What does a good teacher do when students fail?

I aspire to be good teacher. When I graduated from college, I chose to enter graduate school because I liked studying economics but more-so because I enjoyed working with people who wanted to learn. I still question the existence of altruism because of the personal satisfaction I enjoy when I perceive a student learns something purely for their own benefit but I had something to do with it. Am I a “good teacher”? The most direct evidence that I have access to, student evaluations, could suggest that I am. Students are satisfied with my classes and believe that they know more than they did before taking one of my classes. Many of my students have gone on to do things that I believe were facilitated by our interactions. Whether or not I am a “good teacher”…could I be a better teacher? Undoubtably. I believe that part of being good at my job is by identifying opportunities for improvement and then making measurable progress toward that goal.

Recently, one of my classes took an exam and many students earned failing grades – around 42% of the class earned less than 60% of the available points. When I see an outcome like this, my immediate thought is, “What was wrong with the test?” or “Did I not each this material well enough?”. I am more concerned that I did my job poorly than the students did their jobs poorly (assuming that a student’s job is to understand concepts well enough to demonstrate so on an exam). I looked at the exam carefully and critically. I reviewed the questions that I wrote and compared them to the material covered in class, how the wording could have been interpreted in ways other than I had intended; I tried to envision all the ways that this exam was an inappropriate assessment of the material that I wanted students to understand. Following a sincere and critical analysis of the test, I found that none of the questions were inappropriate or unfair. Many of my students performed poorly and there was no obvious evidence that it was my fault. This is one of the curious things about education as a marketable service; students cannot hand over a specified number of dollars per credit hour and receive information directly into their brains – to enjoy the full benefit of education requires effort in addition to expenditure. So, how can I do a “good job” when the metric for performance is not necessarily a function of my own effort.

The process of offering educational services should not be equated to spouting off information with the expectation that students will digest it perfectly and then be able to reproduce it. I understand that. As I allude to above, my favorite part of being an educator is working with individuals and seeing their development. With that in mind, when students perform poorly I do not take that as a sign that I have done the job poorly but that the job is not yet done. What I have been thinking about more recently is how to approach the next step of my job. Do I tell my students that many of them failed to meet my expectations and it is incumbent upon them to do better next time? Do I lower my expectations so that the students are more likely to meet them with the level of effort that they are already putting forward? I do not like either of these options and I think that they ignore many of the nuances that accompany working with college students.

The approach I have adopted takes more work than either of the highly simplistic options identified above, but I hope that they make positive progress toward being a “good teacher”. I do not change my expectations of students but I want to offer more support and guidance to meeting those expectations. Following the exam, I offered incentives for students who performed poorly to arrange one-on-one meetings with me and I asked them about how they approached learning the material and offered feedback on opportunities I saw for improvement. I viewed this to be constructive for multiple reasons: I learned more about how students are learning and can try to adapt to fit this process better, I was able to provide advice that was specific to each student, and I hopefully established a connection with high-needs students that will facilitate their learning for the rest of the semester.

I do not know if the approach I have taken is what a “good teacher” does. I am still trying to find a good definition for what a “good teacher” is. Here is what I do know following my many meetings with students: each of the students that arranged a meeting with me has at least a cursory commitment to learning, these meetings have given me an opportunity to learn more about what is working in my presentation of material, I have more to learn about being a “good teacher”. The last part of the preceding statement is a cop-out, but it is still true. Maybe a better statement would be that I am still conflicted about what I should expect from student, but that is just as much of a cop-out as before.

While it would be convenient for there to be an obvious lesson and solution, that could contradict my previous position that being good at my job is to continuously improve how I am performing it. This is an exhausting proposition as it will be present throughout the length of my career, but also a fundamental part of why I believe this is a fulfilling career. Perhaps it comes down to the appropriate discount rate? What a fitting conclusion for economics….