Opening the Classroom Door

An obstacle to better college teach ing is the defensive notion that a teacher compromises his freedom if he allows anyone except students to enter his classroom and evaluate his perform ance. This sanctification of the class room not only cuts the teacher off from useful criticism but also gives adminis trators a handy excuse to argue that good teaching cannot be judged, and that therefore a teacher's rewards have to be based on his publications.

Challenging this notion is small (1,050 students), Quaker-founded Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. Its pres ident, Landrum Boiling, observes that "our justification for existence and for charging the relatively high fees we do must be that we do a superb job of teaching." Toward that end, Earlham got a $20,000 grant from the Danforth Foundation of St. Louis, under which Earlham teachers can invite experts in their fields to sit in their classrooms, observe their techniques and assess their abilities.

The program opened last month when Lincoln Blake, a first-year English lecturer, invited one of his former English professors, the University of Chicago's Mark Ashin, to attend his morning classes. Ashin sat unobtrusively at the rear of the room, took notes, then conferred with Blake for an hour daily to pinpoint ways in which the class could have been improved. "We saw where he got off the track here, or had skipped over a point there," explains Ashin. Most helpful, recalls Blake, were Ash in's keen pointers on how "to use questions to bring the students to question among themselves." Blake also appreciated Ashin's advice on timing the discussions better so that the most significant points got a bigger share of the class period.

The Earlham program is voluntary and the experts' evaluations are not confided to administrators--"this is a confidential relationship, not one involving an administration spy," says Boiling.

Thus it poses no threat to the teacher--and also falls short of the type of evaluation upon which promotions and salary can be based.

But it is a wedge in the classroom door, letting in an air of openness that can become contagious. Already, three Earlham teachers have applied for similar help, and meanwhile two of them Psychology Lecturer Richard Johnson and Chemistry Lecturer Gerald Bakker, have adopted a mutual-aid program of their own, each monitoring the other's classes.

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