the CTL blog

Below is a written version of comments offered in the general discussion by Jim Trostle of the Anthropology Department at the CTL roundtable on academic rigor on Thursday, March 15, 2012. We’re grateful to Jim for attending the roundtable and giving us permission to reproduce his remarks here.

I am growing increasingly tired of conversations about how we can increase the “rigor” of our teaching, and am increasingly eager to talk instead about how we can increase the impact and creativity and engagement and excitement of our teaching.  It seems to me that we don’t usually spend a lot of time defining what “rigor” is, or what exactly it is supposed to produce among our students, but we nonetheless tend to measure it with easily obtained information (how many hours studied, how many non-A grades given, how many courses offered at 8 a.m. or on Friday).  These measures tend to equate rigor with concepts like “good hard work” or “being a serious student.”  And then we turn around and compare our measures to those of other schools, never really knowing what the measures mean.  Is a student who puts in 6 hours of study time per week more or less rigorous than one who puts in 15? And what about the student who takes Adderall and does the 15 hours it would usually take to do work in 3 hours instead.  Is that rigorous or not?  Is a course at 8 a.m. more rigorous than a course at 10? How about at 8 p.m. as opposed to 8 a.m.?  And then how do we account for innate ability? For those who work best at midnight instead of eight in the morning? Continue reading →

Below is a written version of the comments Maurice Wade of the Philosophy Department offered at the CTL roundtable discussion on academic rigor on Thursday, March 15, 2012. We’re grateful to Maurice for participating in that discussion as a panelist and for giving us permission to post these comments here.

I’m going to do here what philosophers often do and what so often makes philosophers so irritating to so many.  I’m going to pose a bunch of questions and offer little to nothing by way of answers.  Philosophers often wonder if we know as much as we think we do or need to know when we set out to make judgments about matters that we regard as important, in this case rigor in our educational efforts.

Even with the kinds and amount of data that Dan Blackburn and Rachel Barlow have provided, we should be reluctant to arrive at any substantive conclusions about the rigor of our educational efforts at any level—college-wide, divisional, departmental, etc.  My view is that before such conclusions can be justifiably reached, we need to know much, much more than these data can tell and much, much more than we already know.  We need much more detailed knowledge of the educational choices that our faculty colleagues are making, how they enact those choices, and the goals that they aim to serve by those choices.  Our starting point should be the moral equivalent of the legal presumption of innocence, that our faculty colleagues take their professional responsibilities seriously and care a great deal about how much our students learn.  This presumption is refutable, of course, but only with the kinds of knowledge about the actual educational choices and practices that are being enacted in our classrooms.  Do we know ourselves well enough as teachers to give legitimate meaning to the data that we have?  I strongly suspect that we do not. Continue reading →

The Trinity College Center for Teaching and Learning has sponsored two forums on academic “rigor.” Lively discussion ensued, but sadly attendance was low. So we’d like to move the conversation into the electronic world.

We’ll soon be posting some short position papers or comments on this question. We invite all members of the Trinity Community to participate either by posting comments here or writing short papers which we can post.

Below is the announcement from the CTL to the Trinity Community about this event. It gives a sense of the charge given to the panelists. Continue reading →