Ten
Changing Demands on College Teachers in the Future
Nancy Zimpher
Presented in the keynote
address of the spring conference, Changing
Demands on College Teachers: A Conference for Teaching Support Providers, April 27,1998
- Teaching will be more public than it ever
has been before. It will be open to inspection, discussion, and increasing accountability.
The nature and quality of assessment will change. Faculty
will teach within a culture of evidence that will place great importance on demonstrating
learning outcomes.
Evaluation and documentation of teaching will change.
It will be done more systematically and rigorously and will involve multiple
methods and sources.
Teaching will be come technologically enabled. Instructional
technology will be used within the classroom as well as for anytime, anyplace learning.
Content transmission will not he the focus of
teaching. As information continues to grow and be readily available in many
forms, the focus will be on helping learners to know how to access information, evaluate
it critically, and use it to solve problems.
Curriculum and program design will be inseparable
from teaching and learning. Coordination, integration, and teamwork will be
hallmarks in the future.
Diversity will be seen as asset-based. Higher education will realize that all benefit
when different perspectives and cultures are included.
Different pedagogies that students have
experienced prior to college will change their expectations about good teaching. They will
come with values for collaborative and active learning, and for contextual, experiential
approaches, such as service learning.
Higher education facilities will have to
look different. Rooms will have to be flexible to accommodate the new pedagogies and they
will have to be technologically sophisticated.
A new scholarship of teaching will occur. Value
will be placed on systematically exploring teaching issues and researching experiments
with new approaches and conditions affecting student learning.
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