The Missing Course

David Gooblar’s The Missing Course offers a simple, but radical thesis: that improving college teaching requires shifting the mindset about what the product is the professor offers. It is easy to think that your product is your expertise in your content area, honed through years of study. Institutional structures in PhD programs and promotion standards reinforce this belief from one end, while, on the other, there is a temptation to think that the transaction the students are paying for is to have knowledge transmitted to them by a world renowned expert (you).

However, speaking as someone who took classes from some exceptional lecturers and loves the feeling of one of his own lectures landing with an audience: even the most inspiring lecturer will not connect with every student. Gooblar’s proposal follows in the vein of recent scholarship on teaching and learning that encourages teachers to eschew lectures in favor of shades of active learning, but with a critical addition: that the product is not the content, but the student.

This proposal seems obvious, but it also requires foundational changes in class design and assessment and simply bypassed the handwringing about why students aren’t capable of picking up the subtle themes and brilliant observations about life and everything. As Gooblar opens with in chapter one, is that you can’t make someone learn, so the challenge is finding ways to encourage learning beyond the punitive threat of a poor grade. The lecture works well, if still imperfectly, for students who are already interested in learning, but it works best as a gateway drug––a taste that prompts students to go out and get more. That is, the lecture works well for students who approach it as part of an active learning process. But too many others approach the lecture as something to passively receive, learn by rote, and regurgitate as best they are able on the test.

Each of The Missing Courses’ eight chapters approach a different aspect of this teaching, from the basic course design to assignments, to classroom activities, with practical, actionable suggestions to try. There are too many points to summarize here, but I found myself happy to find practices I use in my own classes like low-stakes weekly quizzes and extensive opportunities to revise assignments among his suggestions and still found myself jotting down new ideas.

As a history professor who believes in the importance of teaching writing across the curriculum, I was particularly excited to have suggestions from a professor of writing and rhetoric about how to encourage best practices in citations. For instance, he provides the most lucid explanation I have seen of why students struggle to cite secondary scholarship and will often only do so when citing direct quotes:

“To write a summary, the student must read the whole text (perhaps multiple times), think deeply about the most important aspects, and synthesize observations into a concise rendering of the text’s substance”

In other words: using secondary scholarship is hard and intimidating (what if you get it wrong!), where citing a quote is easy. I couldn’t tell you where I learned how to cite scholarship. I don’t remember being taught how at any point, it was just something I picked up by osmosis, so I very much appreciated seeing Gooblar’s suggestions on activities that can help teach these skills.

All of Gooblar’s suggestions come back to the student as the course material. Toward that end, he emphasizes the importance of respecting students as individuals even, or perhaps especially, when they are failing the course, and of facilitating the classroom as a community where not only are students and their ideas respected, but students may also help each other grow.

At this point you might be thinking, what about the content? If the students are taking a course on World History, shouldn’t they, you know, learn about World History? Of course the answer is yes, but, speaking from experience, thinking in terms of coverage is a trap. I tell my students in these classes that every class period (and usually every slide) could be a semester-long class course of its own, meaning that we only ever scratch the surface. Which is going to be more beneficial to the student in the long run: making sure that we spend ten minutes in a lecture talking about the Tibetan Empire of the second half of the first millennium CE, which is admittedly fascinating, or redirecting that time to primary source analysis, discussion, debate, practice summarizing and engaging with sources, or any of a myriad of other active learning techniques. Some of these are harder when teaching introductory courses where it seems like the students don’t have enough background to engage at the level you want and lectures are sometimes a necessary component of the class, but incorporating active learning into the course offers significant rewards.

Toward the end of the book, Gooblar turns his attention to how to teach in the modern, tumultuous world. I jotted a brief response thread on Twitter, but wanted to spotlight it again here. College professors are often accused of trying to indoctrinate their students into radical Marxism or the like. While American college professors do tend to be more liberal than conservative, the largest number actually self-classify as moderate. Further, the recent primary results have demonstrated that the Democratic party remains a big-tent coalition, while the Republican party, which has accelerated attacks on funding for higher education in recent years, has veered further right. The political doesn’t end at the classroom door and to pretend otherwise is naive.

As a history teacher I run into these problems with regularity and, to be honest believe that I can and should better handle them. Ancient Greek democracy was made possible by both exclusion (narrow participation that did not include women) and exploitation (Athens had many times the number of enslaved people as it did citizens). The spread of religions was at different points a blood-soaked process, Christianity included, and European colonization amounted to exploitation and indoctrination at best and either incidental or intentional genocide and ethnic cleansing at worst. And for all that I find history endlessly fascinating.

Gooblar suggests a similar approach to the one I’ve adopted, which is to “take seriously the equality of our students and the inequality of the world,” while placing an emphasis on process. There are some premises that I will not tolerate in my classroom, including endorsement of slavery, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, but I also believe that there is room for students to argue for the virtue of, for instance, Athenian democracy and capitalism so long as their arguments are based on good use of available sources and I build time into the class period to have students practice these skills.

One of the virtues of a college classroom should giving students space to debate issues in a responsible and respectful manner: disagreements are okay, bullying is not.

The limiting factor in college teaching is not knowledge, but attention. Becoming a good teacher requires practice and cultivation, just like developing any other skill. Fortunately for anyone interested in improving their skill, we are currently living in a golden age of publications on teaching and learning. I haven’t finished everything on the list of resources I solicited a few years back, but The Missing Course is already my go-to recommendation for a place to start.