TEN CHANGING DEMANDS ON COLLEGE TEACHERS IN THE FUTURE

by Nancy Zimpher
  1. Teaching will be more public than it ever has been before. It will be open to inspection, discussion, and increasing accountability.
  2. 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.
  3. Evaluation and documentation of teaching will change. It will be done more systematically and rigorously and will involve multiple methods and sources.
  4. Teaching will become technologically enabled. Instructional technology will be used within the classroom as well as for anytime, anyplace learning.
  5. Content transmission will not be 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.
  6. Curriculum and program design will be inseparable from teaching and learning. Coordination, integration, and teamwork will be hallmarks in the future.
  7. Diversity will be seen as asset-based. Higher education will realize that all benefit when different perspectives and cultures are included.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

Presented in the keynote address of the spring conference, Changing Demands on College Teachers: A Conference for Teaching Support Providers, April 27, 1998.

From The Office of Faculty & TA Development, The Ohio State University, http://www.osu.edu/education/ftad/index.htm, reprinted with permission on the TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV (http://sll.stanford.edu/), January 27, 2000.