The Real Cost of Overlooking Teaching Quality in Higher Education:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 284 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest David Gooblar

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 284 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest David Gooblar

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Introduction to the Guest: David Gooblar

Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is David Gooblar. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, but his main expertise besides English is pedagogy.

[00:00:42] The Importance of Pedagogy in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: Now, many of you are going to wonder why we are doing a show on Pedagogy, but let me tell you, faculty have the most contact with students and anybody else at the university. And when I think back to my college experiences, I think about the faculty that I had and what great teachers they were. Now we know that every college and university in the country wants to achieve more equitable student outcomes and better student outcomes. And given that the faculty spend more time with students than anybody else, we know how important pedagogy is teaching outcomes.

David’s going to talk to us today about what senior leadership and boards can do to help improve their student outcomes, specifically through faculty teaching and pedagogy.

David, welcome to the program.

David Gooblar: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to have this conversation.

Drumm McNaughton: Me as well.

[00:01:40] David Gooblar’s Background and Journey

Drumm McNaughton: You are an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. You’ve got some incredible publications and some really neat books out. Tell us a little bit about your background because what really got me excited about having this conversation was how you can make teaching better and more equitable to everyone participating and I think that’s going to be the main focus of what we’re talking about today. Either that or I’m losing my memory more than I thought I was.

David Gooblar: No, no, no. That’s it. That’s what I work on and that’s what I was hoping to talk about. Of course. Yes, so my research, my scholarship is on higher education and on, college teaching, and recently, on how college teaching can lead to more equitable outcomes, in American higher education.

But my background is in English. I mean, I teach in an English department. I got my PhD in English, in 2008.

[00:02:35] Challenges in the Academic Job Market

David Gooblar: Which was, the sort of biggest of many recent, job market crashes for the higher education market. And so, although I got a PhD from a very good institution and I published my dissertation, I was seemingly a very good candidate. I, I joined the job market at a time when all the jobs vanished. And so, the jobs that I did apply for had, upwards of a thousand applicants for a single position. And so I went many years, without getting a position. And it was in this sort of, period of, reconsideration of what I’m going to do with my life. And of course adjuncting, which is what, someone with a PhD does when they can’t find a tenure track position. That I had some realizations that led to essentially a second or a different academic career.

[00:03:22] Discovering the Field of Pedagogy

David Gooblar: When I was teaching as an adjunct, I realized that I was not at all trained to teach. I was being asked to teach these courses that were of course. Completely separate from what I did my research on. I did my PhD dissertation on, the American author Philip Roth. And, you might be surprised to learn that there’s not a huge market to hire adjuncts to teach classes on Philip Roth.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m shocked.

David Gooblar: Or even, I mean, or even 20th Century American literature. I was generally hired to teach introductory classes and, rhetoric classes and composition classes. I realized that all of my training, that gave me the PhD essentially the, the certificate that equipped me to get these jobs, completely ignored teaching as part of the training. And so, that led me to really start reading about pedagogy and learning about, that this was a field really discovering that this was a field and that there were people out there who studied, various ways of teaching and how one could teach better or worse. And so that led to, there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way, but it led to my, researching and writing about college teaching as my main sort of research specialization.

And it’s, ironic or coincidental, I don’t know how you want to put it, that it led me back to an English department. And I’m lucky enough to be at a, an English department at the University of Iowa that where they allow me to work on whatever I want. And so I do teach literature, and I teach writing, but I also get to continue my research and college pedagogy. And as you said, my recent research is very much on the way that pedagogy contributes to how equitable, a university’s outcomes are.

Drumm McNaughton: Which is really interesting.

[00:05:08] The Role of Faculty in Student Success

Drumm McNaughton: Two points along those lines. I remember when I first started teaching and it was adjunct work just like yours. Usually in a business curriculum, but I was teaching in areas that I knew organization development, organization change, things along those lines. But we were never taught how to teach.

Now I come from a line of teachers. My grandmother taught mathematics. She graduated from Mount Holyoke back in the early 1900’s. My mom taught home economics. She graduated from Framingham Teachers College in Massachusetts. I taught flying in the Navy. But none of this really prepared me for the classroom and what a wake up, what a wake up that was.

But pedagogy is so critical for student outcomes, and I think it’s really overlooked.

David Gooblar: Absolutely.

[00:06:04] The Impact of Teaching on Student Retention

Drumm McNaughton: Many listeners at this point may be thinking, “Well, what does this have to do with running a university?”. Well, guess what? It has everything to do with it because can bring all the students in, but unless you retain them, and that’s done through interaction with all your staff, but especially your professors, and if professors don’t know how to teach, you’re going to lose students.

David Gooblar: Absolutely right. We know that the single biggest indicator for graduation rate, so for whether a student will graduate within six years is first year GPA. Now there’s, of course, lots of factors that go into whether a student succeeds in their classes, but surely one of the bigger ones is their professors. How their professors teach, whether their professors teach in a way that students can learn and succeed. And so it is, malpractice for institutions to look at ways to retain students and ways to help students succeed without examining how their professors are teaching.

Drumm McNaughton: I remember doing a consulting project years ago for Los Angeles Unified School District and they were just introducing a new math instruction guide. One of the things that we looked at with them was team teaching and getting people to work together as well as to evaluate each other and make changes to the way that they taught. We don’t have anything like that in higher ed do we? Or very few?

David Gooblar: Very few top-down initiatives where there is investment in changing how professors teach. There’s of course a long tradition in higher education of faculty being left alone to do what they want. And as a member of faculty I understand and appreciate this tradition, of course, professors do not like being told what to do. They certainly do not, they certainly do not like being told what to do by administrators. And I think that this is a very, very strong tradition in higher education. So much so that, and, my, my fellow professors are going to stone me for saying this, I think sometimes it goes too far and it allows for a kind of stagnation within the field of higher education pedagogy.

[00:08:20] Traditional Teaching Methods and Their Limitations

David Gooblar: I do think that things have changed somewhat, but for the most part, professors teach the way that their professors taught, who taught the way their professors taught. It is a small -c conservative discipline. And part of why it is that conservative discipline that is slow to change is because it’s thought to be something that is the property of the professor himself or herself, not the property of the institution. And it kind of exists within their own career and their own classroom. And so it’s not subject to the kinds of development that we, expect our institutions to engage in as a matter of course.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, and it’s not unlike what happens when people are promoted to administrative jobs. And of course we all know that faculty think when you get promoted to administration that you automatically lose 20 points of IQ. You’ve forgotten everything that happened when you were in a classroom.

Be that it is may, we typically will promote faculty members to be department chairs to Deans to Provost, ultimately, but we never give them any leadership training. So it always comes down to, just like in teaching, the sins of the father, the sins of the son. We continue to make the same mistakes over and over, which reminds me of Einstein’s, you know, the definition of insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.”

David Gooblar: Sure.

[00:09:54] Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education

David Gooblar: And the other thing that really affects things within the college classroom is that, you could make an argument that my professor and my professor’s professor knew how to teach well. And it is well and good for me to continue on the long, wonderful tradition of college teaching. One problem is that our student body has changed radically since I was in college and since my professors were in college. Particularly the way that it has changed is that the college student body in the United States has diversified. In as late as 1990, 8 out of 10 American undergrads were white students. Right now the number is 55% and going down. Right?

So the diversity of race, of gender, of sexuality, of socioeconomic status that we take as a norm in higher education, is still a really new thing. And so one of the arguments that I make in my new book is that one of the ways we can account for the struggles that marginalized students have in college and university is that they’re at institutions that were built for earlier generations of college students who were much more privileged as a rule. Who tended to be wealthier. Who tended to be white. Who tended to come from families who had parents who went to university, et cetera, et cetera. And so our pedagogy has not adapted to our changing student body.

Drumm McNaughton: And part of that pedagogy is the sage on the stage, the flipped classroom, it’s not small tutorial model, like what you’d have at Cambridge or Oxford. And the students of today aren’t necessarily prepared or able to absorb that information from the sage on stage like they used to.

David Gooblar: Correct. So, there’s been tons and tons of research on the limitations of lecture as the sole mode of instruction for college courses. It is not a great way to run a class if you’re hoping for students to learn. It does help certain students learn, though. The students that it really helps are students who know how to do well at school already. Students who have very good study skills, who have the resources at home to get help when they need it, who are self-motivated and who feel comfortable and fully themselves in the classroom, they can do well with lecture. They don’t need much more than the information that they’re supposed to learn and test to prepare for. Right? But many of our students don’t have those privileges. They don’t have the resources at home, they don’t have the history of doing well at school, they don’t have the time to do all the studying that we expect them to do because they work 30 or 40 hours a week, they don’t have parents who’ve been to college, and they don’t have the positive experience at school where they feel they can be themselves in the classroom.

So with all of those strikes against them, they’re not going to do as well with a pedagogy that is just, “here’s the information, you go learn it.” And so that’s why the particular ways that sage on the stage fails actually comes down harder on marginalized students than it does privileged students.

[00:13:04] The Rise of DEI Initiatives

Drumm McNaughton: Of course, which is part of what gave rise to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It was a grassroots demand for change.

David Gooblar: Yes. So, absolutely correct.

Drumm McNaughton: You like that segue?

David Gooblar: DEI in higher education, I think is best thought of as a response to grassroots demand for change. Like many things in this country, change, political change, change that relating to inclusion of new populations, only happens when the powers at be, are forced to make those changes.

Typically, people that have power at the expense of others don’t like to give up that power. I don’t think that’s a particularly radical thing to say. And so in, we have a long history in higher ed, usually people begin to tell this story starting with the sixties though, of course there’s a long history before then, but of protest from marginalized populations to be included in higher education.

We have very famous protests in the 1960s in this country, to establish, black studies departments to establish gender studies departments, to diversify faculty, to diversify, student bodies. There were protests that led to affirmative action. One thing that happened in response to these sorts of waves of demands for change was that the institution of higher education co-opted such demands. To create the administrative specialty of DEI. DEI, which if you’ve been around, for any amount of time you, you realize is a rather kind of new name, or something that’s not that new anymore.

But, it was institutions trying to say to grassroots protestors and activists, “don’t worry, we’ll cover this. We’ll take care of this. We have an office for that”. Part of that, of course, is very good. We want our institutions to be responsive to demands for change. We want them to change and to, if we believe in inclusion, if we believe in , equity, we want our institutions to have an office to take care of those things.

Drumm McNaughton: And that’s all well and good, and it’s important that everyone comes to an institution with a sense of belonging. Generally, first generation, they, they don’t have that sense, it’s important that they get it, but we didn’t do anything with the professors and how they teach.

[00:15:40] The Disconnect Between DEI and Classroom Teaching

Drumm McNaughton: Or really with the students on how they learn. We’re starting to with that last part, but not with the professors.

David Gooblar: That’s right. And so that, that’s, one of the things that, really stuck out to me when I started doing this research was I, of course, supported a lot of the things that DEI offices were doing. But I kept on noticing, that they wouldn’t do almost anything with the classroom, with the way professors teach. And I thought that was a curious submission.

You can see that sometimes if you look at the various action plans that came up in the wake of 2020 and Black Lives Matter protests. We saw colleges and universities all over the country do some soul searching and convene working groups to come up with ways to create the conditions to lead to more racial justice and in their institutions.

I looked at the action plan that SUNY came up with State University of New York. Gigantic institution, 64 campuses, I think they have almost a half a million students. And they, produced an action plan, something like 50 pages, all of these parts. It took them six months to come up with seven working groups.

And I just, I looked it over. And there’s a lot of great suggestions on how to change the university. There is not a single recommendation about how professors teach.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm.

David Gooblar: Really kind of blows me away, that an institution with 35,000 faculty would take a long look at themselves to see what needs to be changed for in this really, important moment and give those 35,000 faculty essentially nothing to do in the battle.

[00:17:23] Faculty Governance and Administrative Challenges

Drumm McNaughton: And I have to wonder, how much does faculty governance play into this? I’m a big supporter of faculty governance. You know, as long as people understand what their swim lanes are, and you know, you don’t go, poaching into my swim lane, I won’t go into yours. But many times administrators are afraid to get in and make those kinds of suggestions because you’ve got that vote of no confidence hanging over your head.

David Gooblar: I think that might be part of it. And like I said before, I do think that there is a kind of status quo where, as you say, administrators are loathed to, get themselves involved too much in what happens in the classroom. And faculty are happy to be left alone. Or in fact, insist upon being left alone to be in charge.

I do think that we can trust and respect professors’ autonomy for what they teach. And also give them the support they need and the training, so that they can teach better.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, we’re going to get into a whole list of ideas for how we can create a better partnership to focus on better student outcomes, because that’s really it. You know, as a human being, 99.9% of us focus on the WITFM, the what’s in it for me, instead of focusing on what we’re here for, we’re here to help transform students’ lives.

David Gooblar: That’s right. That’s right.

Drumm McNaughton: So in creating this need for better pathways for students, what can we do?

David Gooblar: So one of the things that really started me down this road was in my role as a sort of pedagogy researcher. I was coming across all of these studies by education researchers, by cognitive psychologists, that were looking at the way different teaching approaches could change outcomes within individual classes. That could shrink achievement gaps between privileged students and marginalized students. And we know really quite a lot now on how various ways of changing teaching can change the outcomes within individual classes. What we haven’t seen is the connection between those studies and that kind of body of knowledge and how institutions actually are run.

[00:19:50] Bridging the Gap Between Faculty and Administration

David Gooblar: So, I do think that part of what we need to do is communicate between what we know about what works within a classroom and the people who are making decisions that might shape hundreds of classrooms.

Drumm McNaughton: Okay, so, what I hear you saying is “how do we bridge that gap between administration and faculty through a governance process that really focuses on how we do things better instead of stay of my classroom”?

David Gooblar: I think that’s a absolutely necessary step. Now, there are other steps as well, but you cannot work together without working together, right? We need to get on the same page of, what our goal is. Because I do think that if you were to sit down administrators and faculty and really got them to be honest. There’s a ton of shared goals. There are a ton of shared wishes for what you’d want to do.

And certainly, helping every student succeed would be at the top of most people’s lists, I would hope. I do think that part of what’s necessary is educating both sides as well. So it’s not just about faculty and administration communicating to each other, but understanding what can be done, and what we do know. I’m not taking for granted that faculty know how to teach better. I don’t actually think many faculty have that understanding. I think that part of, I take part of my job as to be spreading the gospel of better pedagogy. I think it’s something that a lot of professors are hungry to learn about, because as we talked about earlier, they’re not sort of trained how to teach.

But that’s part of the job as well is educating faculty and administration alike, on the sort of ins and outs of how to teach, so every single student can benefit, not just the ones who are, for lack of a better term, good at school already.

[00:21:46] The Need for Pedagogical Training in PhD Programs

Drumm McNaughton: And you bring up a really large deficit in PhD programs. As a PhD, we’re trained to conduct research. But, guess what? We also have to teach as well. And there are no courses that we would take to teach that type of thing unless you’re going for an EDD. And even then, it’s not always, taught about pedagogies. It’s not always taught about classroom management, things along those lines.

David Gooblar: That’s absolutely right. I mean, this was the subject of my last book, The Missing Course, which is about that hole in, in graduate education. Things are changing a little bit. I do think it’s more common for PhD programs to include at least one course on pedagogy. It is still not something I would call common, but more common, yes.

I just think it’s important to remember that except for the very elite among us, for the most part, professors’ jobs are teaching. A professor’s job is teaching would be a better way to say that. The majority of the time we spend is either teaching or preparing to teach. Yes, there are superstars who, spend most of their time researching and writing.

Most of us are squeezing in our research and our writing, among our teaching responsibilities. And so I think it’s still a kind of shocking omission that the standard way that we train people for this profession treats teaching like something that you’ll pick up along the way. And it really, I think, undersells what, a complex and of course, important discipline, teaching is.

Drumm McNaughton: It really is, and we don’t, as we’ve been talking about, we don’t really train folks how to do this. You don’t get it in your graduate programs. But even when you get hired at a university, a tenure track does the 40, 40, 20, you know, 40 research, 40 teaching, 20% service. But your orientation probably has about zero to do with teaching pedagogy?

David Gooblar: It has to be, the incentives are such that if I want to keep my job after six years, if I want to get tenure and stay, I better produce as a researcher. Right? We know, we know that people can absolutely neglect their teaching and write a book and they’ll get tenure.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

David Gooblar: Everybody knows this. Yes, there are some guardrails. I’m sure there are people who have taught so poorly that it endangered their tenure case. But for the most part, the incentives are set up to really encourage all of us to spend all of our time, as much time as possible, because you still have to show up for class. And our…

Drumm McNaughton: that’s what TAs are for.

David Gooblar: …our attention on our research.

so, the incentives are absolutely running away from people investing in developing their pedagogy.

[00:24:43] Rethinking Tenure and Faculty Incentives

Drumm McNaughton: I’ve thought for a long time, there ought to be different tracks that faculty go along. Instead of the standard 40, 40, 20. You could get tenured in teaching, and this would be your primary focus. You could be tenured in research, et cetera. Everyone should have to do service. I mean, that is just part of the job. But we don’t do that other than, a very small number of institutions.

David Gooblar: We do have, at many institutions now, an instructional track. We do have that at in my institution. But as I’m sure you’ll know, although, the expectations for instructional track faculty are that they spend more their time on teaching. It’s a much worse job. They don’t get the protections of tenure, and they don’t get the pay, and prestige or time that a tenure track job gets mostly instructional track faculty because they’re expected to focus on their teaching. Teach a much bigger load than tenure track faculty.

So we have the beginnings of it. And I can hear, I can almost hear some of our listeners responding to you saying, “but we have an instructional track”. I think it’s a welcome development in a lot of institutions, but, it’s not as good of a job as a tenure track job. And, in many places it’s, really poorly paid. And so I do think that’s not quite the solution that, , you were describing that we would hope for.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, no, I would like to see, if we’re going to continue with tenure, I’d like to be able to see instructional faculty get tenured and maybe part of their service is training other faculty on being better teachers. That would be a, that would be a radical change.

[00:26:24] Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Tenure

David Gooblar: One of the people I spoke to in the course of, researching this new book was the Chancellor of University of Minnesota, Rochester, Laurie Carroll. They’re a small campus at the University of Minnesota. They really only do health professions. They’re right, there in Rochester, right by the, Mayo Clinic.

And they have really invested in trying to, in incentivize teaching innovation and improved teaching. And they have as part of their tenure process, what research on your teaching have you done and what teaching innovations have you developed? And that, as far as at least a as the official policy is supposed to have as much weight as traditional research.

And so I really love that kind of thinking. That you could encourage and incentivize, not just developing pedagogy, but research on your pedagogy. So your institution might actually learn something from this research because, you’re learning about how your professors are teaching your students at your institution.

Drumm McNaughton: And if you do have people researching pedagogy, their service component would be teaching others on these pedagogies.

David Gooblar: That would be great as well. Absolutely. That’s very much needed.

[00:27:32] The Future of Higher Education Demographics

Drumm McNaughton: Because it’s not going to get any less diverse. We’re going to continue, I mean, I just did a session with a couple of good friends of mine, Bob Massa and Bill Conley from Enrollment Intelligence Now, and we talked a lot about the demographics.

We’ve had growing demographics for 15 or 20 years, increased classes, et cetera. The next 15, we’re going to lose all of those gains that we had. But, we’re becoming far more diverse as a country, and we can expect that the students coming in may not have the same kind of training that us old white folks had, for lack of a better word.

David Gooblar: For sure. Yes. Yes,

Drumm McNaughton: And everybody was a first-generation student at some point in time. Just like pretty much this entire country was founded by immigration. So we can’t lose our roots, but we can’t lose sight of what should be at the center of our service, of our employment, which should be the student.

David Gooblar: Absolutely correct. It’s a persistent and long understood problem that these students who are not succeeding in our higher education institutions are generally the students who are lower on the socioeconomic status. Who are black and brown and who are women in STEM fields, right?

The same issues that we’ve seen in graduation rates for 20, 30, 40 years, they’re still there in the numbers. And so if we want our students to succeed, we really need to focus on which students aren’t succeeding.

Drumm McNaughton: And at the same time, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We’ve got a lot of really good stuff out there, but we need a more equitable pedagogy.

David Gooblar: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Right.

Drumm McNaughton: So see, I learned something from you.

David Gooblar: Thanks. I hope so.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation for me, David, and I appreciate your being on the podcast. Let me ask you a couple of questions at the end.

[00:29:51] Strategies for Improving Student Outcomes

Drumm McNaughton: What can administrators do to better student learning outcomes?

David Gooblar: Sure. So the first one, most administrators are not going to like to hear, but it is the simplest thing even if it’s not the easiest thing, which is to hire more faculty. Everything that we know about what leads to better outcomes for students, is made easier if professors have fewer students to teach. Right. There are, I think there’s 13 institutions, with more than a thousand students that have a student, to faculty ratio of six to one or lower. All of them have very high graduation rates for marginalized students. Right. And it won’t surprise you when you see these are all very wealthy institutions. I don’t underestimate, the cost of hiring a lot of faculty, but I do think that institutions would do well to think of faculty as a student success lever, as an investment in student success. If professors have fewer students, they are more likely to be able to do the things that we know works to help students succeed.

So that’s the difficult pill to swallow. But I do think that’s, the first thing that my mind goes to. Investing in faculty development is absolutely something that institutions can do that we kind of know how to do. Teaching and learning centers, we know that teaching and learning centers improve, both, improve teaching and improve retention rates. So if you invest in, faculty, teaching and learning centers, faculty development, you will help teachers develop their pedagogy and help students learn better. The other thing that comes to mind that we just talked about is changing the incentives around tenure and around faculty’s jobs.

If you can put in place incentives that faculty are actually rewarded for innovating in the classroom. They’re rewarded for taking a course on pedagogy, you’re going to see better results. I think as well what you were getting at, that better communication between administration and faculty and coming at these conversations looking for common ground, can go a long way.

So it’s not, we’re going to force faculty to do this and this, but rather where can we see that, administration and faculty have shared goals. Particularly around student success, particularly around equitable outcomes. How can we work together to help professors teach students better?

Drumm McNaughton: So critical. What can faculty do?

David Gooblar: Well, faculty can start by, reading my book, of course. That, that was a joke. You can’t see. I’m smiling. But faculty can, in the time that they have, I recognize that many faculty have very little time for this, but read up a little bit on, on, teaching.

There’s never been a better time to find accessible information about pedagogy. There’s a relatively thriving field of education, research centered on the college classroom. And you can find online lots of ways to better teach your classes so your students are more engaged. And so those students that you may have taken for granted, will not succeed or will struggle, can start to do better.

And there’s lots of different ways to do it, but the way that I like to think of better teaching really centered on how students learn. We know that people don’t learn by pouring knowledge into their heads. We know that people learn through bringing their prior knowledge to a task or to a concept.

Finding out that prior knowledge is insufficient in some way, and revising that knowledge to work better, right? So if you think of your class, instead of thinking of it as a time when I’m going to tell students everything they need to know. Think of it as a time when they’re going to figure out why their prior knowledge doesn’t work that well, right?

If you can create the conditions where they can come up against the limits of what they currently know, and if you can motivate them to figure out how to understand something better, they’re going to succeed a lot better rather than you just telling them the

Drumm McNaughton: Yep. And I’m going to throw in one other thing is make it relevant for students. One of the biggest lessons that I ever learned was when my daughter was going to middle school and it was a magnet school, they totally different teaching. And it reminds me in some ways of Unity Environmental College. Everything is focused around a particular area. It might be environmental studies, it may be something else, but all of your math, all of your social studies, all of those things are focused on that, so that you can see the inter relatability of all the disciplines.

David Gooblar: Absolutely. Yes. People are motivated to learn. They’re motivated to do anything when it’s relevant to their lives. Absolutely. Right. Why would I be motivated to pursue something if I don’t think it has any bearing on my own life.

Drumm McNaughton: Which is all part of the issues of belonging, things like that. How is it relevant to me? David, this has been fascinating. I thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

We always end up with two questions.

[00:35:07] Key Takeaways for Boards and Presidents

Drumm McNaughton: What are three takeaways that boards and presidents need to keep in mind when thinking about student learning outcomes and how faculty pedagogy can impact those.

David Gooblar: So three takeaways for boards and presidents. I would say the big one for me is to see teaching, to see college teaching as a kind of arrow in your quiver for student success. That this is something that I fear boards and presidents have typically left to faculty to sort out for themselves. We need to see teaching as something central to an institution’s approach to students. We need to as well, I think, move away from DEI as a specialization, as something that is one of many offices within an administration. And rather think about student success holistically and absolutely connected to equitable outcomes. We’ve known for such a long time, which students are struggling in our institutions.

I gave a talk, a couple weeks ago at Loyola University of Chicago about how to better help economically insecure students succeed. And I gave all of these examples of ways that professors could change their teaching to help students living in a near poverty. And, a professor raised her hand at the end of it and said very nicely, “but aren’t all these things you described, isn’t that just good teaching?” And I do think that is what works. It’s important for us to remember that our privileged students don’t need great teaching. Our marginalized students really do need great teaching. And so if we invest in better teaching, we’re going to almost inadvertently help those marginalized students succeed.

Drumm McNaughton: And in many ways we owe it to them. I hate to bring up the student is the customer, but in, in fact, they are. And if we’re not able to meet the student’s needs, the customer’s needs, one size does not fit all as it used to.

David Gooblar: Absolutely right. We make a promise to these students. We, you know it on all of our, on our websites and our brochures, we promise all these things to students that we’re going to help connect them to the rest of their lives that we’re going to help them achieve amazing things that we’re going to help them find themselves. We do owe it to them to help them to the best of our ability.

Drumm McNaughton: Remember, we’re there to educate, but we’re also there to transform.

David Gooblar: 100 percent.

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

[00:37:42] David Gooblar’s Future Endeavors

David Gooblar: Ah, well, what’s next for me? I just took on a new role at my institution. I’m directing what we call general education literature. So it’s a general education course called the Interpretation of Literature, which is required of all University of Iowa students except for English majors.

And so, as I see it, an introduction to the practices of literary reading, 3000 students take it a year, 150 sections a year. And I sort of oversee all the instructors, approximately 60 or 70, mostly graduate instructors, who are teaching this course. So what’s next for me is kind of figuring out how to be an administrator, to some extent, to administrate this course. And to try to operationalize a lot of the stuff that I write about how to teach better into a structure that actually helps early career instructors put it into place. So I’m very excited to see how I can help these new instructors particularly teach students who don’t think that they can get anything from an English class. They’re there because they have to be and so it’s the kind of pedagogical challenge I really love. The idea of helping students not just learn, but see the value in what we’re teaching. So that’s kind of my focus for the next year, is figuring out how to do this role and also hoping to do it well.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m sure you will. Let’s have you back in about a year to talk about it.

David Gooblar: That’d be wonderful. Thanks so much.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you for being on the show, David. Thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

David Gooblar: My pleasure. I enjoyed it too.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, David Gooblar. David, thanks for being on the show. I love podcasts where I learn a lot and boy did I learn a lot today, so thank you very much.

To my audience, thanks again for tuning in, look forward to seeing you next time.