Great College Teaching: Where It Happens and How to Foster It Everywhere

Shows where and how exemplary teaching is practiced in US higher education and charts a course for cultivating teaching improvement throughout all types of institutions.

Great College Teaching highlights where and how exemplary teaching is practiced in U.S. higher education and charts a course for cultivating teaching improvement throughout all types of institutions.

As Corbin M. Campbell reveals in this incisive work, although teaching quality is rarely reflected in college rankings such as those produced by U.S. News and World Report, this metric has implications not only for student outcomes such as subject-matter knowledge and preparation for careers but also for college prestige, educational equity, and even democracy.

Campbell draws from a multi-institutional observational study that covered more than 700 higher education courses in a range of contexts, from regional public universities to highly ranked private universities, from small liberal arts colleges to large flagship universities. She examines what each type of institution typically excels at and where they often fall short.

In mapping the terrain of teaching quality in higher education today, Campbell parses out the best practices of exemplary teaching institutions, in which evidenced-based practices such as equity-based and culturally relevant teaching support student learning, and teaching-supportive institutions, in which policies and cultures prioritize teaching and promote faculty development.

This clear-eyed work provides options for enacting real, sustainable teaching improvements by using individual, collegial, and organizational levers to shift perceptions and priorities around teaching. The actionable practices and policies suggested in Great College Teaching can be adopted by academic leaders, administrators, and faculty developers to improve teaching within a spectrum of academic contexts, across multiple disciplines, and for various course settings.

Corbin M. Campbell is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor in the School of Education at American University. She is the recipient of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to develop a policy playbook for equity-based teaching in higher education.