Fairleigh Dickinson University
Professor of History
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow (UW-Stout), 2004-05
A True Blessing, But Not Without Its Curses: The Influence of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows Program on My Academic Career
Let me begin by stating unequivocally that my time as a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow (WTF) way back in 2004-5 was one of the most important experiences of my career. There are a number of reasons for this. First, my cohort of Fellows and the more senior personnel who guided us were exceptional people in every sense. I’ve forgotten most of their names (except for Holly Hassel, who went on to win some games on Jeopardy!, about which I remain in awe), but I couldn’t have hoped for a more supportive and inspirational group. Second, the WTF program introduced me to a whole new field – the theory and scholarship of teaching and learning – at a point in my early career when I could’ve just as easily followed a “typical” faculty trajectory, one devoid of applying research methods to gather evidence and publish results on pedagogical matters. It’s probably the worst-kept secret in higher ed that most professors get little to no training in teaching, to say nothing of conducting research on the subject. In that critical sense, I’m forever grateful that WTF saved me from myself.
I wrote a chapter in 2018 describing how my investigations of teaching issues served as a valuable bridge to instructors in other disciplines. That is, matters of teaching and learning often transcend any given discipline, which can lead to breaking faculty out of their disciplinary silos. When I left the UW System in 2005, I found myself at an institution with no history of faculty development, let alone a culture of scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). Using what I’d learned at UW (including participation in my campus SOTL group, which had begun in 2003), I founded a teaching development program, chairing it from 2009-17. I also lobbied successfully for pedagogical research to count as regular scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes.
Such work not only helped get me tenure and promotion to full professor but also led to distinguished faculty awards for both teaching and research. Outside my institution, other people noticed my efforts. Maryellen Weimer, a celebrated expert on college-level instruction, praised my work and invited me to serve on the editorial board of The Teaching Professor. An offer to join the national advisory board of the Society for History Education came around the same time. In 2015, the American Historical Association (AHA) bestowed on me its William & Edwyna Gilbert Award for my article on the tension between breadth and depth in introductory history courses. This made me the first (and only) historian at my university ever to win an AHA prize. Ultimately, I teamed up with the AHA to secure major funding from the NEH, allowing us to conduct a national survey of the American public’s views on, and uses of, the past, including people’s educational experiences with history. This resulted in not just an important publication, but in my penning related columns for Slate, TIME magazine, and the History News Network, as well as an interview with the American Historical Review’s podcast, History in Focus.
As these accomplishments suggest, the WTF program encouraged me to investigate teaching and learning with the same methods and rigor I applied to my disciplinary field. This led to novel, even demonstrably successful, approaches to basic educational problems. Randy Bass, a Georgetown-based SOTL pioneer whom I met as part of my UW campus faculty development program, pointed out to me that problems are “good things” in teaching, just as in traditional research: they offer the opportunity to grapple, to experiment, and to improve our practices.
That curiosity, nurtured while a Fellow, has never left me. Among other projects, I devised a quantitative approach to teaching the reading of historical texts and other media, then shared the successful results here and here. I employed the method of “decoding” to understand how I, as a professional, go about writing introductory paragraphs, and then devised a method to teach this skill. I learned the fundamental value of “backward design,” published on it, and led numerous workshops on the technique for other faculty. I figured out why subject matter experts and their students can read the same words on a page but have very different takeaways, a topic I discussed both here and here. I even solved the perennial problem of cellphone distraction in the classroom and shared the protocol, though I remain perplexed as to why more faculty don’t use it!
These are just a few career highlights that I regard as outgrowths of my training as a WTF. Sam Wineburg, arguably the most important researcher of history pedagogy in the last quarter century, shows that professional historians don’t simply know a lot of facts about the past. Rather, these experts think about history in ways that are fundamentally different from how their students do. The WTF program did something similar for me: it set me on a course to think about and understand teaching and learning in whole new ways, and to investigate matters I otherwise wouldn’t have known even existed. It’s been a long and circuitous road, and I’ve had many influences and mentors ranging far beyond WTF. But without that crucial introduction early in my career to what college teaching can be, I somehow doubt I would’ve accomplished many of the things in the preceding paragraphs.
And Now for the Curses
A little knowledge about how learning works can be a dangerous thing in higher ed. I’m certainly not the most accomplished college teacher or SOTL researcher: others I’ve met or worked with, such as Dee Fink, Maryellen Weimer, Randy Bass, Stephen Chew, and Jonathan Zimmerman come to mind in that regard. But because pedagogical training is so weak across the professoriate, even a modicum of knowhow is exceptional, and that can be a curse. Here, I’m reminded of the Trojan princess Cassandra, whose fate was to know the future but never be believed.
Ancient prophecy aside, I know first-hand the frustration of what it’s like to work at an institution that has no culture of SOTL or systematic teaching improvement, let alone a funded program like the WTF. This is odd, since my university is one the many “teaching-first” institutions dotting the country, yet it has consistently proffered excuses for why investments in faculty development just can’t be made. (I ultimately stepped down from chairing my school’s unfunded teacher training program due to exasperation with broken pledges from administrators.) An internal poll I conducted in 2017 found that the majority of my fellow faculty were not engaged in any sort of teaching improvement, while only a tiny minority reported ever having conducted pedagogical research. Despite that dearth of instruction and engagement, a Lake Wobegon-worthy 95% of respondents characterized themselves as effective or highly effective teachers.
Maybe they are, but if we were talking about our students in this context, we’d probably chalk up the obvious disconnect to very poor metacognition, or perhaps invoke the Dunning-Kruger effect. Whatever the case, it leads to some rather suspect, even harmful practices that I can only watch with irritation and disbelief. Despite experts pointing out that there’s no agreed-upon definition of “good teaching,” let alone a simple diagnostic for measuring it, dubious markers thereof proliferate. For example, there’s an ever-growing pile of high-quality research showing no correlation between student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and actual learning. But that doesn’t stop SET results from being trotted out as if they’re holy writ. Similarly, class enrollment data becomes a proxy for teaching quality. But if the goal is simply “butts in seats” – a target that administrators and some faculty overtly aim for, especially in light of plummeting enrollments – then the floodgates open to all manner of questionable instructional methods. The resulting slipshod practices serve as the antithesis to the WTF program and nearly everything I’ve done as a SOTL researcher.
Most strangely of all, I’ve found through countless interactions that the instructors who are most convinced of their teaching prowess are usually the ones who know the least about the fields of teaching and learning, who forego opportunities to improve their practices, and who are the least likely to have produced any teaching-related scholarship. Actually, perhaps this isn’t so strange: studies on self-awareness reveal that it’s the weakest students with the strongest confidence, so why should faculty be any different?
Meaningful conversations with these people go nowhere because, in their minds, they have nothing to learn. In any case, it quickly becomes apparent that they’re unacquainted with even the most basic relevant literature. I suspect one of two things (and perhaps both) is going on here. First, these faculty have probably fallen into the trap of believing that repetition alone confers expertise. That is, after X number of years of teaching, they’re necessarily experts at their craft. But we know that high proficiency isn’t achieved this way. Malcom Gladwell popularized the notion that 10,000 hours of practice at something results in expertise, but in fact, he had grossly misrepresented the more nuanced research of the psychologist Anders Ericsson.
Second, those who eschew formal instructional training may do so out of profound fear – fear that everything they know and believe about teaching and learning is wrong, a crisis that would blow apart their self-images. I seem to recall a story about a member of the Inquisition refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear of what he might see in the heavens. The account is surely apocryphal, but it nicely encapsulates why some faculty show contempt and even hostility toward the very thing they purport to love and excel at. Institutional cultures and priorities can either alleviate or exacerbate these conditions.
To counter the myriad misconceptions about teaching and learning that permeate higher ed, I’ve found myself producing more columns and scholarship in a likely futile attempt to change attitudes. These include articles on the positive role that boring plays in teaching; on the necessity for difficulty in the learning process (a favorite topic, seen here and here); on the unrealistic expectations we have for “engagement” as a teaching panacea; on the crucial difference between knowing and understanding; on the tyrannical role that basic content and “coverage” continue to play in classrooms; and on assorted other teaching and learning fallacies that lead us down blind alleys. Thinking back to my opening days as a college instructor, I had no idea these issues even existed. I’m glad I know now, but it can be depressing to realize how entrenched some of them are, despite plentiful warnings to the contrary.
If professors’ lack of instructional training is the worst-kept secret in higher ed, then the runner-up is probably that research is valued more than teaching – and not by just a little bit. In a column I recently co-wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I analyzed the content of 150 obituaries composed for historians over a 25-year period, and the research/teaching balance wasn’t even close. Language devoted to scholarship consistently dwarfed that given to teaching (and service), in some cases by ratios of greater than ten to one. Faculty who spent their careers at research-intensive institutions were far more likely to be commemorated than were those at so-called “teaching-first” venues. Not only that, but historians at teaching-focused establishments consistently mimicked their research-focused colleagues in privileging scholarship over teaching. Finally, out of the 150 cases, I found only two that mentioned anything that could classify as SOTL work. Those results parallel Jonathan Zimmerman’s recent findings that, for over a century, there’s been tension between the relative values of research and teaching, and that research has invariably come out on top.
Long before I did that investigation, I knew that I couldn’t rely solely on my teaching-related scholarship to advance my career. Although I succeeded in getting pedagogical research to count in review cases, as mentioned earlier, I’d still have to show competence in traditional scholarship as well, even while colleagues who took more conventional paths faced no SOTL requirements. The injustice of effectively having to dance backwards and in high heels, if Ginger Rogers will allow me the metaphor, always rankled me a bit, even if it resulted in greater professional satisfaction and success. During the pandemic, to take but one instance, many colleagues’ research productivity came to a halt due to library, archive, and travel restrictions, but my own continued unabated, thanks to my ability to pivot to teaching and learning projects when other options were unavailable. And although I’ve remained a productive history researcher, I always welcome the opportunity to change gears to things pedagogical, and to share my efforts with others. If that’s a curse, I guess I’ll take it.
The Verdict
All in all, for the reasons adumbrated above, my involvement in the WTF program so long ago has had a profoundly positive, if at times frustrating, impact on my career. Would I have achieved the things I did without my time as a Fellow? Perhaps, but I have to admit that the odds are strongly against it. The support and mentoring I received from WTF in the early stages of my professional development were crucial to who I’d become over the next two decades, and I’m pretty happy with, even proud of, that person. One rarely solves anything definitively in the realm of teaching and learning, so it’s the effort of chasing that elusive rainbow that matters most. My deepest thanks to WTF and the folks who guided me. May the program nurture another generation of teachers and scholars as well as it did me.
Biography:
Pete Burkholder (Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 2004-05) is professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, where he has taught since 2005. He has won distinguished faculty awards at FDU for both teaching and research, as well as the American Historical Association’s Gilbert Award for the best article on teaching the past. Burkholder is on the national advisory board of the Society for History Education, the editorial board of The Teaching Professor, and was formerly a consulting editor for College Teaching.
Teaching-Related Scholarship:
Burkholder, P., “The Numbers Don’t Lie – or Do They? An Exercise in Decoding Medieval Pop Culture Artifacts,” in A. Archiopoli et al., eds., Teaching Popular Culture in the Humanities Classroom (Lexington Books, 2025), 85-100: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666967074/Teaching-Popular-Culture-in-the-Humanities-Classroom
Burkholder, P. and Calder, L., “Obituaries of Historians Show What We Value, and It’s Not Teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 2024): https://www.chronicle.com/article/obituaries-of-historians-show-what-we-value-and-its-not-teaching
Burkholder, P., “In Defense of Boring and Other Supposed Teaching Taboos,” The Teaching Professor (May 2024): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/in-defense-of-boring-and-other-supposed-teaching-taboos/
Burkholder, P., and Pastorino, G. “Dramatic Film, the Rodney Dangerfield of Teaching Resources,” The Teaching Professor (November 2023): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/preparing-to-teach/course-design/dramatic-film-the-rodney-dangerfield-of-teaching-resources/
Burkholder, P., “The American Public and ‘Difficult Histories’: What World Historians Can Learn from a National History Survey,” The Middle Ground: World History and Global Studies 26 (2023), 47-62: https://middlegroundjournal.com/2023/12/08/the-american-public-and-difficult-histories-what-world-historians-can-learn-from-a-national-history-survey/
Burkholder, P., “Some Takeaways from A History of College Teaching,” The Teaching Professor (December 2022): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/professional-growth/some-takeaways-from-a-history-of-college-teaching/
Burkholder, P., and Matro, K., “The Continued Tyranny of Content,” The Teaching Professor (February 2022): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/the-continued-tyranny-of-content/
Burkholder, P., “Closer Together: Across Party Lines, Americans Actually Agree on Teaching ‘Divisive Concepts’,” Slate (October 2021): https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/opinions-on-history-education-survey-of-americans-finds-most-agree-on-teaching-divisive-concepts.html
Burkholder, P., and Schaffer, D., History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey (American Historical Association, 2021); available in web form and as a PDF at https://www.historians.org/teaching-learning/current-events-in-historical-context/history-the-past-and-public-culture-results-from-a-national-survey/
Burkholder, P., and Schaffer, D., “A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History: National Poll Offers Valuable Insights for Historians and Advocates,” Perspectives on History 59/6 (September 2021), 28-31: https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-history-national-poll-offers-valuable-insights-for-historians-and-advocates/
Burkholder, P., “Taking Measure of Our DEI Efforts,” The Teaching Professor (September 2021): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/taking-measure-of-our-dei-efforts/
Burkholder, P., and Schaffer, D., “The Split in How Americans Think About Our Collective Past Is Real – But There’s a Way Out of the ‘History Wars’,” TIME magazine (April 2021): https://time.com/5972867/history-wars-survey/
Burkholder, P., “Quia difficilia sunt: The Pedagogical Benefits of a Challenging Middle Ages,” Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Teaching 28/1 (2021), 61-88: https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_las/smart/backissueSMART2.php#Spring2021
Burkholder, P., and Peabody, B., “Back to the Future: The Educational Returns of Lifelong Learner Avatars,” The Teaching Professor (February 2021): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/back-to-the-future-the-educational-returns-of-lifelong-learner-avatars/
Burkholder, P., “History by the Numbers: A Quantitative Approach to Teaching the Importance of Conflicting Evidence,” The History Teacher 54/1 (2020), 69-106: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27058654
Burkholder, P., “Engaging with the Engagement Issue,” The Teaching Professor (September 2020): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/engaging-with-the-engagement-issue/
Burkholder, P., “What You Know that Just Ain’t So,” The Teaching Professor (April 2020): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/what-you-know-that-just-aint-so/
Burkholder, P., “Teaching Historical Literacy within a SOTL Framework,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 44/2 (2019), 44-50: https://doi.org/10.33043/TH.44.2.44-50
Burkholder, P., “How to Read a Historical Film,” World History Connected 16/2 (2019), 1-14: https://tinyurl.com/r4l3xp6
Burkholder, P., and Jenkins, K., “What Are Our Fields About? Survey Suggests Disconnect between Professionals and the Public,” The Teaching Professor (November 2019): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/student-learning/what-are-our-fields-about/
Burkholder, P., “Knowing vs. Understanding: A Short Exercise to Highlight the Difference,” The Teaching Professor (March 2019): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/teaching-strategies/active-learning/knowing-vs-understanding-a-short-exercise-to-highlight-the-difference/
Burkholder, P., “Not So Lonesome Anymore: Bridging the Disciplines Through Pedagogy,” in K. Tracy et al., eds., The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist (Punctum Books, 2018), 31-49: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/319/edited_volume/chapter/2332083
Burkholder, P., “The Dreaded Introductory Paragraph: Decoding a Learning Bottleneck,” Best of the 2018 Teaching Professor Conference (Magna Publications, 2018), 5-6
Burkholder, P., “Historical Thinking in the Medieval Classroom” (podcast interview), Historically Thinking, Episode 76 (August 2018): https://historicallythinking.org/episode-76-historical-thinking-in-the-medieval-classroom/
Burkholder, P., “Hard Lessons from Ben Franklin’s Failure,” Teaching United States History (March 2018): http://www.teachingushistory.co/2018/03/hard-lessons-from-ben-franklins-failure.html
Burkholder, P., “Reading Right Past Each Other: Divergent Faculty and Student Perspectives on Texts,” Teaching United States History (January 2018): http://www.teachingushistory.co/2018/01/reading-right-past-each-other-divergent-faculty-and-student-perspectives-on-texts.html
Burkholder, P., “Establishing Learning Goals – And Mapping a Plan to Attain Them,” Teaching United States History (November 2017): http://www.teachingushistory.co/2017/11/3987.html
Burkholder, P., “A Medievalist Visits the Americanist Teaching Neighborhood,” Teaching United States History (September 2017): http://www.teachingushistory.co/2017/09/3870.html
Burkholder, P., “Helping Students Make the Right Call on Cell Phones,” Faculty Focus (September 2017): https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-classroom-management/helping-students-make-right-call-cell-phones/
Burkholder, P., “Lessons from Expertise, Decoding, and a Quest for the Five-Minute Mile,” The Teaching Professor (May 2017): https://www.teachingprofessor.com/topics/preparing-to-teach/course-design/lessons-expertise-decoding-quest-five-minute-mile/
Burkholder, P., “From Passive Viewer to Active Learner: Strategies for Teaching Medieval Film,” Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Teaching 24/1 (2017), 61-78: https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_las/smart/backissueSMART2.php#Spring2017
Burkholder, P., “Backward Design, Forward Progress,” Faculty Focus (May 2016): http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/backward-design-forward-progress/
Burkholder, P., “Metacognitive Roadblocks: How Students’ Perceived Knowledge and Abilities May Hinder Performance in Undergraduate History Courses,” American Historical Association Tuning Project Report (May 2015): https://tinyurl.com/vpkvx38
Burkholder, P., “A Content Means to a Critical Thinking End: Group Quizzing in History Surveys,” The History Teacher 47/4 (2014), 551-578: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43264354
Burkholder, P., “Why You Read Like an Expert – and Why Your Students Probably Don’t,” Faculty Focus (November 2014): http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/read-like-expert-students-probably-dont/
Burkholder, P., “Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries: Conversations about Student Research Projects,” Faculty Focus (June 2014): http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/transcending-disciplinary-boundaries-conversations-student-research-projects/
Burkholder, P., “Getting Medieval on American History Research: A Method to Help Students Think Historically,” The History Teacher 43/4 (2010), 545-562: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25740776
Burkholder, P., and Cross, A., “Video Killed the Term Paper Star? Two Views,” in R. Bass et al., eds., The Difference that Inquiry Makes: A Collaborative Case Study of Technology and Learning (Academic Commons, 2009), 4-19
Burkholder, P., “Popular [Mis]conceptions of Medieval Warfare,” History Compass 5/2 (2007), 507-524: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00394.x