Research Academy Book Discussion Group - Fall 2007

Under Discussion: Derek Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton University Press: 2006).

In his book, Our Underachieving Colleges, former Harvard President Derek Bok has raised some important questions about the learning that takes place among college and university students in the United States, and about what schools are doing to foster that learning.

• Are United States colleges and universities offering their students some of the finest educational opportunities in the world, or are they generally "underachieving?"


• What kind of "education" do our students generally achieve? Are we doing all that we can to foster the highest learning among our students? What exactly are the ingredients of an excellent undergraduate education?


• How can we better educate our students.

As we read this thought-provoking and widely-discussed work and invoke lively discussions of Bok's questions, ideas and findings, we pose questions of our own. Using the book as a springboard, we will exam collectively the situation at Montclair State University and probe Bok's contribution to answering our questions.

Discussion Days. Each day will take up a different question, and it is expected that participants will take part in all or most of these discussion days.

• Tuesday, October 9, 2007, 4:00pm

  Questions raised/topics discussed (our intent is to see if Bok addresses these questions as we progress through the book):

  1) What are the goals--of the university? of teaching/classrooms? If you've identified these goals, how do you adjust your teaching accordingly?

  2) What is critical thinking and how do you teach it?

  3) How do you motivate students?

  4) How do you teach people to learn?

  5) What does completion of an MSU program of study mean?

  a) What are the common elements?
  b) What are the specific elements? (Can you measure these?)
  c) What is our niche in higher education?

  6) How do you evaluate teaching?

  a) What is the value of good teaching, particularly when increased effort as a teacher often means decreased attention to scholarship?

  7) What should our students be able to do?

  8) If teaching is an aspect of who you are, what does it mean to change your teaching?

  9) What does available research reveal about institutions like MSU?

  
  
• Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 4:00pm

  The following questions were the ones we decided we'd really like to pursue in the next discussion:

  1) What do we need to understand about our students?

  2) What are our expectations for students' behavior in the classroom? Are these expectations about civility? Professionalism? Morality?

  3) What do we need to measure of student learning? Is it content? Is it thinking?

  4) What is our common language (across disciplines)?

• Tuesday, November 13, 2007, 4:00pm

  Meeting summary:

  We largely agreed that Bok speaks less to our particular institutional reality in chapters we discussed; many felt that his treatment of race and gender were not only seriously lacking, but did not nearly represent the ethnic diversity and range of issues specific to MSU.
  
  We found ourselves strategizing a bit about our last session and beyond in the latter half of of the discussion--and I'd like to continue this conversation a bit further, too. We all agreed that we've identified some very real questions--but now--what about solutions??! So that's where we're at--a kind of "where do we go from here" moment.

• Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 4:00pm

  Final Questions and Summary:

  Last time, we outlined some "now what" questions--these are questions with an eye towards action--that have grown out of the issues raised by Bok:
  
  1) What is our "model" MSU?
  2) What do we need to bring to our classrooms and departments?
  3) How do we best teach MSU students?
  4) Are content and thinking mutually exclusive?
  5) How do we teach inductively?
  6) What resources do we need to do all this?