• Introduction
• Definitions
• A Problem I Could Live With
• Understanding and Mastery
• The Inverted Pyramid
• Benchmark Understanding
• Against the Grain
• References
  and Acknowledgments
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Randy Bass (bassr@gusun.georgetown.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.

Section Two:
A Problem I Could Live With

My own engagement with the scholarship of teaching followed a similar trajectory from seeing my teaching as a problem (or failure) to seeing in my teaching a set of problems worth pursuing as an ongoing intellectual focus. As with many people, my heightened attention to teaching was occasioned by a crisis. Three years ago, after introducing a number of experimental "electronic literacy" components into my courses, my teaching evaluations plummeted. I now know that this is not too uncommon when teachers significantly revise their teaching, especially involving educational technology. As little solace as that fact is now, it probably would have meant even less to me at the time, occurring as it did the year prior to tenure. This was particularly perilous in my case, as I had dedicated my whole career to new technologies in the humanities, including the subject of technology and pedagogy. A "failed" semester proposed to deconstruct my entire portfolio. I felt an acute pressure to reconstruct my courses and teaching methods one element at a time, and to justify, track, and evaluate each component of that reconstruction.

Over the next year and a half I revised some courses and created others from the ground up, especially a new introductory American literature course, "American Literary Traditions," for which I've written an online course portfolio (Bass, 1998). In this process of reflection and redesign, I resolved to make every course component intentional. That is, I tried to articulate for myself the reasoning behind every aspect of the course, especially the connections between technology and discipline-based pedagogy. In doing so, I found myself asking questions about student learning I had never asked before. For a decade I had had good success as a teacher: positive feedback, strong evaluations, evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) that students learned something in my courses.

Yet, I now realized I knew very little about why certain students did better than others. Or, more generally, I knew very little about how students came to know the material I was teaching. Ever since graduate school I had taught mostly the way I had been taught, and tended to replicate the pedagogies that worked best--quite frankly--on me (or slight variations of me). Now that I was trying to change my teaching radically, those naturalized teaching methods and the assumptions behind them were exposed to be without any clear scaffolding or support by the evidence of learning, however sound or useful some of the approaches were.

Next Section: Understanding and Mastery

Previous Section:Definitions