In Praise of Great Teaching

In the foundational (K-12) phase of our education, years of data and research confirm what we might naturally suspect: great teaching, more than any other factor (including family and neighborhood experience) contributes to a student’s academic outcome. For some reason, we lose that thread of discussion once a student crosses into college. As the journal Dædalus reports in a 2019 article: “An odd feature of the public policy discussion of higher education is the near absence of attention to the quality of teaching.”

Our shared pandemic experience has challenged us to rethink and revisit nearly every facet of college life, whether you are trying to lead as president or doing your best to keep pace as a second-term sophomore. We have asked some members of UIW faculty to share their experiences from the past year, in part to give some much-deserved attention to this overlooked aspect of our work.

As I read and reflect on our faculty and their insights, I am reminded of an essay by the late Jeanne Knoerle, who served as president of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana from 1968 to 1983. Writing about the relationship between the love of learning and the desire for God, Knoerle observes: “I suspect that we are most fully human when we are most fully in touch with each of these powerful forces.”

In these reflections on teaching during a pandemic, and in the faculty’s own words, I hear both teacher and student rediscovering what it means to bring more of our humanity into the classroom, and to weigh, as Knoerle writes, the balance between the “rich panoply of facts, ideas and insights from which to choose, and the force of faith, which provides an energy to illuminate those choices and an end for which they are made.”