What Can K–12 Education Teach College Professors?

Pretend that you have been a frequent patient at a hospital over 10 years, and during those many hours you watched carefully as the doctors perform their job. Then, one day after a short ceremony you are told that tomorrow you will be expected to be the doctor. I can imagine that this would cause significant stress and discomfort, but this is essentially what happens to many science PhDs on the academic track. One day after watching instructors teach for decades, you are suddenly cast into the role of professor and are expected to flourish without receiving instruction specific to this part of the job. This is a common issue in our higher education system. We do a great job preparing scientists to be creative academic or professional thinkers, but we spend little if any time teaching them how to convey their knowledge and skills to others (Bok 2013). This has changed quite a bit since I was in graduate school and many universities are strategically leaning into preparing academic instructors for higher education, which I applaud heartily. But the reality remains that many people finishing a scientific doctorate receive little formal training on how to teach effectively, or what educational research tells us about how students learn. In other words, Academia seems to assume that new professors already know how to create a lesson plan, deliver content and teach effectively, simply from the observational experience of being taught themselves, although academic search committees often look for evidence of teaching when hiring tenure track teaching positions. Fortunately, there is a wealth of educational knowledge on these subjects, but unfortunately it is locked away in teacher training courses designed exclusively for those who pursuing a career as a K–12 teacher. After being a tenured professor for 25 years, I recently decided to get my single subject teaching credential to teach high school biology when I retire from Academia. The field of education has developed significantly as a discipline and currently produces verifiable, large sample-sized, rigorous, and statistically monitored scientific evaluation of educational methodologies. This means that there are well-supported educational ideas and concepts with demonstrable positive outcomes that we as college educators can draw from. It’s encouraging that the field of learning sciences has advanced so significantly in the past decades. Unfortunately, the first thing I learned in studying to become a high school teacher is that the K–12 education system in the United States is fundamentally broken. Over the past century, we as a nation have underfunded educational structures for poor and disadvantaged communities, and our collective actions have created a system of outcomes where poor students (often of color) do not have the same opportunities as students in affluent communities (Duncan-Andrade 2022). The system is inherently unfair, and these disparities are passed through into the college classrooms. The majority of students in your classes will be products of an education system in crisis. The second thing I learned is that educational research and developmental psychology have made great strides in understanding how people learn effectively and there is a wealth of useful information that anyone entrusted with educating others—at any level—should have. I will only summarize a few strands to provide the flavor of some educational researchers and their contributions and then I will summarize a few take-home messages for college educators. Many people reading this will be familiar with Abraham Maslow’s theories (1943) regarding a person’s pyramid of needs. His basic idea is that every human has a similar set of physical and metaphysical needs, which he arranged in a five-part pyramidal structure (Fig. 1). Maslow placed the most critical needs at the bottom of the pyramid and less critical at the top (Maslow 1943). The theory suggests that people must meet their lower-level needs (i.e., the physiological and safety needs) before they can address any of the higher-order needs and desires (i.e., love, belonging, esteem and self-actualization). If they are struggling to meet the lowest-level needs, they will not have time, energy or brain power to deal with needs and desires at any of the higher levels. This has implications for education across all sectors, because if students are chronically hungry, sleep deprived, or unhoused it is going to be very challenging for them to care about or remember the Lotka–Volterra interspecific competition equations or the details behind anthropogenic climate change. I have had students in my college classes who were living unhoused, dealing with profound safety issues in their home, or were experiencing daily food insecurity. These college students cannot put 100% of their effort into learning ecological theories or caring about endangered fishes. Their motivation for earning a college degree might be incredibly high because their future lives and livelihoods depend on it, but at the same time they may be perpetually stressed and will not achieve at anywhere near their highest potential. Another esteemed educational researcher is Dr. Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist credited with developing the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and the idea of a “zone of proximal development.” Vygotsky’s writings were banned in the Soviet Union and only made available to the wider world in 1956 (summarized in Vygotsky 2012). One of his most lasting contributions deals with the zone of proximal development, or ZPD. This idea suggests that at any given place in their lifetime, each individual student has a cognitive level of difficulty at which they can learn on their own (Fig. 2), but when aided by a knowledgeable teacher, they can expand their learning zone and are able to master more difficult content. Vygotsky defined this level as the zone of proximal development or the area of learning a student can achieve when assisted by a teacher. The ZPD is a sweet spot for learning and therefore should be the target for a teacher’s pedagogy. But this is not as simple as it sounds because the ZPD is different for each student and changes with time and experience. Every student arrives in a classroom with a unique background and experiences. As a result, teachers cannot teach all students uniformly but instead should differentiate their instruction based on the level (i.e., ZPD) appropriate for a particular student or groups of students. Another set of critical educational ideas are contained in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Dr. Benjamin Bloom published a classification framework for educational learning objectives in 1956 (Bloom et al. 1956). His original taxonomy divided learning objectives into three broad areas: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor, with the cognitive domain the most widely recognized and remembered. Bloom suggests a six-level pyramid of consecutive learning levels (Fig. 3), which are often applied both to varieties of knowledge as well as question types for student assessment. His theory suggests the easiest cognitive task for a student is to remember a concept or idea. Instructors assess this ability by using words such as define, state, or list in their questions. A more challenging task involves the understanding and assessment of knowledge. Assessments at this more advanvced level, would include words like describe, discuss, explain, etc. At higher levels of mastery, students might apply new information or later analyze and find connections among ideas, each with their own assessment terminology. And at the highest level of understanding, the student can take a stand on an issue or eventually produce new and original thought. As instructors, it is important to initially teach our students at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy because foundational mastery there promotes greater understanding and achievement later as the students encounter higher levels of content knowledge. In other words, introductory classes should fundamentally be taught differently than advanced and graduate level courses. Vygotsky and Bloom’s ideas led to the development of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), proposed by Dr. David Rose in the 1990’s (summarized in Rose and Meyer 2002). UDL is a framework for education, based on cognitive neuroscience research, learning theory, and phenomenological evidence which suggests that a flexible learning environment will better meet the needs of a diverse community of learners. In its simplest form, UDL says you create effective learning environments for all students (regardless of their innate skill levels) by embracing their inherent diversity and abilities. Educational research shows that when UDL principles are followed, a larger range of students understand concepts and achieve higher outcomes (Boothe et al. 2018, Dewi and Dalimunthe 2019, Rusconi and Squillaci 2023). College classrooms are increasingly populated with a wide diversity of learners including nontraditional students, first generation college students, students with disabilities, military students, and English language learners. Applying UDL concepts will help all the students in a classroom learn. Also important is the idea of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy put forth by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s. She demonstrated that it is important for a student’s educational potential, if the teacher appreciates the individual student’s cultural heritages (Ladson-Billings 2022). Ladson-Billings’ theories are grounded in the observable achievement gaps among racial and socio-cultural groups of students in the United States. By expressly addressing students’ cultural background, teachers and students both recognize that cultural identity is important and impacts a student’s ability to learn new content and integrate it into their existing body of knowledge. An instructor failing to account for these influences when designing a curriculum can result in highly talented and capable students missing core concepts simply because lessons were delivered in a way that culturally passed the student by. Finally, with direct respect to teaching science, the National Research Council (2012) published an amazing resource with their 3-Dimensional Framework for K–12 Scientific Education. In it, they suggested that science education (of any sort) should be broken into three integral components (or dimensions), scientific practices, crosscutting concepts and discipline core areas, each of which would be integrated into teaching standards, instruction, curriculum and assessments. Within the Biology core area, the suggested topics and competencies read like a current high school biology text that aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the final draft of which were released in 2013. The NGSS have currently been adopted by 20 US States and the District of Columbia and are influencing and directing K–12 scientific education across the United States. In terms of specific suggestions for teaching Ecology, researchers like Diane Ebert-May and Janet Hodder have collaborated with the Ecological Society of America (ESA) to produce “Pathways to Scientific Teaching” (2008). This text is based on a series of published ecological articles from Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that outline six ecological units instructors can cover using active learning strategies and pedagogical principles reported to help students improve higher-level thinking. In addition, in 2018 the ESA endorsed the Four-Dimensional Ecology Education framework (4DEE) which is an offshoot of the NRC’s 3D Framework designed specifically to address ecological literacy. In this framework, they suggest the inclusion of a fourth pedagogical dimension, namely Human–Environment Interactions when specifically teaching Ecology. These resources and others are available for all college science professors to use and interpret within their own classrooms. How does all this relate to teaching in a college classroom? I can distill these and other ideas into five main points elaborated below, all of which I was never explicitly taught in graduate school, but that I will incorporate into my own teaching now and in the future. First, it is important to get to know your students as individual human beings. Know who they are, where they come from, what motivates them, and hopefully what their academic strengths and weaknesses are. This should also include understanding what they have been exposed to in their K–12 education, or more concretely what tools and competencies do they have when they arrive at your door. The educational literature demonstrates that students who are seen and individualized by the instructor feel more supported, which improves their learning (Pintrich 2002, Barajas et al. 2014, Fritz-Mauer and Mausner 2015). If they are comfortable and feel welcomed, they will have improved learning outcomes. There are many ways to accomplish this, and below are some suggestions that may help getting to know the students. Learn the student’s names and use them when you interact. Some people (e.g., myself) struggle with this and resort to mnemonics and tricks, but the effort goes a long way. By using their names, they become a person in your eyes, and they feel known. Another idea is using a whole class icebreaker (or a get-to-know-you conversation) to start the semester. Alternatively, you can give them a cultural history/background sheet (Appendix S1) where they answer a series of questions about themselves, their families and their communities (i.e., How do you identify ethnically? Were you the first in your family to attend college? How does your culture feel about education? Do you currently have any demands on your time other than school? etc.). Some people also use a background sheet to acquire a quick inventory assessment of the scientific topics are they familiar with. Also, speaking with students outside of class lets them know you think about them as an individual and more than just the score they earned on your last examination. Getting to know them as people with a variety of wants, needs and foibles will likely improve their learning more than many new technological tools or teaching fads. Secondly, we know that individualized student instruction helps most people learn (McDonald Connor et al. 2009, Switzer 2013, Bahçeci and Gürol 2016) especially when paired with social and collaborative learning. As an instructor of a class of 200+ students this is impractical, but recognizing that individual instruction is effective, can go a long way to helping students learn. While not possible for everyone in the class, you can make a significant difference one-on-one in office hours or with students who are struggling. Taking the time to try to help a struggling student can mean the difference between their success and failure. One of the perennial topics in higher education is grade inflation, sometimes resulting from lowered expectations to accommodate a wider range of student accomplishment. That is not what I am suggesting here, as I believe it is possible to maintain high academic standards while providing individual targeted assistance for some students. Not all of them are going to need your help, not all of them are going to succeed, and that is ok and expected. Additionally, in terms of the 200+ student class, research has clearly demonstrated the impact and effectiveness of collaborative and collective learning strategies (Slavin 2004, Jensen and Lawson 2011, Stump et al. 2011). This suggests that instead of trying to individually assist each of the 200+ students, a professor can sometimes break the class up into collaborative learning groups and still positively impact their learning. A third suggestion involves recognizing that students learn more easily, are more engaged and perform better when content material is relevant to their lives (Aronson and Laughter 2016, Knoster and Goodboy 2021, Johansen et al. 2023). How do you determine relevancy to a younger generation? One way is, again, to talk with them and to listen to what they are—and are not—saying. 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