The Challenge of True Curricular Reform

Three years from now, how will we know if curricular reform is working? What signs will indicate that improved courses and advising are enriching the undergraduate academic experience? It is time to ask this question--to lay down criteria by which we can measure and move toward success—even though more hours of faculty debate will unfold before the last vote on the new system of General Education is tallied in a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Exhaustion from four years of meetings and reports could prompt faculty to retreat into comfortably established classroom routines. Yet we must not presume that President-elect Drew G. Faust and her incoming deans can implement complex changes on their own. Genuine improvements in advising, course offerings, and pedagogy require ongoing faculty commitment. Each step of the way, faculty and administrators must articulate clear goals and plan wisely for how (and how not) to proceed. Here are some principles and caveats to keep in mind.

Give teachers time and resources to design new and significantly enriched courses—courses with broader appeal, compelling goals, and a capacity to actively engage students in solving problems, improving basic skills, and handling authentic materials. Most faculty members will not need to do additional teaching, but virtually all will need to sharpen their teaching skills and develop broader course offerings (often using research assistance or a month of paid summer time). Compelling and effective courses will be in demand for secondary fields and electives as well as general education—and three years from now we should see a higher proportion of undergraduate courses with lively and unspecialized content, taught using creative instructional methods. Especially as we develop new and revised offerings for general education, we must not rush. If faculty are in a hurry to get their courses certified, and if students demand instant and infinitely flexible menus of offerings, established courses will just be relabeled, providing little improvement in content or pedagogy.

Keep committees and rules to a minimum, but require periodic reviews of course goals and effectiveness. Certainly, we cannot have so few rules that “anything goes,” but let’s use compact committees of faculty, responsible administrators, and student advisers to work out core principles and allocate supportive resources—and then leave the details to the creativity of instructors and departments. The existing Core Curriculum has been much resented by students and faculty, because new courses are approved through a vast spider-like apparatus of committees, and existing courses are rarely reviewed. To carry out the new general education system as well as other promised reforms, we should allow maximum space for pedagogical creativity. Rather than tell all course heads they need to follow set formats—for exams, assignments, course scheduling, sections, and so forth—why not ask periodically for evidence that instructional goals are clear and that students are learning and finding the course worthwhile?

Provide resources for curricular improvement to departments and concentrations. Individual course heads are not the only ones who must rise to the occasion. Departmental chairs and directors of undergraduate and graduate study face even more daunting challenges, for they must orchestrate collegial efforts to improve course offerings and advising, enhance training in basic skills, and sharpen the preparation of teaching fellows. Rather than pepper departments with disconnected demands from separate University Hall offices, FAS must ensure that department leaders have real-time information and flexible resources. Starting next year, FAS should give multi-year grants to allow departments to plan and execute coordinated curricular enrichments, and then provide ongoing support for changes that truly enhance student learning.

Finally, make better training and more creative deployment of graduate teaching fellows a central part of curricular reform. Graduate student teachers are as vital to great research universities as medical interns are to flagship hospitals. At Harvard, we fund graduate education in part through teaching fellowships and offer excellent teacher training to our PhDs. But teaching fellowships have been tied, in a cookie-cutter fashion, to lecture-course sections enrolling 15 to 18 undergraduates apiece. Faculty are often loath to try new course formats for fear of not employing enough TFs; and graduate students do not develop a full range of pedagogical skills. As reform proceeds, the College and the Graduate School must encourage additional, more flexible deployment of teaching fellows, not to substitute for faculty engagement with undergraduates, but to allow TFs to partner with faculty in seminars that combine lectures and discussions, to help design course materials and “hands-on” learning environments, and to support courses with improved technologies. Departments, in turn, should be allowed to spend teaching fellow budgets flexibly and creatively.

Under any scenario, it will not be easy to fashion more pedagogically effective courses and weave stronger ties between students and faculty advisors. But we can achieve measurable reforms in just a few years, if we set clear goals and modify ossified procedures. To make curricular reform a reality, we must of course ensure accountability and careful budgeting—yet also find ways to enhance cooperation, reduce bureaucracy, and stimulate creative teaching and learning where it really counts, from the bottom up, and in the hearts and minds of teachers and students themselves.



Theda Skocpol is the current dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and was the chair of the 2006-07 FAS Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, which offered ideas to support ongoing curricular reforms.