The Instructor’s Double Standard

Teachers have a lot of power over students in the classroom. Typically, cialis we write the syllabus, decide the rules, make rulings on infractions. In turn, we are accountable to our institutions, as instructors and also regarding our many non-teaching obligations. In conversations, I frequently brush up against the reality of The Instructor’s Double Standard, here defined as any instance when an instructor holds students to a standard to which she does not hold herself, or to which she is not held by the institution.

Examples of the Instructor’s Double Standard:

For one example, there is the Digital Devices Double Standard. A recent episode of the Digital Campus podcast (time tick 40:50) included commentary on a recent study that 90% of students have used digital devices in the classroom for non-course-related purposes. The participants rightly suggested that, if you substituted “faculty members” and “faculty/committee meeting” for “students” and “classroom,” you would probably see similar results.

Another example is the Deadlines Double Standard. Students often have inflexible deadlines for their projects, with grade-based consequences for lateness (failure, or “one-letter-grade-per-day,” or similar). Yet faculty members in higher education are notable for missing the writing deadlines to which they agree with their publishers, and are often forgiving of one another for late administrative work. Problems with the Deadlines Double Standard are implicitly acknowledged in the fact that many instructors tend–usually informally and even surreptitiously–toward “grace” even in their courses, allowing some late work without penalty, or granting post-course extensions on uncertain grounds.

A double standard in which I am especially interested is the Prepared Learner Double Standard: Students are expected to have already figured out the strategies and practices conducive to effective learning, while instructors in higher education–who usually have little or no formal course work the field of education–are permitted to learn the strategies and practices of effective teaching (if at all) over the long arc of our careers. That is, we get a cookie for having absorbed anything about effective teaching via our life-long exposure to the educational systems through which we have come, but our students are implicitly expected to have absorbed everything about effective learning through their own exposure.

What other examples of the “instructor’s double standard” are you aware of?

Engaging the Double Standard:

Of course, I’m not the first person to observe these double standards or respond to them. Some instructors allow their students a lot of control over the syllabus, deciding on activities, deadlines, even learning goals. “Project Based Learning” seeks to reduce the number of artificial constraints imposed on learners in favor of real-world activities that often involve learner agency (v. passivity), and iteration (v. failure). Here, I’d like to make just a bare start on articulating some of the informal, frequently-heard arguments for the Instructor’s Double Standards, with a sense of my own critique of such arguments.

“I succeeded as a student with these standards”: It worked for me, so it will work for them. I did it, so they can do it. Yes, there are problems with it, but I turned out okay. This argument has the strength of being verified by data: Most of us instructors are the product of schools that employ these double standards, and here we are. Challenges to this argument include: 1) Many of us came up in a system that effectively excluded learners outside of a narrow and privileged cultural subset, an exclusion possibly effected in part by these double standards; 2) We instructors represent only a subset of that subset: those able to succeed under the conditions created by the double standards; 3) The argument sounds an awful lot like arguments in favor of that peculiar form of institutionalized sadism known as “hazing.” As you can tell, I am not inclined to be persuaded by variations on the argument from tradition.

“Artificial ? Bad”: We commonly accept that a learning process involves certain artificial constraints. A music student practices scales and fingering exercises, even though these have little place in performance. Athletes, martial artists, and military recruit privates undergo similarly artificial drills, the purpose of which is to develop discrete skills that only later are integrated into practical applications. An officer or a non-commissioned officer is spared many of the kinds of artificial expectations imposed on a recruit private, simply because s/he is assumed already to have knowledge and skills encoded in such artifices. This leads closely to a similar expression in support of the Instructor’s Double Standards:

“Choosing to Break Rules ? Not Knowing How to Observe Them”: We teach a child to color inside the lines, but we accept the mature artist’s decision to color outside the lines (literally or figuratively) as she sees fit. We accept a colleague’s decision to run late on deadlines, on the assumption that she is capable of “coming through” when asked frankly to prioritize a particular deadline in the face of recognizable real-world consequences for lateness. If a colleague’s computer emits the tell-tale “whoosh” noise of outgoing email during a meeting that I am chairing, I might acknowledge to myself that this part of the meeting is not really relevant for that colleague, or that I have crafted a boring or needless meeting…rather than jump to the conclusion that colleagues today just have no attention span anymore.

Clearly, I am more disposed to consider favorably these latter two points. At the same time, I remain uncomfortable with the analogies, especially as they evoke a paternalistic, or even overtly parent-child, model for the education of adults. And, of course, any of these can devolve into rationalizations for an instructor’s self-serving decision to simply and unreflectively reinforce the traditional privileges enjoyed by the teacher in the learning space.

How is your comfort level with the Instructor’s Double Standard in its various forms? Where do you find them appropriate? Where do you see possibilities for addressing them?

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