Education that works

As I may have mentioned before, I am Assessment Czar at the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. (It’s an unofficial title, so I feel like I can choose the exact wording.) It is not a job anyone really relishes, and in fact I only got into it because I was scared the accreditors would shut us down while everyone else (understandably) dragged their feet on it. Over time, we committed to a very large range of assessment tools, many of which were probably not very meaningful, but our core rubrics on writing and discussion skills demonstrated something that we already knew: our program works.

Students of all ability levels who stick with it grow as writers and discussion participants. We were initially suspicious that the upward trend reflected the weaker students dropping out, but when we controlled for students who participated in every checkpoint exercise, the result was the same. One of my colleagues often reminds us that Shimer is not an honors program, though the things we do — small classes focused on discussion of important primary materials — are usually reserved for honors students or at least upper-level students.

It works because it is intensive — they are immersed in an environment where they have to figure out how to learn and grow in a student-driven classroom. It works because it is systematic — our curriculum has a structure with built-in checkpoints. And it works, above all I think, because we know our students — the same cohort of student is in continual contact with the same group of faculty members, who all share the same goals and standards (though admittedly students do sometimes think we are radically and inexplicably different).

Much of what we do is contrary to the trends of higher ed. At most schools, students at the lower levels are taught by contingent faculty who are treated as disposable — and though they typically do a great job, they simply can’t build relationships with individual students over time. At most schools, at least until a student has chosen a major, individual courses are treated as isolated monads with no particular relationship with one another, as departments are forced to compete for students. And building a structured core curriculum in a school that hasn’t already inherited one seems impossible due to the endless (justified!) arguments about ends and means that would surely result, even if everyone put aside anxieties about turf, etc.

At the same time, our apparently old-fashioned approach does cohere with the skill-based orientation of contemporary higher ed. We are teaching them flexibility and exploration more than we are expecting them to memorize lines from the Iliad, for instance — and anecdotally, I have often experiened better educational outcomes by using texts that would not normally fall under the heading of “Great Books.” It is important that we share a central canon that spreads through the curriculum, but its contents are to some extent arbitrary, and certainly we have learned that its boundaries can be flexible. This leads me to think that our approach could also be beneficial in a more conventional disciplinary context, if people could break the spell of “coverage” — something that we have had to do in recent years as we saw that we could never include materials of greater diversity if we were quick to insist that a student “had to” get certain texts.

I’m having trouble figuring out how to wrap this up other than to say: we are doing something that works, and we are doing it in a way that is not conservative or backward-looking. We are doing it off in a little corner and it is hard to get people to see and understand what we are doing, but we are doing it, and it works, and it should be a model for others.