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At Texas A&M University recendy, the chancellor created a firestorm of controversy over his plan to pay faculty members hefty bonuses for favorable comments and ratings from students. Some people feared the plan would become a corrupting influence, leading professors to buy high marks from their students with inflated grades or free beer. For student supporters of the idea, however, it was an opportunity to express legitimate assessments of their teachers. "I understand dieir concerns," one student leader said of the plan's critics, "but a student can distinguish between a good teacher and a popular teacher."
Behind that controversy lies a much older struggle over the very meaning of good teaching. If there is a difference between good instructors and popular ones, what is it? Every year hundreds of promotion and tenure committees struggle with that question, and for good reasons. Without some definitions, all attempts to improve teaching wander aimlessly in a sea of conflicting ambitions. In this essay, we offer a way across those troubled waters. With a definition of good teaching clearly in mind, we can then offer some insights into how the best teachers achieve them.
DIFFERENT STUDENT APPROACHES TO LEARNING
Our journey begins with a single experiment in 1976 that, at first glance, seems far distant from any questions about teaching quality and how to achieve it. In that experiment, researchers at a Swedish university gave a group of students a text and said, here, read this; when you finish, we're going to ask you some questions.
After the reading was done and the researchers began asking questions, they quickly realized that different students had taken fundamentally different approaches to the exercise. On one end of the scale of responses, students had simply attempted to remember as many details as possible, trying as best they could to replicate what they had read. On the opposite end of that same scale, other students had thought about arguments they encountered in the text, and had distinguished between evidence and conclusions in those arguments. They had identified key concepts, mulled over assumptions, and even considered implications and applications. The researcher called the first group "surface learners" and the second, "deep learners."
In subsequent investigations, researchers identified a third kind of approach, often called...