Choose the Award You Want to Win

Quick Announcement:  On occasion, I make the following announcement and I usually have quite a few people contact me.  I post between 5-15 essays on teaching in college every year.  In fact, this is my 308^th essay covering a span of more than a decade.  At the moment, the blog has had a total of 631,721 pageviews (or an average of about 2,050 for each essay).  If you would like to receive a short email whenever a new essay is posted, send me a note at Jhoyle@richmond.edu.  I will not use your email for any other reason.  You will always know when each new essay is available. 

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"The fact remains that declining domestic enrollment will force colleges of all political leanings to compete harder to provide genuine value to students.”  I read this assertion in my newspaper over breakfast this morning.  (“Colleges face fewer customers but more competition” by Matthew Yglesias, Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 29, 2021)  Colleges must compete harder to provide genuine value to students.  Now, that is an interesting assertion with implications that should make faculty and administrators both pause for a moment.  What does that really mean?

 

This past week, I had lunch with my dean (he had salad while I went for the oyster platter).  We talked about many things, but one topic in particular is a favorite obsession of mine.  In colleges and universities around the country, I believe most schools and departments have a reasonable number of good teachers.  I have had the pleasure of knowing many such people.  However, I do not think we have a sufficient number of great teachers.  I believe that is a primary reason why college education is so often maligned.  We are not able to coax enough of our good teachers to become great teachers.

To provide a great education, schools need great teachers.  That seems so self-evident that I am hesitant to say it. 

We could have an interesting debate over the definition of “great teaching,” but I will take the easy way out and fall back on Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”  Maybe, rather than establish a definition, we should list characteristics. 

--Great teachers change lives. 

--Great teachers awaken student curiosity. 

--Great teachers promote a love of the subject matter. 

--Great teachers inspire students to do their best.

--Great teachers have an effect on students that carries on for years and even decades.

--Great teachers help students learn to think.

--Great teachers push students to work incredibly hard.

This list could go on and on.

Going from good to great.  I am sure that Jim Collins has made a fortune writing about specific businesses that managed to bridge the gap from good to great.  It is a tricky challenge.  How can we encourage more professors to make that leap?  If, after seven years, they are good teachers, how can we entice them to be great after 14 years?  That seems like a reasonable transition.  That seems like a reasonable goal.  How do we encourage more to make it?

Maybe more importantly, does anyone actually think about that?  Or, is it a subject that is simply ignored at colleges and universities?  When is the last time that an administrator looked at a faculty member and said, “You are a good teacher.  I want you to become a great teacher.”?  The true answer might be, “Never.”   We need more great teachers to change more student lives.  We have a large number of good teachers.  How do we prevent them from settling for good? 

I have taught in college now for more than 50 years and that is a conversation that I have never heard anyone bring up.  Most teaching conversations seem limited to helping poor teachers improve.  That is important, but more good teachers need to consider how they can grow into great teachers.

So, I want to offer one piece of advice today that I believe can help.  I was reading something yesterday that I wrote years ago and it contained the following quote from Ellen Johnson Eirleaf who served as president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018, “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

I believe that one thing that prevents many teachers from becoming great is a lack of ambitious goals.

When it comes to teaching, do you have goals that are so big and demanding that they scare you?  Because it is the drive to achieve those goals that will push you to become great.   Be honest with yourself, in the upcoming spring semester, what are your teaching goals and do they scare you?

Here is my suggestion.  You belong to some group:  a department, a school, or a college.  Assume that the students within this group are going to give out teaching awards next May.  They will invent several awards and all the students will vote for the winners. 

What award would you want to win? 

Design a hypothetical award that you truly want to win.  Most demanding teacher.   Kindest teacher.  Funniest teacher.   Smartest teacher.   Trickiest teacher.  Most caring teacher.  Teacher with the best Power Point slides.

What award fits your goals?  Of all the teachers in your group, you want the students to name you as the winner of this specific award.  How would you make that happen?

This will help you focus.  Even though the award is not real, creating an idea of what you want to become can be transformative.  Ambition is so important for growth but it has to be specific.  “I want to be a great teacher” is not very helpful.

Focus on one area that you deem important and it will serve as a springboard for overall teaching greatness.  You have to start somewhere and identifying “your award” will help you establish a greatness that works for you.

I always know, each semester, what hypothetical awards that I would like to win from my students.  It is essential to know who you want to be as a teacher, the role you want to play.  So, design an award that you would like to win and then consider what it would take for students to vote for you over all of the other faculty in your group.  Trust me, that can be (and probably should be) scary.  Ambitious goals usually are scary.

We need more greatness in college teaching.  That begins when you think about what greatness means to you.  What award do you want to win in the upcoming semester?

TEAM AMBITION

I wrote my first entry for this blog on January 7, 2010.   At that time, I expected to write 5 or 10 essays.   I thought I might get a few hundreds readers.   I had one goal in mind:   to get more teachers talking about teaching.  Personally, I don’t think we come close to having enough serious conversations about the challenges and fun of being teachers and I wanted to push people in that direction.   I just think we need a lot more exchange of ideas if we are going to meet the educational problems of today.

Well, this is now my 159^th posting on this blog and there have been more than 72,000 page views over the past three years.   I very much appreciate everyone who helps to spread the word by mentioning the blog to someone else.   The goal never changes – to get people talking about their teaching.   Education is serious business.   It is not a job to be taken lightly.  Every day seems to be full of both heartache and excitement.   Over the years, teaching has made me ecstatic many times but it has also made me miserable.   The actress Bette Davis had a famous quote:   “Old age is no place for sissies.”   Well, as far as I’m concerned, teaching is no place for sissies.

I never fail to remind myself of one of my favorite quotes – one that comes from the movie A League of Their Own.   Tom Hanks is talking about baseball but he could have been talking about teaching.    “It’s supposed to be hard.   If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.   The hard… is what makes it great.”

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In case you are interested, here are the posts that have gained the most readership over the years:

(1) – What Do We Add? – July 22, 2010

(2) – Introduction – Teaching (Financial Accounting) – January 7, 2010
(3) – What the Catcher Tells the Pitcher – August 21, 2011
(4) – The Future Is Now? – August 13, 2012
(5) – What Is the Purpose of a Final Exam – May 12, 2010
(6) – What Is the Best Book You Ever Read – June 23, 2012
(7) – A Note to My Students – January 15, 2012
(8) – We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us – May 22, 2012
(9) – Now, That Is a Very Good Question – May 14, 2012
(10) – Big Mistakes – March 26, 2011

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The Super Bowl is being played this Sunday.    The Baltimore Ravens take on the San Francisco 49ers.   What do the players want?   My guess is that they each want to do very well individually.    No matter what position they play – from quarterback to strong safety - they want to excel.   But, I doubt that is good enough for any of them.   Their team did not get this far because a few of the players were great at doing their jobs.   The players have to want the entire team to excel.   They must have a burning hope that they will be able to work together as a group to accomplish great things and be victorious.

In other words, each player has an individual ambition.  Those players want to play great.   But, more importantly, they also have a team ambition.   They must be deeply devoted to the possibility of the whole team doing well.   Very little good would happen without that team ambition.

Individual ambition is pretty common.   Team ambition is a lot trickier.   In sports, one of the things that helps create team ambition is that they keep score.   Ultimately, one team wins and one team loses.   That provides a common goal – every person works to achieve the ultimate objective:   victory.   No one ever argues about the mission or its importance.

You occasionally see the same thing in some businesses.   At most companies, everyone has his or her own turf and each person wants to be good (or, at least, good enough) within that personal territory.   However, at the best run operations, there also appears to be a team ambition.   In those cases, employees are willing to do the work necessary to push together toward a common goal to make the entire organization great.   This is found for a number of reasons but one is that people actually keep score in business.   What is the amount of revenue we earned this period?   Are operating cash flows going up or down?   How did reported net income look for this quarter?   People want to do well personally but they want their organization to do well also. 

My guess is that if you are able to take a lot of individual ambition and use it to create team ambition then you are potentially the next Steve Jobs or Jack Welch.  

College education is under attack these days.   According to many critics, college costs too much and accomplishes too little.   In fact, it is a challenge to find anyone who sings the praises of a college education in 2013.

Why is that?  

I think one of the reasons the college experience is being questioned is that most of us in the teaching business have a lot of individual ambition.   In our own teaching and research, we really hope and work to do well.   We like being successful on our own turf.   However, I am not certain there is enough team ambition in college education today.   Most of the readers of this blog belong to a department, a school, a university.   What is the goal of that team?   Is it a goal that can be easily measured?    Is it a goal that will stretch the members of the team beyond their comfort zones?   How hard are you willing to work to achieve that team goal?

I am not talking here about a mission statement.   A mission statement says “we want to have a good football team.”   I want something more concrete – “we want to win the Super Bowl on February 3, 2013.”   At the end of the time, you know whether you have been successful.   When you eventually make the tally, you know whether your team was victorious.   With that goal, you have something for the group to work toward.  

Let me make a suggestion.   We are still near the beginning of 2013.   Call a department meeting or a school meeting or a university meeting.   Ask everyone to suggest “New Year’s Resolutions” for the team as a whole.   Pick the ones that seem most intriguing.    Then tell the group that you are going to reconvene in 365 days to measure the team’s success.   What specific goals do they want to have achieved (not individually but as a group) by this time next year?

Those goals have to be something that can be measured (you have to keep score).   They should stretch the group.   Then you also need to decide on a legitimate reward – a nice dinner for the team, perhaps, or a bottle of wine for everyone, or a trip to a local theatre. 

I believe college education will begin to improve when we start thinking about producing more team ambition.   We already have role models:   the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers.   Set some legitimate goals that will push the group over the next year beyond their individual comfort zones.   Measure the results.   Provide a nice reward.   This is not rocket science.

In your dreams, what can your team accomplish over the next 12 months?   Don’t always set individual goals.   Set some team goals.   Then make them happen.   Measure the results.   Celebrate the victories.