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Thriving in Academe
Tales from Real Life

Working with College Faculty to Improve Their Teaching

When my colleague Bill came into my office one afternoon, it quickly became clear that he was deeply disturbed with his teaching and his students. He felt confused about why his best efforts to teach did not seem to be working. His students were not responding the way he wanted, and he was puzzled by the steady downward trend of his student evaluations.

Uncommon? Not at all. Many college teachers find it difficult to analyze and respond to problems in an effective way or to think their way through to more powerful ways of teaching.

For the past 25 years, I have worked with college teachers, individually and collectively, to improve the ways they teach. In the beginning, each instructor and his or her students and classroom seemed unique. But after several years, I realized that, as in Bill’s case, most of the issues I encountered fell into two general categories: course design and teacher-student interaction.

Good teaching demands skills in both areas as well as an understanding of the relationship between them. I learned over the years that the majority of problems teachers face call for a change in the design of their courses.

When I introduced Bill to these ideas, it was as if a cloud lifted and he could see a way forward to dealing with his problems. He sighed with relief and said, “I wish someone had explained teaching to me this way when I first began teaching. It would have been so helpful!”

—L. Dee Fink
University of Oklahoma

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