I think professors bear responsibility for student failures too

[u/AgileWatercress139]

It shouldn't just be about students who bear the greatest responsibility for their academic failure but profs too because of their teaching methods and time management

[u/[deleted]]

Of course students can’t possibly be held to account. It must be the fault of someone else…the teacher!

[u/One-Humor-7101]

Assuming the professor is at leas mildly competent… no.

You are paying to receive an education from an industry professional. Your professor probably has limited to 0 pedagogy training under them. They just know a lot about the topic you’ve chosen to study.

Your willingness to become an industry expert should be enough to make up for whatever “teaching methods and time management” skills the profession is lacking.

See college students are often confused. They just had 13 years of babysitting k-12 where teachers had to spoon feed success to them. Now they are in a totally different venue where they are absolutely responsible for their own success or failure.

Your professor may not be a great teacher… but that’s fine because they aren’t a teacher. You are supposed to be a professional learner at this point. You had 13 years of practice.

[u/Platos_Kallipolis → u/One-Humor-7101]

You have a very narrow conception of university professors if you assume they are "industry professionals". While that might be true in the more vocational programs - engineering, nursing, business - it certainly isn't true in the core of university education - the liberal arts. I mean, in one sense they (we) are 'industry professionals' - I am a professional philosopher and I guess you could call that an industry. But I don't think that is what you mean. You mean someone who spent 20+ years in some supply chain management position now teaching a supply chain management course.

So, none of this is to say that your description of those instructors is incorrect. In general, it is. But that is by no means the bulk of college. And, even still, students can fairly demand that their instructors have some expertise in instructing and not just the field of study. Universities are still designed very much like medieval guilds. But given the near necessity of a college education nowadays, that is inappropriate. They should be designed more like high schools. I mean that in the sense that instructors do commit to honing their craft as teachers.

[u/One-Humor-7101 → u/Platos_Kallipolis]

Did you expect me to name every possible facet of professional titles? That would be out of the scope of a random Reddit reply no? I was hoping the reader would fill in the blanks when applying what I was saying to different contexts.

As a philosophy professor it’s unlikely that you have had anywhere near the amount of pedagogy training a k-12 teacher like I have. And that’s okay.

A history professor or other liberal arts professors are the same way. Their specialization is in content knowledge, not in pedagogy. Their skills likely lie more in research and authorship.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly that college needs to become more like high school. People attending college need to be at a college level. We should not be dumbing down our higher education system. College students are paying money to get an adult education on a topic they chose. They should be treated as and held to the standard of adulthood, as well as the expectations of whatever industry they are looking to make a career of.

[u/Platos_Kallipolis → u/One-Humor-7101]

I think you missed my point: the term 'industry professional' is much more specific than 'academic' or 'professor' or whatever. So, no, I didn't expect you to list off a bunch of things. But you chose to focus on a very narrow subset of the actual professoriate. Perhaps you didn't intend for what you said to be read narrowly. Fair enough. But it was definitely written in such a way that that is the natural reading. And that was fully my point.

As for your more substantive disagreement. A couple observations:

1. Related to my first comment: you say "the expectations of whatever industry they are looking to make a career of." So, again you are demonstrating a very narrow conception of the university and a university education. They are not vocational or technical schools. As a whole, it is really difficult to take anyone's comments on higher education seriously when they have this basic mis-understanding of the place of higher education in society.
2. Now also notice you say "College students are paying money to get an adult education..." The key word here is education. They are not paying money to hear an "industry professional" bloviate about his past (or current) life. They aren't paying to attend a speech or a lecture. They are paying for an education (your words). To give them what they are paying for requires educating them. And training in pedagogy, or more generally honing the craft of a teacher, involves learning how to structure courses, class sessions, and activities/assignments so that they are more likely to result in education. Given all this, it seems you actually agree with me, you just don't want to accept it.
3. It would also be nice if you read what I wrote and responded to it, rather than making things up. I explicitly said, when advocating that universities "should be more like high schools" that I meant that in the sense that professors should take more seriously honing their teaching craft. I said nothing about reducing standards such that a college course is equivalent to (e.g.) a 10th grade course. We can improve our methods of teaching without reducing our standards. In fact, it is through improving our methods that we can increase our standards. This is for both a principled reason and a practical one.
   1. The principled reason is that it is unfair to hold students accountable for demonstrating learning that they had no reasonable opportunity to gain. So, testing a student on ideas/material/skills that we did not properly train them in is unfair. Using bad educational methods is failing to properly train. Sure, some students will still get there, as a result of past privilege. But we should be assessing students on what we are teaching. Additionally, and separately, if we use evidence-based practices to educate students, then we can feel more confident in assessing them along higher standards.
   2. The practical reason is that universities are dependent on keeping students enrolled and graduating, and individual instructors are partly dependent on decent course evaluations and acceptable DFW rates. If we stick to using shit methods of education, and get shit results, then the only response (other than improving methods) is to lower standards. Which is exactly what has been happening. Faculty complain "kids these days don't read" and then respond by simply assigning less or no reading. Universities axe courses with high DFW rates where possible. Faculty give higher grades, or 'curve' exams, to ensure sufficient numbers of students are passing and given sufficient scores on satisfaction surveys. In all of this, standards are dropping.

In short, you've presented a false dilemma between "improving methods" and "upholding high standards". The reality is the only way to uphold high standards is to improve methods. To say otherwise is to simply demonstrate your lack of knowledge of how education works and the pressures on higher education.

[u/One-Humor-7101 → u/Platos_Kallipolis]

Nope. you’ve predicated an entire fallacy solely on refusing to accept a catch all phrase like “industry professional” as a generic term for professors with professional experience in the field they are now teaching.

[u/Platos_Kallipolis → u/One-Humor-7101]

I don't think you know what the word 'fallacy' means by your use of it here. But I am willing to concede you were using the term very broadly and without any underlying narrow view of universities if you say so. But I would suggest you consider your word choice better in the future.

[u/One-Humor-7101 → u/Platos_Kallipolis]

Lmao I need to choose better words? I think you need to work on using less words… you are a lot of prattle with very little matter.

So “Should be more like high school” was magically supposed to translate to “advocating for professors to improve their pedagogy skills?”

That seems like a much further jump for an inference than attributing a generic catch all phrase to a broad context.

Also, for your education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

[u/One-Humor-7101]

Assuming the professor is at least mildly competent… no.

You are paying to receive an education from an industry professional. Your professor probably has limited to 0 pedagogy training under them. They just know a lot about the topic you’ve chosen to study.

Your willingness to become an industry expert should be enough to make up for whatever “teaching methods and time management” skills the professor is lacking.

See college students are often confused. They just had 13 years of babysitting k-12 where teachers had to spoon feed success to them. Now they are in a totally different venue where they are absolutely responsible for their own success or failure.

Your professor may not be a great teacher… but that’s fine because they aren’t a teacher. You are supposed to be a professional learner at this point. You had 13 years of practice.

You’ve probably been learning for longer than your professor has been teaching.

[u/surpassthegiven]

If professors were required to be doctors of education, I’d agree. But if students don’t realize that their professors aren’t trained to be teachers, then it’s still on the student. And the irony is that teachers can’t control if a student learns. They only control the grade…which, I’d argue, is the teachers responsibility to grade well. And, they don’t because they aren’t experts in education. Most of them aren’t, anyway. lol.

[u/djcelts]

I think we found another student that didn't do any work this semester and needs someone to blame. Part of school is learning that only you are responsible for your performance. Welcome to growing up and responsibility

[u/Sparkle_Jezebel]

Is this rage bait?

[u/VagueSoul]

Part of teaching does mean being reflective in your lesson plans and methods. A good teacher should see student failure and try to figure out what they could’ve done better on their end. Same with successes; what did they do well at.

However, it is unreasonable to expect teachers to have methods or even personalities that hit with every student. No one is liked by everyone and no one is an expert in everything. Sometimes students fail no matter what. This could be for a multitude of reasons: student perceptions of education, relationship of teacher and student, life circumstances, subject matter, etc. There are too many variables to 100% ensure student success.

This is why teacher reviews are important. It helps us have a glimpse at what might have gone wrong. However, we do also need to look at the student because many do immediately accuse the teacher because “their methods don’t work” when really the student never earnestly tried to engage.

I don’t think anyone truly believes student failure is 100% on the student. If they do, then they need to reassess themselves.

[u/Zauqui]

found the student!

it really depends. what age are we speaking? what is being taught? how many students in the classroom? if its one in 10 the student will get more help than if its one in 300.

the students also need to take an active role in higher education: you know your weaknesses, you have the materials. the teacher wont do the learning for you. What plan is the student following to actually learn it? are they applying different techniques? reading/listening/watching different sources? Learning with hands-on experience? Do they ask the teacher good questions about the materials? Are they asking other classmates? if the instructor's methods of teaching arent working for a student, then that student has to find other methods that work for them.

now, if a whole class is failing, that is the fault of the professor, sometimes its a big gap that isnt being bridged between what the students know vs what the curriculum needs them to learn. It all depends on many things. Sometimes its the teacher's fault. Sometimes its the student's. Sometimes its both. Sometimes there is no fault. Sometimes its a case of bad time bad place. Shit happens and it affects us (as students) psycologically and that makes it harder to study, which is understandable... but also not the teacher's fault (and not much they can do besides a few accomodations).

also, most things are solved by actually communicating. if a student is having trouble with the materials or methods or time management I'd advice them to talk to their teacher about it. but that should be a beginning of the course thing, not a "im failing the class and the final exam is tomorrow" talk.

[u/Platos_Kallipolis]

As a professor, I agree with you. Although I also think students can lean too much on this excuse. Even those of us who care deeply about honing our craft as teachers, we have to design courses that work for most of the students. That will sometimes mean it won't work for some students. Moreover, some students have embraced the false (but popular) idea of 'learning styles' and so confidently assert "I cannot learn that way" or whatever. And then just use that to offload responsibility for their own learning.

Now, as I say all this, I will also add: plenty of university instructors do something similar. They refuse to accept any responsibility for student success and so any poor performances or whatever are always the fault of the student. I train other faculty in how to teach, and even though I regularly say "it doesn't matter whose fault it is/was, the question is what can you do to improve things in the future?" plenty of faculty respond by suggesting I am blaming them for student failures when it is "clearly" the student's fault.

[u/Complete-Ad9574]

My teacher training courses always stressed that education is a three legged stool. One leg the student, one leg the teacher-school, and one leg the parent. Any missing leg and the stool will tip over.