Larry Gladney on Yale FAS’ guiding principles for teaching and learning

This fall, Yale students and professors, like their counterparts at universities nationwide, are doing much of their study and collaboration online, whether on campus, at home, or elsewhere, sometimes in markedly different circumstances. To foster the healthy and free exchange of ideas and the joy of communal teaching and learning that are hallmarks of a Yale education, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS) recently articulated mutual responsibilities for students and instructors alike.

“Guiding Principles for our Teaching and Learning Community,” which are applicable to the entirety of the FAS, address flexibility, accessibility, equity, academic integrity, mutual respect, and other characteristics necessary for communal learning.

A committee composed of faculty, students, and staff developed the principles over the summer. In late August, FAS Dean Tamar Gendler, Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley, Yale College Dean Marvin Chun, and Larry Gladney, FAS’s Phyllis A. Wallace Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development, shared them with the community.

In an interview with Yale News, Gladney, who led the committee, discusses the principles, how they were developed, and why now.

What inspired the project?

A vast amount of planning for continuing the academic mission of FAS was needed to prepare for this very unusual semester. A faculty committee, the Academic Policy Committee (APC), proposed, as one of its key recommendations, that FAS leadership work with faculty, student and staff representatives to create and promulgate a set of “academic norms and expectations.” The committee I chaired was the response. The inspiration for the recommendation of the APC was a document created by Cornell to promote academic expectations for last spring’s semester’s sudden switch to online teaching. Our document is different in that the Cornell document was in response to an emergency situation, whereas we produced a document for a planned situation of predominantly online teaching.

How would you describe their unifying theme?

The unifying theme is that universities exist to bring people together to learn from each other. All of our principles derive from this idea that we should optimize our ability to learn from each other through mutual respect and transparent, honest communication.

Why did it seem especially useful to express the principles now?

The pressures of the pandemic, coupled with using a predominantly online environment for courses, means that both instructors and students are dealing with profound changes to a very traditional model of teaching and learning. We thought it important to re-establish a commitment to the core principles by which universities work and how they bring value to education. While many of the changes we are experiencing are determined by the need to maintain health safety, the core values we want to live by are still there. We wanted to draft a document through a process that gathered, from instructors and students, what they believed these values to be and articulate them back to the community. While the guiding principles that emerged are extant in any semester, this particular semester seemed to be one where instructors and students should be reminded of them, given that there would be worry about how instructors and students would approach such a different experience for courses.

In what ways do the principles respond to the unusual circumstances of the time?

One thing we stress is that we are in an unusual operational mode this semester. Inevitably, there will be things that we do not get exactly right or constraints for which we could not reasonably have planned. We emphasize that everyone needs to be honest and open with limitations they may experience, for example, due to unexpected illness or time constraints related to caring for loved ones, and we all need to be compassionate with each other in exercising flexibility for the unexpected.

How did the committee go about its work?

We started by having representation on the committee from undergraduate and graduate leadership, staff, and faculty. We met weekly to discuss how we wanted to structure the document and what we were hearing from different constituencies. To get more input, we created a survey that went out to every undergraduate, every graduate student, and a number of faculty. We received short answer responses from roughly 500 respondents. These were analyzed with natural language processing techniques to pull out common terms that were widely represented, helping with the classification of answers so that we could determine the frequencies of various kinds of concerns or expectations. (I have to thank the Poorvu Center for their help in this part of the work.) The committee also consulted directly with representatives of various constituencies, e.g. the leadership of the FAS Faculty Senate, the instructional faculty, and students with disabilities. The committee communally wrote the document. We produced a next-to-final version for comment by the heads of the Graduate Student Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, the Faculty Senate, the student body president, and the FAS dean’s office. After that input, we produced the final draft for approval and dissemination by FAS Steering. The committee had tremendous dedication to getting this all done in about six weeks despite family illnesses, previously planned vacations, severe weather and extended power outages. It was hard work worth doing, and we believe we have set the stage for a rewarding semester.