We're going to start with a moment--
a few remarks from Provost Garber.
And I just want to pause for a second
and mention that, when HILT first began,
we did some research on what makes an initiative like this
to improve teaching and learning culture at a university
successful and what makes it unsuccessful.
And one of the key attributes in the literature
is regular systematic endorsement
and championing from the most senior of our leadership.
And so I just want to say how lucky and wonderful
it has been to have President Faust,
Provost Garber be at every one of these events.
And it's because of their care in the teaching
and learning mission.
And I think it has made a huge difference symbolically
and substantively their interest.
So help me welcome Provost Garber for a few remarks.
And then I'll come back, and we'll
set up the exercise that we're going to do over lunch.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Erin.
I just want to thank you Erin and the health team
for once again organizing a terrific conference
on an issue that matters hugely to Drew, to me,
to basically everybody who cares about teaching and learning
at the university, which I hope means everybody, period.
These meetings have been really instructive.
They provided a way for people to get to know each other,
to set up collaborations, to exchange notes,
basically, about how they deal with challenges
of teaching and learning.
And I want to thank all of you for taking the time out
of your busy days to be here.
Let me just say briefly about the topic today,
about evaluating teaching, is one that's obviously
of extraordinary importance.
And I don't know if Tom Kane is here right now.
But Tom Kane of the Graduate School of Education
had very kindly sent me some of his notes about what
are the most important findings from the literature
on evaluating teachers in the K through 12 setting.
So there's really a lot there.
There's a quite a big literature.
And I couldn't possibly do justice to that literature
or even to his summary of that literature.
But one of the things that really stands out
as an important finding is how there is great--
much greater within school variation
in learning outcomes than across schools.
And there is much greater within school variation
in teacher quality.
And furthermore, the teacher quality, as it's measured,
is fairly persistent.
That is, there tend to be good teachers and not so good
teachers.
So if you're a student, your learning outcomes
depend, in some respects, almost as much on which teacher
you get as in which school you are assigned to.
And this means that the teacher is also, from some measures,
more important than, for example,
the specific curriculum.
So clearly, evaluating teaching, at least in the K
through 12 context, is extraordinarily important
if you care about learning outcomes.
Now, I've taught in a variety of settings in my teaching career.
And they include, of course, large lectures.
It includes working in a business school setting, where
it's highly interactive.
See The grades for the students--
I taught at Stanford, but the rules are the same here--
50% of the grade is based on classroom participation.
It's an incredibly easy, engaging setting
to work in when you have those kinds of incentives
for the students.
I've taught small seminars.
And I've taught in clinical settings.
And clinical settings, I mean really
in medical clinical settings, where it's
a small number of students.
It's highly Socratic.
You know whether they understood either what they've read,
what they've seen in a patient, or what you've told them--
you know almost instantly.
There's no hiding it.
And in each of those settings, the teaching task
is somewhat different.
And the evaluation tests-- the quality of teaching,
is typically measured in different ways.
In clinical settings, although it's
possible to be evaluated by someone
other than a student or a trainee,
it's a little more difficult than in lecture settings.
One of the other things I learned in my career
is basically how there's huge variation in how different
parts of the university evaluate teaching.
And here, I don't really want to bring up
any embarrassing facts.
But suffice it to say that in this regard,
I think business schools--
and I use the plural here, because I
think this is common--
sort of set the standard, in that
faculty sit in on lectures or the teaching
sessions of other faculty.
That's part of the promotion review process.
And they get feedback.
And even in very large courses, it's
quite possible that faculty members will never
have their teaching evaluated by another faculty member.
Of course, we do have student evaluations of faculty
all the time.
But it's really not quite the same
as knowing that your promotion, for example,
depends on the views of your colleagues
on the faculty in the department.
One of the other findings that Tom mentioned from the K
through 12 literature is that, not only do people not
like to be evaluated--
not a particularly surprising result, I know--
but in fact, they don't actually-- a typical faculty
member or a lecturer of any kind isn't typically
aware of what they're doing wrong or right.
And they have memories of their sessions teaching
that don't necessarily comport with what
the students have observed.
And in fact, according to Tom, this
is why video is so important in helping
teachers of any kind to understand how they're doing.
Because with video, depending on what the video focuses on,
you can start to see how the students have
kind of blank stares at a certain point.
You can actually see how the faculty member did not directly
answer the question that the student asked.
A lot of this, it's not that people are exactly
self-deluding, but we aren't wired
to sort of process this information
and be objective about it.
But we can't deny it when it's put in front of us
in the form of a video of the teaching session.
So it's tremendously important.
And here, let me just mention something that many of you
know about.
And it has to do with HarvardX and edX.
And of course, both HarvardX and HILT, as well as
research operations sit in the Vice Provost
for Advances in Learning's office, Peter Bol's office.
We started edX in--
we actually formally announced the creation
of edX and HarvardX in 2012.
But it had its roots really in 2011.
And I arrived here as provost in the fall of 2011.
And there was a committee that existed
at the time I arrived called something like Harvard at 400.
So we were just about to have the 375th anniversary
of the founding of the university.
And this committee was thinking about what Harvard should
look like in 25 more years.
And for some reason, they had gravitated
more and more toward the importance of online learning
and to the opportunities it represented.
As part of this process, the committee
invited a couple of professors from MIT to meet with them.
MIT at the time--
still has-- they had the OpenCourseWare initiative,
which was a very broad initiative.
I know many of you are very, very familiar with it.
But it includes online learning, all kinds of course materials.
But there were videos of MIT faculty teaching.
And these MIT professors said, you
know what's really interesting about this experience
of OpenCourseWare?
For the first time, when we put our classes out there
on the web, the whole world, of course, could see our lectures,
but our colleagues could see us lecture.
[LAUGHTER]
And they talked about what a profound effect that had
on how they approached their teaching.
They cared in a different way.
So, of course, the light bulb went on.
And I heard this.
Members of the Harvard at 400 committee heard this.
And I realized that this new set of technologies
that we called online learning, and later it was about MOOCs--
the terminology really doesn't matter, could not only
change how we make what we have to teach available to students
broadly, it would actually change
how we approach teaching in our classrooms.
So think about the video.
This is like the typical video taken to the n-th degree,
because when you do a formal online course--
and this really was taken to a whole other level when
we created HarvardX, where we have production teams helping
with these courses, all kinds of scrutiny at multiple levels--
you have a kind of evaluation that you would rarely, if ever,
see in a typical classroom setting.
And in fact, this is one of the things
we're trying to measure--
how our efforts with online learning
are affecting teaching on campus.
Not every faculty member who does an online course
has the same reaction.
But we've heard from several of them.
People who had very high ratings as teachers
in their regular courses, they talk
about how the experience has transformed their approach
to teaching.
So I've spent a little more time talking about that
than I really intended to.
But the bottom line for me is that we really
need to think about the forms of evaluation that
are feasible that people who lecture
and who teach in other settings, other than lecture halls,
will find acceptable, that they will participate in,
and how they can incorporate them into their teaching.
Of course, we care about content.
Of course, we care about learning styles, and so on.
But fundamentally, if we don't figure out
how to improve our teaching, we will now make all the progress
that we might in enabling our students to learn.
So thank you, again, for participating
in today's events.
This is-- obviously, your work is
central to the mission of the university.
And I very much look forward to hearing the outcomes
of today's conference.
Thank you and enjoy.
[APPLAUSE]