In my experience, excellence in teaching and excellence in research are strongly negatively correlated. That is: the top researchers are often terrible teachers, and the top teachers are rarely successful researchers.
How could it be otherwise? Excellence in **any** profession is a full-time job. You can't be a expert lawyer **and** a professional basketball player, any more than you can be a top chef and a leading surgeon. In part, this is a matter of time: your time is limited, so every minute that you spend on activity X is a minute that you didn't spend on activity Y. Good teaching demands a lot of time, and there's always room for improvement, so a truly professional teacher would be spending 100% of their available time on developing their teaching skills. On the other hand, research faculty are under huge pressures to churn out papers and harvest grant funding. Something has to give, and inevitably that means that people cut corners with their teaching.
Think about the statistics involved: truly excellent teachers are rare, just as truly excellent researchers are rare. If 1% of the general population is capable of becoming an excellent teacher, and 1% of the general population is capable of becoming an excellent teacher, then 0.01% of the general population is capable of excellence in both. Most researchers are mediocre teachers because most people are mediocre teachers.
The notion that research improves your teaching is transparently bullshit, and it's just a coping mechanism for researchers to justify phoning in their teaching responsibilities. It's easy to see that this is nonsense -- nobody is arguing that good teachers make better researchers. Why is it that doing research has such profound impact on the quality of teaching, but teaching is irrelevant to doing research? The asymmetry here indicates that people aren't serious when they claim that there is a connection between the two activities.
By the way, this is true outside of formal academia. I've had the opportunity to take music lessons with some very big-name professionals, and they usually don't add much value. On the other hand, the really great music teachers that I've had have often had undistinguished performing careers. Again, being a great performer and being a great teacher are totally different activities which demand very different skill sets, and very few people have both.
Well, thank you for writing this article! I enjoy your articles, and always read them.
For many years, Tiger Woods took putting lessons from a putting coach (I forget his name). The putting coach was not a champion golfer, but he was a champion putting coach for professional golfers. Those are different things, and Tiger knew it! Most big-name golfers have a team of professionals who assist them, and those people are rarely star players. They don't have to be -- they are there to help the star player achieve his goals. Different skills.
Look at Michael Jordan. He is unquestionably one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but nobody thinks that about him as a GM. There are very few pro basketball players who go on to a coaching career, and the great coaches are never the big stars. (Larry Bird had a few years as a coach and was successful, but he didn't pursue this for very long.)
I like your questions about undergrad teaching at R1s, and have thought about this topic a lot. I'm the product of a small liberal arts college (I won't say which one, but 100% of alums Strongly Agree that it is The Best One), and have spent my entire life since graduation at various R1s. This includes my early faculty career, where I did do undergrad teaching, and my later years at other R1s mostly focused on grad ed admin with a tiny bit of grad student teaching.
I and several of my colleagues at my first faculty job were considered to be great teachers. This was certainly appreciated by the "paying customers" (aka students), though was otherwise not considered an important aspect of our value by anyone else evaluating us. But did being active scholars contribute to our great teaching? I think at least a little, though maybe not as much as one might expect and not necessarily because we brought cutting edge scholarship to our teaching. In fact I was rather intentionally focused not on the latest and greatest, but rather at presenting the arc of inquiry in my field (dev bio) starting with establishing the foundational concepts and then examining the evolution of the methodologies that produced historical knowledge and define contemporary practice. But, to be honest, I don't think I needed a concurrent extramurally funded research program to do that. I think that the exposure to the field and methodology during a strong PhD and a productive postdoc would have been sufficient. I suppose that having an active funded research program gave me both confidence and externally validated authority. Students did indicate that they took us more seriously than they took the adjuncts, even though they liked many of the adjuncts better.
As (generally) satisfied as I am with my own career, I will admit that I have yet to achieve the kind of satisfaction that I assumed I would get when I was a sophomore having epiphanies in Cell Bio and Organic Chem inspired by the almost uniformly outstanding teachers I had at my SLAC. I probably romanticized their lives in small northeastern towns with their 2-2 teaching loads, cozy offices, student-centered presence and availability, and their attempts to get some tiny grants to be able to provide us with the minimal research experience we needed to get in to good grad schools. My R1 life has had more structure and formality and an entirely different focus.
I had all of this in mind as a parent when my kid was looking at colleges. I tried to subtly steer her away from R1s. Funny thing is she ended up at a R2 that presented itself, somewhat accurately in terms of student life, as very undergrad focused, and then proudly announced their attainment of R1 status during her junior year which I guess somehow justifies the nearly $100K that they extract from us annually.
Also noting how similar the Duke AI report is to other university AI reports that I have read (and the one that I am in the process of contributing to as we speak..).
Thanks for these comments. I think the overlap of good teaching spans type of institution, but what I am less sure of is how to help faculty get better at teaching.
This are the key questions yes: "whether, why and how a research university has, or can have, a comparative advantage in teaching undergraduates?" My book is about this and I am hopeful that @Kylesaunders will find a way to integrate this into his new tool. I believe departments full of faculty who work in the "unknowns" quadrants, which tend to be at research universities, are best positioned to survive AI disruption.
I think you are probably right about surviving AI disruption, but what I find both comical and annoying is that many of my technophile colleagues who are extremely comfortable downloading datasets collected from an instrument 1500 miles away that they operate with their phone and analyzing them in their pajamas are scared to the point of paralysis that some grad student is going to write their QE proposal with ChatGPT and they don't know what to do to stop that.
I know I already commented but I want to say again I'm so glad you are asking the pointed questions you are. There's only one real reason to pay for college in the AI era and that's to work with faculty on the cutting edge of knowledge. I realize I have been saying this now for nearly two years and I'm almost bored with myself for having to repeat it but maybe people are catching up? Maybe people will listen to you?
In my experience, excellence in teaching and excellence in research are strongly negatively correlated. That is: the top researchers are often terrible teachers, and the top teachers are rarely successful researchers.
How could it be otherwise? Excellence in **any** profession is a full-time job. You can't be a expert lawyer **and** a professional basketball player, any more than you can be a top chef and a leading surgeon. In part, this is a matter of time: your time is limited, so every minute that you spend on activity X is a minute that you didn't spend on activity Y. Good teaching demands a lot of time, and there's always room for improvement, so a truly professional teacher would be spending 100% of their available time on developing their teaching skills. On the other hand, research faculty are under huge pressures to churn out papers and harvest grant funding. Something has to give, and inevitably that means that people cut corners with their teaching.
Think about the statistics involved: truly excellent teachers are rare, just as truly excellent researchers are rare. If 1% of the general population is capable of becoming an excellent teacher, and 1% of the general population is capable of becoming an excellent teacher, then 0.01% of the general population is capable of excellence in both. Most researchers are mediocre teachers because most people are mediocre teachers.
The notion that research improves your teaching is transparently bullshit, and it's just a coping mechanism for researchers to justify phoning in their teaching responsibilities. It's easy to see that this is nonsense -- nobody is arguing that good teachers make better researchers. Why is it that doing research has such profound impact on the quality of teaching, but teaching is irrelevant to doing research? The asymmetry here indicates that people aren't serious when they claim that there is a connection between the two activities.
By the way, this is true outside of formal academia. I've had the opportunity to take music lessons with some very big-name professionals, and they usually don't add much value. On the other hand, the really great music teachers that I've had have often had undistinguished performing careers. Again, being a great performer and being a great teacher are totally different activities which demand very different skill sets, and very few people have both.
Thx for the time you took with this comment. Your example of music lessons is interesting. I have experienced similar with golf instruction.
Well, thank you for writing this article! I enjoy your articles, and always read them.
For many years, Tiger Woods took putting lessons from a putting coach (I forget his name). The putting coach was not a champion golfer, but he was a champion putting coach for professional golfers. Those are different things, and Tiger knew it! Most big-name golfers have a team of professionals who assist them, and those people are rarely star players. They don't have to be -- they are there to help the star player achieve his goals. Different skills.
Look at Michael Jordan. He is unquestionably one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but nobody thinks that about him as a GM. There are very few pro basketball players who go on to a coaching career, and the great coaches are never the big stars. (Larry Bird had a few years as a coach and was successful, but he didn't pursue this for very long.)
"Those who can, teach. Those who can't, do."
I like your questions about undergrad teaching at R1s, and have thought about this topic a lot. I'm the product of a small liberal arts college (I won't say which one, but 100% of alums Strongly Agree that it is The Best One), and have spent my entire life since graduation at various R1s. This includes my early faculty career, where I did do undergrad teaching, and my later years at other R1s mostly focused on grad ed admin with a tiny bit of grad student teaching.
I and several of my colleagues at my first faculty job were considered to be great teachers. This was certainly appreciated by the "paying customers" (aka students), though was otherwise not considered an important aspect of our value by anyone else evaluating us. But did being active scholars contribute to our great teaching? I think at least a little, though maybe not as much as one might expect and not necessarily because we brought cutting edge scholarship to our teaching. In fact I was rather intentionally focused not on the latest and greatest, but rather at presenting the arc of inquiry in my field (dev bio) starting with establishing the foundational concepts and then examining the evolution of the methodologies that produced historical knowledge and define contemporary practice. But, to be honest, I don't think I needed a concurrent extramurally funded research program to do that. I think that the exposure to the field and methodology during a strong PhD and a productive postdoc would have been sufficient. I suppose that having an active funded research program gave me both confidence and externally validated authority. Students did indicate that they took us more seriously than they took the adjuncts, even though they liked many of the adjuncts better.
As (generally) satisfied as I am with my own career, I will admit that I have yet to achieve the kind of satisfaction that I assumed I would get when I was a sophomore having epiphanies in Cell Bio and Organic Chem inspired by the almost uniformly outstanding teachers I had at my SLAC. I probably romanticized their lives in small northeastern towns with their 2-2 teaching loads, cozy offices, student-centered presence and availability, and their attempts to get some tiny grants to be able to provide us with the minimal research experience we needed to get in to good grad schools. My R1 life has had more structure and formality and an entirely different focus.
I had all of this in mind as a parent when my kid was looking at colleges. I tried to subtly steer her away from R1s. Funny thing is she ended up at a R2 that presented itself, somewhat accurately in terms of student life, as very undergrad focused, and then proudly announced their attainment of R1 status during her junior year which I guess somehow justifies the nearly $100K that they extract from us annually.
Also noting how similar the Duke AI report is to other university AI reports that I have read (and the one that I am in the process of contributing to as we speak..).
Thanks for these comments. I think the overlap of good teaching spans type of institution, but what I am less sure of is how to help faculty get better at teaching.
This are the key questions yes: "whether, why and how a research university has, or can have, a comparative advantage in teaching undergraduates?" My book is about this and I am hopeful that @Kylesaunders will find a way to integrate this into his new tool. I believe departments full of faculty who work in the "unknowns" quadrants, which tend to be at research universities, are best positioned to survive AI disruption.
I can see the scene
I had not fully gotten Quadrants and Resesrch univ.
I think you are probably right about surviving AI disruption, but what I find both comical and annoying is that many of my technophile colleagues who are extremely comfortable downloading datasets collected from an instrument 1500 miles away that they operate with their phone and analyzing them in their pajamas are scared to the point of paralysis that some grad student is going to write their QE proposal with ChatGPT and they don't know what to do to stop that.
I know I already commented but I want to say again I'm so glad you are asking the pointed questions you are. There's only one real reason to pay for college in the AI era and that's to work with faculty on the cutting edge of knowledge. I realize I have been saying this now for nearly two years and I'm almost bored with myself for having to repeat it but maybe people are catching up? Maybe people will listen to you?