Academic Background

• Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Psychology), University of Manitoba, 2024
• Distinguished Professor (Psychology), University of Manitoba, 2009-2024
• Professor (Psychology), University of Manitoba, 1981-2009
• Assistant to Associate Professor (Psychology), University of Manitoba, 1971-1981
• Registered Psychologist (cPsych), Psychological Association of Manitoba, 1975-2003 (American-Psychological Association/Canadian Psychological Association Approved Clinical Program)

Education

• B.A., Psychology, University of British Columbia, 1968
• M.Sc., Social Psychology, University of Calgary, 1969
• Ph.D., Social Psychology, University of Calgary, 1971

A Research Perspective on Effective College Teaching

Anecdotes abound of “great teachers” throughout recorded history, such as Plato and Sophocles, and no less so today. Higher education institutions assert that the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination is their primary mission in serving society. In pursuing new knowledge, along with its twin, teaching, they seek to examine and to inculcate good teaching practices in K-12 teachers and in college professors (e.g., (Perry & Smart, 2007)). Their endeavours to optimize educational practices accelerated appreciably in the 20th Century with public education expanding from elementary to secondary schools. More recently, they have led to a field of research devoted specifically to the scholarship of teaching and learning in postsecondary institutions as advanced by the US-based Carnegie Foundation (Rice, 2007).

A Quest(ion)

My interest in psychology, and by necessity in teaching, began at the University of British Columbia when I learned as an undergraduate my preoccupation in watching others engage in social discourse could lead to a promising career. All it would take was to finish my BA, attend graduate school to acquire a PhD, then get hired by a university. In conception, a relatively simple proposition, so I dutifully applied my talents and energy to pursue those goals. But “the best laid plans…” are not always as straightforward and the journey not as easy as initially conceived

The graduate school I attended in Calgary offered only a MSc in psychology when I first arrived, but not a PhD. At that time, it was a branch campus of the University of Alberta that soon became a fully accredited, independent university, namely the University of Calgary. My time there was exhilarating and eye-popping in educational opportunities and, in due course, I graduated as the first PhD student from the Department of Psychology.

My graduate training focused entirely on the “doing of science” and the research that underpinned the discipline. Thus, I acquired a sizable knowledge base in my chosen discipline, but no understanding of teaching it. Like my colleagues, I arrived at the University of Manitoba proficient in disciplinary knowledge, but with little conception of how to share it with others. Worse still was no services were provided for those who wished to become skilled in, let alone excel at, teaching their discipline. In fact, discussing my pedagogical struggles with colleagues could foreshadow serious career risks in my future tenure and promotion decisions.

Not surprisingly, my first years of teaching were unsatisfactory for me, not to mention for my students. But I was motivated to do better and, fortunately, well-grounded in a social science discipline. Together, these enabled me to delve into a vast research literature on the nature of college teaching effectiveness. Surprising to me, the literature was substantial, methodologically sophisticated, and long-standing. In fact, it went back 50 (now 100) years to the 1920s – a notable timespan for the much younger social sciences versus the long-established basic sciences.

Career Quest Payoffs. Before addressing what “good college teaching” is, as documented by research evidence, a brief note on the career “payoffs” of my quest(ion). My simple desire to teach better triggered a lifelong journey that made me better as an instructor and created my long-standing research program on effective college teaching. Many publications later, together with my collaborators, Drs. Philip C. Abrami and Les Leventhal, we attained international recognition for our research on what constitutes effective college teaching and the instruments that measure effective teaching practices. In 1990, my initial quest(ion) regarding “good teaching” was further enriched when the Graduate Students Association at the University of Manitoba honoured me with the Outstanding Teaching Award.

In pursuing these and other issues in the late 1980s, Drs. Cheryl Bond, Alexander Gregor, and I founded the Centre for Higher Education Research and Development (CHERD) at the University of Manitoba. As the Director of Research (1991-2006), I conducted research on the nature of effective college teaching and facilitated workshops, seminars, and practical training to help faculty members improve their teaching (knowledge creation and transfer). CHERD’s mission was to inform academic administrators (deans, directors, vice presidents) about managing and governing higher education institutions and teaching effectiveness therein. Strongly supporting our efforts were Vice-President (Academic) Fred Stambrook and Dean Raymond Currie, Faculty of Arts, who unrelentingly endorsed the two foundational missions of higher education institutions: the discovery of new knowledge (research) and the translation of that knowledge to others (teaching).

CHERD was the first centre of its kind in Canada to conduct cutting-edge research on college teaching and to impart that knowledge to faculty members to improve their teaching effectiveness. In doing so, it investigated classroom dynamics between instructors and students in diverse educational settings: qualities of instructors instrumental to effective teaching and students’ attributes key to academic success and failure. By pursuing the two critical missions of higher education for society (research, teaching), CHERD was unique in its research focus being modeled on the highly acclaimed Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) at the University of Michigan and it’s teaching programs grounded on the well-regarded Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at Stanford University. Thus, CHERD mirrored the basic principles of all academic work: to engage in research in a chosen disciplinary topic (i.e., effective college teaching), and to convey that new knowledge to receptive audiences (i.e., teaching faculty members, academic administrators).

Along the way, my original quest(ion) led me to edit a special edition of the Journal of Educational Psychology entitled “Instruction in Higher Education” comprised of acclaimed researchers on college teaching (Perry, 1990). The Journal is the preeminent research outlet in the field of educational psychology published by the American Psychological Association, the foremost professional society in the discipline of psychology. The journey also enabled me to serve as an Associate Editor of the Higher Education Handbook of Theory and Research) (1991-2017), and also on several editorial boards, e.g. the Journal of Educational Psychology and Research in Higher Education.

In 2006, I hosted a three-day international conference on the role of teaching in higher education institutions that attracted over 200 delegates from five different continents. The invited addresses were given by leading scholars in the field and published as chapters along with others in an edited book entitled “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Evidence-Based Perspective” (Perry & Smart, 2007) that included:

• Philip C. Abrami (Concordia University)
• Ann Austin (Michigan State University)
• Elisha Babad (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Martin Covington (University of California at Berkeley)
• Kenneth Feldman (Stony Brook University)
• Stewart Karabenick (University of Michigan)
• Michelle Marincovich (Stanford University)
• Herbert W. Marsh (Oxford University)
• W. J. McKeachie (University of Michigan)
• Harry Murray (University of Western Ontario)
• Paul Pintrich (University of Michigan)
• Reinhard Pekrun (University of Munich)
• Eugene Rice (Antioch University)

So, What Makes College Teaching “Good”?

Of course, the answer to the question depends on who you ask, and no less so, on the actual benefits of "good teaching" (Haynes et al., 2009). Multiple sources offer insights into what constitutes “good teaching” that include observations of not just students in classrooms, but of faculty members, college administrators, and alumni, among others. And each is quite willing to articulate what constitutes “good teaching” in broad terms with respect to critical educational objectives such as student motivation, emotional engagement, or academic performance.

But at a very basic level, “good teaching” can be understood as what instructors do to trigger a love of learning in students about the content of the course, and in turn, a desire to pursue the material beyond the course itself. This passion for, and enjoyment of, the material engenders positive affective reactions in the learner and motivational states that energize the learner to delve more deeply into the material conveyed by the instructor. In a sense, the learner is captivated to want more of the course material and to seek it out thereafter.

From an empirical perspective, effective college teaching and its pedagogical benefits are well documented in the broader research literature and my own work as well (e.g., Perry, 1993a, 1999, 2003; Perry et al., 1993, 2005). In brief, “good college teaching” involves observable, discrete behaviors uniquely orchestrated by the instructor in given achievement settings to attain positive educational outcomes. In brief, this approach posits that these behaviors are teachable and can be stabilized thereafter through practice. A subset of such effective teaching behaviors presented below are more fully detailed in Perry (1991, see Table 3 and Figure 2; and elsewhere, e.g., Perry, 1993b, 1997; Perry et al., 1993, 1996):

• instructor organization
• instructor clarity
• instructor interaction (with students)
• instructor expressiveness (enthusiasm)*
*Expressiveness = observable effective teaching behaviors
*Enthusiasm = emotional engagement in students triggered by expressive teaching behaviors

Each teaching behavior can be acquired independently through basic practice until some level of proficiency is achieved. Thereafter, each can be integrated with one or more of the others in a graduated process until some level of synchronistic competency is reached not unlike learning to swim. Synchronizing breathing and face in the water, kicking legs to stay afloat, and coordinating arms and legs are swimming skills first learned independently. Thereafter, they can be combined in a choreographed, synchronized sequence much like a musical performance. Independent orchestra sections must be practiced first, then a conductor must stitch them together, and finally they must be practiced repeatedly before attempting a formal orchestral performance.

In similar ways, teaching behaviors learned independently must be synchronized strategically at some point to attain optimal pedagogical effectiveness in achievement settings. Successful implementation requires a clear understanding of how each teaching behavior impacts specific learning processes, different kinds of students, and deep reflections about how unique combinations of such teaching behaviors optimize diverse learning outcomes.