<p>This week's topic: teaching</p>
<p>At a large research university such as Berkeley, teaching can sometimes be uneven. You will inevitably have a share of professors who are unintelligible, uncaring, or grades/tests incongruously. There have been complaints in the past about professors who are deeply involved in research and cares little about teaching undergrads. The trade-off makes sense: you spend more time in research, and have less time to prepare well for a lecture, or think about ways to improve your teaching. This seems to be more common for those with tenure, for whom teaching quality often matters little as they cannot be fired.</p>
<p>I have never particularly liked the concept of tenure because it goes against the fundamental logic of a job: if you do well, you are promoted/rewarded. If you do poorly, you are demoted/fired. But for tenured professors, their performance seems to matter little. Consider a quote from sakky:</p>
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The main problem is that some profs are very easy graders and others are very harsh graders. THAT'S the problem. And profs generally consider it their prerogative to grade their classes however way they want. If a prof wants to give out all A's to all of his students, including the terrible ones who did no work, nobody can really stop that from happening. Conversely, if a guy (like Wu) wants to flunk 40% of his class, nobody can really stop that either. Yeah, you can put him on probation, but like I said, that apparently doesn't accomplish much, because once he gets off probation, he's going to continue to do the same exact thing anyway.
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<p>There seems to be some professors who grade harshly year after year, or teach boring classes year after year, with little consequences. I don't think getting rid of tenure is a realistic goal, so what else can we do to alleviate this problem?</p>
<p>A possible solution came to me when I thought about how professors are often critized for having great research but horrible teaching skills (consider Smoot)...why can't we have both? Now, to be fair, there are many great lecturers and dedicated professors at Berkeley who also produce great research, but I think we can agree that there are also a group of professor who are similar to Smoot.</p>
<p>So how do we have both great research and great teaching? I believe the answer lies in positive reinforcement (in psychology, the notion that the arrival of a positive stimulus following a response will increase the frequency of the response) instead of negative punishment (in psychology, the notion that the removal of a positive stimulus following a response will decrease the frequency of the response). In practice, what this means is instead of threatening a professor with possible removal from his position as a result of bad teaching, we should reward a professor for good teaching. Past studies in psychology suggests that positive reinforcement is a more effective way of eliciting a response than negative punishment.</p>
<p>Already this idea has been implemented in education. Consider an article that has been spreading on high school education:</p>
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WASHINGTON -- In the closing weeks of the fall campaign, the Bush administration is handing out money for teachers who raise student test scores, the first federal effort to reward classroom performance with bonuses.</p>
<p>Using the old-fashioned incentive of cash, President Bush's program encourages schools to set up pay scales that reward some teachers and principals more than others. Those rewards are to be based mainly on test scores, but also on classroom evaluations during the year.</p>
<p>The grants are also aimed at luring teachers into math, science and other core fields.
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<p>We should offer the same incentives for university professors. What if we give more research funds to those professors who receive high evaluations? The professors who teach better will also get more funding, and produce more research. Those who are lacking funds will try to improve their teaching methods to get more funding. We should essentially end up with more "great research, great teaching" professors. It creates a win-win situation.</p>
<p>On a similar topic, we should also offer incentives to visiting professors. Visiting professors are often unpredictable and varies in quality. Now, I'm sure there are many professors who would love to have a temporary teaching job at Berkeley. So, let's have evaluations for visiting professors such that those who receive good evaluations can be invited back to teach in the future. This way, we have more predictability in that visiting professors will be of good quality, and it would act as an incentive for visiting professors to teach better so they could get future gigs.</p>