear is indeed a
four-letter word, one not to be spoken in polite
society. As faculty talk to us about their
teaching, it is up to us to recognize the various
fears that underlie apparent resistance,
frustration, or complacency. We may then respond
more effectively with strategies that allow them
to push past their fears and give them new hope
to re-reinvigorate their teaching.

Fears of Loss

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in
Economics for applying insights from
psychological research to economic science.
Specifically, he and his colleagues studied how
human judgment affects decision-making under
uncertainty or risk. This work was based on an
area of cognitive science that deals with the
concept of cognitive bias. Cognitive bias arises
when we are faced with complex problems that have
no simple solution and our intuitive thinking
resorts to heuristics (i.e., general guidelines)
to tackle the issue quickly. Unfortunately, in
some cases these simple procedures produce
erroneous conclusions, especially when our
decision depends on a good understanding of the
probability of certain events. Kahneman and
Tversky (1979) found that people would pass up
the possibility of great financial gains in order
to avoid a loss-the idea of loss aversion. When
making a decision that involves risk, many of us
do not base our choices on rational arguments. A
person who is loss averse dislikes symmetric
50-50 bets, and the dislike increases with the
absolute size of the stakes. This observation
relates this work to behavioral concept dealing
with preferences (p. 279).
We humans do not consider gains and losses
rationally--our first priority is not to lose.
Even though this conclusion was drawn from work
with people faced with financial decisions, we
may speculate that other apparent high-stakes
situations in which we stand to lose something of
value might evoke similar responses. Reflecting
on this idea, we can see that change of any kind
is fraught with possibilities of loss. When
applied to changing our teaching, these potential
losses can seem to be monumental. What do we fear
losing?

We fear losing content "coverage". This principle
is usually citied first and foremost when faculty
confront nontraditional pedagogical choices. The
tyranny of content coverage is especially acute
in certain disciplines that have a recognized
body of information on which subsequent courses
build, for example, the sciences and engineering.
Our illusion is that we tell students the
information that we want them to know, students
who are motivated will absorb it, and our
obligation to the discipline has been met. Thus,
the most readily recognized and accepted
pedagogical choice is lecture. It's hard to argue
with this premise head-on because most professors
themselves learned very well by the lecture
method, and it does have its place as one option
in our set of pedagogical tools.

We fear losing control. What do the more
student-centered strategies all have in common?
They all represent shifts in the nature of
authority in the classroom. They require us to
move away from the idea that information may be
transferred intact from expert to novice.
Instead, they ask us to move toward the model of
the student as self-teacher, recognizing that
knowledge is of necessity constructed in the mind
of the learners as they seek to reconcile new
knowledge with mental models they've built based
on former experience.

Research in cognitive science may currently be
interpreted as validating the view that knowledge
is constructed, not simply absorbed, yet for many
of us this theory is not necessarily readily
accepted. We need to believe that we can control
the development of students' ideas through our
eloquent prose and detailed explanations;
otherwise, it's hard to know our role in the
classroom. Interestingly, research in cognitive
science also shows us how important the fear of
loss of control is to human thinking (LeDoux,
1996). Our students may struggle against learning
in our disciplines because they perceive that we
are imposing our control over them (Zull, 2002).
How much more than may we as instructors resist
handing over our hard-earned position of
authority to students? And we may even perceive
those who encourage the use of alternate
pedagogies to be someone else seeking to tell us
what to do.

Proposing that we change our preferred way of
teaching seems to assault us on two levels.
First, the classroom has usually been an arena in
which faculty work in isolation and in absolute
control. We do not typically engage in collegial
discussion about teaching, so raising questions
about our choice of techniques may seem to be an
unexpected and inhospitable attack on our
professional expertise. Add to this the fact that
the pedagogical methods being touted often ask
the teacher to relinquish authority in the
classroom to novices, and we have added insult to
injury.

Fear of Embarrassment

Necessary for academic success is the ability to
pose intellectual questions and to generate
recognizably valid arguments to answer them. In
general, most of us didn't need to be highly
adept in social situations to get where we are in
academia. Yet many of the teaching modes other
than lecture require us to navigate and direct
human interactions, a somewhat daunting task.
When working with students in groups or even
facilitating a meaningful discussion, we are in
danger not only of losing content coverage and
control, but also of embarrassing ourselves.  We
fear being seen as incompetent, less smart,
perhaps even just silly. As Palmer (1998) said,
we fear students' judgment of us. We fear losing
respect. Most of us have spent a great deal of
time honing our lecture skills in order to avoid
being embarrassed in public. Asking us to step
into another area of perceived performance for
which we have limited training is asking a lot.

Fear of Failure

Finally, and not least importantly, we fear
Failure.  Failure to transmit critical concepts in
our discipline, failure to resonate with
students, failure to be perceived as experts in
our field. Whatever mode of teaching we have been
using represents the known. Any failures we noted
in the past using these strategies have been
rationalized and dealt with. To change means to
bring the effects of our teaching under close
scrutiny again. We may need to find different
explanations for student failures and put our own
performance under review and judgment again.

How Prevalent Are These Fears?

A number of anecdotal accounts document a
teacher's fears, but what does the research
literature say about this phenomenon? Several
studies exist on math anxiety, test anxiety, even
computer anxiety, but very little on teaching
anxiety-unless we lump it under the very broad
category of performance or speech anxiety. Two
studies dealing specifically with teaching
anxiety, one among psychology professors (Gardner
& Leak, 1994) and on among accounting professors
(Ameen, Guffey, & Jackson, 2002), found that a
large majority of faculty (78%-87%) had
experienced some form of teaching anxiety,
broadly defined as "distress that comes from
either the anticipation of teaching, the
preparation for teaching, or the experiences that
occur while teaching" (Gardner & Leak, 1994, p.
29). In the majority of cases this anxiety was
described by faculty as arising from external
events, not existing as a part of the professor's
self-describing personality, and presenting an
ongoing challenge.

In these studies, teaching anxiety was associated
with some activities that involve talking to any
group, such as standing before the class before
speaking, but other triggers were not so related:
class preparation, students' questions, negative
feedback or disruptions from students during
class, and end-of-term evaluations. As one might
expect, in both studies anxiety felt while
teaching diminished in a statistically
significant way in teachers with more experience
and higher rank. The amount of teaching
experience, however, did not correlate with
reducing the other potential triggers of anxiety;
that is, student questions and evaluations or
class preparation activities, at least in the
study of psychology professors (Gardner & Leak,
1994). Instructors did not significantly
associate anxiety with a class format, such as
discussion versus lecture, but more with lack of
familiarity with course material as noted in the
study of accounting professors (Ameen, Guffey, &
Jackson, 2002).

Neither of these studies asked specific questions
about anxiety when using alternate teaching
strategies such as group work, but certainly we
could speculate that the unfamiliarity with this
style of teaching and the perceived loss of
control could act as an anxiety trigger, perhaps
in a similar way as does lack of familiarity with
course material. The student-centered formats are
more likely to expose professors to possible
negative responses from students, an identical
trigger in both studies. Both class preparation
activities and student evaluations were noted
sources of anxiety in these studies, and one can
imagine that changing one's teaching to include
flexibility in class format and more student
interaction could elicit these fears as well.

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