^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

My main point is that participatory teaching methods simply will not work if they do not begin with a deep bond between teacher and student. Importantly, this bond must be built through mutual respect, care, and an ongoing effort to know and understand one another. Somebody using traditional teaching methods (lecture) can foster these bonds and be as effective as somebody using more participatory methods. The participation and “active learning” that is necessary for true understanding and application may not happen in the classroom, but the lecture is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem of the college campus. An effective lecture can inspire deep late night conversations with peers, mad runs to the library for more information, and significant intellectual throwdowns in the minds of our students.

–Michael Wesch, Professor of Anthropology, Kansas State University, in an email message to The Chronicle editor Jeff Selingo, shared in Wesch’s blog, Digital Technology With Professor Wesch. Wesch was a hit the last time SCUP visited Chicago, at SCUP–42, when he closed “Shaping the Academic Landscape: Integrated Solutions, with a rousing presentation. 

Margaret A. Miller editorializes in Change magazine:

When I started teaching, neither I nor any of my professors or colleagues knew anything about learning—indeed, we didn't even know how much we didn't know about it. If we thought about it at all, we presumed that it was what should be happening automatically on the other end of the log on which we perched, professing. And when the loop was completed via essays or problem sets or other assignments, we were shocked and amazed at how wrong students got what we had said perfectly clearly. Was there some mysterious static in the air that prevented the air waves emanating from our mouths from reaching them? Or were the students just dumb, lazy, poorly prepared, inattentive, or all of the above?

The essay begins with this quote:

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
-Mark Twain

I'm made hopeful by what I see as the increasing tendency of faculty to accept at least some responsibility for classroom learning and for finding ways to get students to do something with what they're teaching, if only to press a clicker.

Does tenure evaluation "undermine" teaching? Is it the administration's fault? Is it because it is truly difficult to evaluate innovative teaching? This is a brief "back and forth" between Michael Brown and Mary Churchill in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mike: Education departments have been denigrated for a long time, often based on the claim that they make a fetish of process and do not adequately take substance into account. But there is a different reason for the defensiveness that often accompanies that judgment: It is primarily in education departments and rarely in other disciplines that faculty are most likely to discuss the relationship between teaching and learning.

Mary: This is related to the fact that so many academic departments seem to devalue teaching. We actively recruit and hire junior faculty members who are able to teach in innovative ways: utilizing global outreach, service learning, and new technologies. But we fail miserably at promoting and retaining these faculty members. We hire them for the “differences” they bring (significantly, many of these new hires are women and/or racial/ethnic minorities), but then we can’t deal with their innovations — particularly when it comes to evaluation.

And so forth.

Perry A. Holloway is the pseudonym of a professor at a public university in California who shared thoughts on Inside Higher Ed about "Is Fundamental Change Really 'Inevitable'?" The comments section of this article is especially useful in gauging various campus perspectives.

Are faculty really obstacles to needed change or are they performing an important function by opposing administrative initiatives?

The budget woes seem to many commentators to be an inarguable reason for “fundamental change” in education, but is money really a sufficient excuse for reorganizing and perhaps thereby weakening an effective system of higher education that has been the envy of the world? Further, do today’s temporary budget problems really reflect a permanent inability to fund higher education in the future, a disinclination to educate students in the ways that have been traditional in the past or a dissatisfaction with the quality of prior education? …

A great deal of the faculty resistance to change occurs because many faculty regard these faddish initiatives, along with the emphasis on assessment, as a waste because they divert resources from the classroom. When tenure-track lines are replaced by adjuncts and faculty are denied lab space, travel funding, or even market-average pay, they come to doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances that the institution cares about quality education.

From the comments:

I teach at a similar institution and can vouch for the fact that what he describes goes on elsewhere as well. The administration pushes the latest pedagogical fad while faculty ignore them and continues to teach using nineteenth-century methods (but with PowerPoint substituting for blackboards). A plague on both houses, I say!

Of course there are exceptions--small colleges dedicated to student learning, like Alverno College--but while I have only my own institution to judge from, I doubt that it is unique.

One way to test this hypothesis would be to ask at your next faculty meeting, "has anyone read any good books on teaching and learning lately?" I know at my university that would be the only time in departmental history that there was total silence at a faculty meeting.

Think about it for a minute: how many professors would give a conference paper without bothering to read up on any of the secondary literature? I mean, you'd be laughed out of the profession. But in universities across the country faculty can walk into classrooms with out the slightest grasp of the research on teaching and learning.

Wow, if nothing else, this article reinforces the diversity of opinions about outcomes and success in learning, and the disparity of motivating forces.

"If a student gets an A in my class, and an A in yours, then we say the student is good," says William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC. "We don't make any comments about what the student has actually learned."

That's the case in part because university prestige often stands in as a proxy for learning. "The general public, they want to go to Stanford whether you learn anything or not," says Ms. Kezar. "As long as employers and parents promote that system, it's not really about what you learn, they just care if students go to a prestigious place."

Indeed, many professors feel little pressure from either students or the public to change the way they do business. "Why I need to spend a lot of time working with my colleagues documenting learning outcomes is unclear to me," Mr. Tierney says of a hypothetical professor. "What is going to happen if I don't? Will no one take my classes? Will no students attend this university?" Faculty members, Mr. Tierney notes, are busier than ever, and assessing student learning is often viewed as just one more demand on their time. "Should they pay attention to learning outcomes rather than understand how to make their classes go online or how to update the syllabus on reading that's changed in their area in the last year?" he asks. "They can't do it all."

If there is any pressure from students, say professors, it is to keep classwork manageable.

Graduates should be expected to demonstrate that they can learn through a variety of formats: lecture, seminar, independent study, internship, guided research, and online course. Lectures aren’t inherently bad, and seminars aren’t inherently good. An education received entirely through any one instruction mode doesn’t prepare students for the many ways in which information is received and must be presented in the postgraduation world.

The most effective forms of instruction are sometimes inexpensive, and the least effective are sometimes very expensive. We are all familiar with courses that use internet-based exercises in which the online material is simply a static textbook to be consulted and read online. Except for faster searching, the technology’s capability is not exploited for any of its distinctive features—dynamic capabilities for simulation or modeling, use of images (especially moving images), sound mixed with text, or graphical representation of complex data. A student learns little in these courses that couldn’t be learned equally well from a printed book.