Skip to main content


Repost Message will copy the article into draft mode and enable you to edit/change dates and information.
Do not change the dates of this posting because it will affect the original.

MCC Daily Tribune

Highlights from the Connecting, Collaborating, and Celebrating the Art of Teaching Conference

Seventy-one MCC faculty and professional staff registered for the Connecting, Collaborating, and Celebrating the Art of Teaching Conference that was held online Friday, April 16. For MCC’s first time to be included in the SUNY community college collaborative that sponsors the conference, we surpassed all the others in our representation. Yay us!

The keynote (titled “The Case for Teaching”) was given by David Gooblar, author of the book The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching (2019).

Gooblar began with a quotation from Cathy Davidson: “The classroom is one of the least egalitarian spaces on the planet.” From there, he spoke to gaps that exist: 1) “achievement gaps” [better understood as opportunity gaps], and 2) gaps in our understanding about such gaps.

“Pre-existing circumstances aren’t the whole picture,” said Gooblar. Something else is going on in college. His conclusions: “We make things worse” and “Our teaching is part of the problem.”

Gooblar spent the rest of his talk on four areas that we can change if, as we claim, we care about equity and student success:

  1. Class structure: a deliberate and sustained shift to active learning, away from lecturing, is shown in several studies to reduce achievement gaps, with the highest measurable benefit for Black students.
  2. Instructor mindset: Those with a fixed mindset about students (deficit-focused, negative, and essentialist) inspire less student motivation. Fixed faculty mindsets also correlate to wider racial achievements gaps.
  3. Classroom culture: Perceptions of competition in a classroom (where some students will “win” and the others will “lose,” or where students all are vying for some limited prestige) is connected to imposter syndrome in students, which predicts student engagement.
  4. Diversity statements: So-called “colorblind” language, where the sameness of students is stressed, and where differences in identities and realities are glossed over or seen as not important (i.e. “We are all the same underneath” or “I don’t see color”) are harmful. Studies show that multicultural statements that acknowledge and affirm difference correlate to higher success rates, especially for students of color.

Gooblar challenged all of us to take the steps necessary—many of them “small teaching” strategies—to move away from status-quo classrooms towards equitable classrooms where all students do better, and historically marginalized students do even more so.

Googlar’s keynote was followed by three concurrent sessions of multiple presentations, on topics such as equity-minded syllabi, culturally-competent pedagogy, accessibility, Guided Pathways, internationalization, design-thinking, and more.

I will post the keynote video inside the TCC’s Blackboard space as soon as it’s available. In the meantime, if you attended, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you have an idea for professional development based on something you heard or learned at CCCAT, please reach out.

Amy Burtner
Teaching and Creativity Center
04/20/2021