The Gates Question: Final challenge forum will start action-plan process

By Steve Hill
University Week

A thought-provoking series of forums concludes next Thursday, but not before the organizers turn to the audience for some help.

Pathways for Raising Expectations and Enhancing Quality is set for 3:30 p.m. next Thursday in 389 Mary Gates. It’s the finale in a series of forums that have posed, wrestled with, and yet never definitively answered what is now known simply as The Gates Question - do we challenge UW students? Regent William Gates posed the question to President Richard L. McCormick and the administration has considered it a priority ever since.

During the third forum, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education George Bridges will ask the audience to help shape the beginnings of an action plan that will ensure something concrete and lasting comes of the series.

“We could have the traditional format with three or four speakers and then questions, but in this case, that just doesn’t seem to cut it,” Bridges said. “We want to build something here. We want to put the participants and the audience to work.”

Bridges and Don Wulff, the interim director of the Center for Instructional Development and Research who also organized the series, say it’s important to get input from a broad and diverse cross section of campus before moving forward. That, they hope, will be accomplished in Thursday’s forum.

“This issue is systemic,” Wulff said. “The solution should involve all persons on campus and sort of a pulling together of all these perspectives so we can go forward.”

In fact, Bridges says the final action plan, which will draw in part from the series, will be a prescription to help the entire University work toward advancing undergraduate education.

“This is not a problem that’s restricted to administrators,” he said. “Faculty have to embrace some of these issues. Students have to embrace these issues. Staff and administrators have to embrace some of these issues. So it’s really going to be a mandate for the entire campus community.”

Among the speakers at next Thursday’s forum will be Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering, and Judith Howard, a sociology professor. Two additional speakers have not yet been confirmed.

Among the topics likely to be considered is the important role teaching and research assistants play in undergraduate education. It’s a topic that has been brought up throughout the series and one that will be important in forming an action plan.

Following the forum, Bridges said, work would begin on the formal action plan that would be presented to McCormick sometime near the beginning of the next academic year. What happens beyond that step will be up to the President. But Wulff and Bridges agree that the series has generated too much interest and passion to let it stop with Thursday’s forum.

“This series needs that final action step,” Wulff said.

Rethinking should lead to concrete changes

By George Bridges
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education

George Bridges

Higher education has many ironies. One is that very few members of the professoriate have any formal training in teaching or any systematic knowledge about student learning despite the fact that most of us spend substantial parts of our careers in and out of the classroom educating students.

This pattern is as true at the UW as it is at other major universities - most of the current faculty have been trained to be research scientists, literary scholars or performing artists, not educators. From one perspective it is remarkable, therefore, that we have so many models of excellent teaching at UW - the tireless dedication of faculty members to their students and the rave reviews year after year about excellent classroom experiences are testimony to the effort many faculty members routinely invest in teaching students well.

A second irony of higher education, here at UW and elsewhere, is that despite spending so much time and effort with students, many faculty members (and I include myself in this) spend remarkably little time in the following kinds of activities: listening to students’ views and opinions about their own education or about our teaching, assessing what and how they are learning, and examining what we can do to improve our teaching.

Contrast this with how we conduct our scholarly work. We focus immense amounts of energy and attention on the details of completing scholarly projects and getting our work published. Imagine trying to complete a project for publication in a scholarly journal - in an area in which we have little or no formal training - and in which we were inattentive to the comments, criticisms and perspectives of the journal’s editor or reviewers. It wouldn’t happen.

For the last year, many of us have been re-thinking how we go about the business of teaching undergraduates, and have engaged in vital conversations about undergraduate learning at UW. One of the University’s “reviewers,” Regent William Gates, motivated this discussion by asking whether we are challenging UW students. President McCormick embraced the question and asked the Teaching Academy to consider the expectations that faculty set for students. In a forum two weeks ago the UW community had a chance to respond to Regent Gates. In last Thursday’s forum, we listened to our students.

Although both forums were provocative, the forum with students was particularly powerful - their comments and accounts of their experiences in our classes were complimentary of the UW at some points and, at others, condemning. All but a few of the students reported that they are challenged - as much by the experience of being in college as they are by the content and structure of our courses. Further, most are unafraid of heavy academic work - they want to be challenged as long as the challenge is relevant to clearly articulated academic goals. Busy work doesn’t cut it with them, and they resent it when it is assigned. Rather, our students seek a meaningful, relevant academic experience.

At the same time, most of the students acknowledged that they had taken courses that offered virtually no challenge - classes that were, in their parlance, “a skate.” Most of these courses were introductory classes characterized by multiple choice/true false examinations and uninspired instructors. Theirs is not an indictment of any individual faculty member as much as it is an indictment of instructional mediocrity in parts of the institution.

The session with students was particularly important because it both clarified and complicated the Gates question. It seems clear that while most of our courses and programs are challenging, we nevertheless offer students too few opportunities to develop critical skills like writing (and re-writing) in their fields of interest. Obviously, faculty, administrators and staff have their own challenges ahead - we must remedy such shortcomings in our undergraduate programs.

The third and final forum this term will be on May 10. The purpose of this forum is to begin the process of creating an action plan for improving our undergraduate programs. The forum will draw suggestions from the University community - faculty, staff and students - for the plan.

Clearly, the plan may take many forms. Regent Gates has suggested that academic policies and standards are needed to raise the level of challenge for students, particularly where the challenge is low. The Teaching Academy’s recent report, Pathways to Excellence in Undergraduate Education, offers a different approach, suggesting seven directions for strengthening undergraduate teaching and learning. Later this year, the College of Arts and Sciences will release important task force reports on undergraduate education including the first-year experience, strategies for enhancing student learning, and (with the Graduate School) the roles of Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants. The task force reports will contain additional recommendations.

Regardless of its final form, however, the plan must offer concrete proposals for change. It must go beyond the principles of excellence articulated by the Teaching Academy. The challenge for the UW community this next year is to use the forums and the plan to advance the undergraduate experience, raising expectations where they need to be raised and offering the types of learning experiences that will most benefit our students.

No lack of opinions on rigor issue

Anyone wondering whether students are interested in the question of challenge should have been at last week’s forum, sitting in the packed auditorium where every seat was filled and an overflow crowd spilled into the aisles. Students had plenty to say, and they said it with passion.

Consider these quotes on the issue of challenging UW undergraduates shared during the April 26 forum: