Richard Freishtat discussed the space where educational research, discipline based education research, advances in understanding how pedagogy can happen best and how learning happens best, converge with student experience and expectations. The lecture explored the growing tension between the advances in teaching and learning, how these do not fall in line with student experience and expectation, and how Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) essentially punish faculty for advancing and innovating teaching, even in very evidence-based ways.
Therefore, the over-reliance on SETs as a measure of evaluation serves to directly inhibit better and improved teaching practice and reinforce outdated modes that favor a learned approach to "doing school", versus a learned approach to learning.
Richard Freishtat is Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California, Berkeley.
