Is Administrative Burden Killing the Art of Teaching?

In January 2000, I taught my first course as a university faculty member.  This was a milestone for me, and I spent weeks crafting my syllabus, reviewing the literature to create my course reader, and designing class exercises that would, I hoped, engender critical thinking and authentic student learning. I pondered the key pieces of knowledge and specific skills that I wanted students to attain, reflecting on my own learning journey and what aspects of it had transformed my understanding of the field I had chosen.

I distinctly recall this experience being a liberating exercise in creativity. For the first time, I was on the other side of the syllabus. It was up to me to make the course content interesting and engaging, and to “sift and winnow” the trove of information at my fingertips. I checked journals and books out of the library and flagged candidate articles and chapters with shards of sticky notes. I ordered several textbooks to consider as required reading. I consulted with peers on topics where I fell short in my knowledge base, often benefiting from lecture notes and student assignments which they had previously developed for their own courses. From this mountain of material, I created my work of art. A crisp, organized, 10-page blueprint of my best attempt to teach students about a topic near and dear to my heart. It was a lot of work, but it was, quite frankly, fun. 

In its core purpose, designing a new course today involves much the same set of activities. There are a few differences, however. Over the last 20 years, a steady stream of policies and procedures have made their way into every syllabus in my department. Some of these are dictated by the university, and some are curricular standards that have evolved from various committee recommendations or agreed upon departmental practices. To be honest, I have lost track of which are required and by whom. I retain them all to be safe. Safe, from what exactly, I am not entirely sure, but I haven’t yet taken the time to sort all of that out. What I do know is that each syllabus now presents more like a contract than a work of art. 

Dictated by my profession’s accrediting body, there is also now an extensive set of competencies that must be integrated into the learning objectives and course content of my syllabi. I am supportive of a competency-based education, so I don’t find this to be an inherently problematic requirement. But the list of competencies that I am beholden to has become long and unwieldy, making the job of aligning a course with the professional learning standards of my field a task more akin to match-making. I select articles and design class assignments to accommodate these articulated competencies, rather than beginning with the process I described above. Since there isn’t room for everything, some of my favorite readings and activities must be set aside in order to memorialize a document that will be reviewed by accreditors at some point in the next one to eight years. 

Perhaps most significantly, I increasingly feel like the time I have available to dedicate to the art of teaching is being crowded out by layers of bureaucratic requirements touching nearly every aspect of my job. Each with their own unique web-based reporting system and training requirements, I am constantly updating statuses and providing information related to grants administration, human subjects research, travel expenses, student admissions decisions, personnel, and my favorite, “effort” reporting (a tedious exercise in accounting for the percentage of my time dedicated to each funding stream that touches my work in each three-month reporting window, as well as these same percentages for every student and staff person whom I supervise on these funding streams). I realize that all of these tasks have legitimate purposes, and that the mechanisms put in place to ensure accountability are well-intentioned. But it is, officially, too much. Further, I don’t see an end to this pile-on of requirements. No single entity is responsible for this trend—federal and state governments, accrediting bodies, risk-averse higher education institutions, and a public that (as it should) demands accountability for the ever-growing price tag of a degree—all share a role. But this tangled, under-coordinated web of requirements can’t continue to exist and proliferate without a cost to the overall quality of the very reason that academia exists—to educate students.

I have lost a great deal of that valuable time that I used to dedicate to the art of teaching. I still feel passion about the topics that first engaged me in this profession. I still feel a strong pull to transfer that passion to those earlier on in their learning career. However, I long for a way to bring the fun, creative, liberating aspects of my job back to life. The most critical ingredient for this to occur is time. Efforts to create more efficient and coordinated mechanisms for administrative record-keeping, focused on only necessary pieces of information, are sorely needed. It is quite possible that attempts to streamline such activities will be disruptive and painful, but I believe the benefits of doing so will outweigh the costs, and quite possibly achieve institutional savings. It is also imperative that academic accrediting bodies, as well as higher education institutions and academic departments, take every opportunity to review the instructional policies and requirements they put forth with the view that less is more. Require what is essential, offer guidance on what is nonessential, and leave breathing room for instructors to engage in their craft.  

Image: @ OtnaYdur

First published on LinkedIn on April 3, 2016:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/administrative-burden-killing-art-teachin...