A Conversation With Goucher’s New President

José Antonio Bowen, the new president of Goucher College in Baltimore, made headlines this fall with the announcement that the college would accept two-minute videos from applicants as an alternative to high school transcripts. But Dr. Bowen, a jazz musician who has played with Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck and Bobby McFerrin, has been shaking up college instruction for years, in workshops across the country, preaching the lessons of his book, “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning.” His ideas about higher education in the Internet age are far-reaching, and could be threatening to some faculty members. But he makes a strong case that colleges will become obsolete if they cling to old habits, when so much of the learning dispensed on campus is available online.

Why is it important to change what happens on campus?

Universities were created at a time when knowledge was scarce. Now knowledge is available everywhere. So If what faculty do is profess to students, their relative value has diminished. If we’re going to stay in business, we’re going to have to offer something of value that people will pay for, something that no one else does. The most important thing is that students are actively learning in your class, that they have a reason to go. If they can get the same experience online for free, we’re all going to be out of business.

What makes for active learning?

Give students something to do before they come to class, and then when they get to class, make that assignment more complex. Teaching is not just getting the facts across to the students, but sharing the context and the complexity of what we know. I teach jazz, so after students listen to Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, I ask them to articulate the differences between them, using a different context. If they’re talking to a carpenter, the analogy might be shag carpet, hardwood and stained concrete, or in terms of alcohol, cabernet, champagne and whiskey. That’s how learning works, comparing something new to something you know, and trying to integrate it.

What makes for successful pedagogy?

Transparency improves learning. If you tell students that what they’re doing is critical thinking, they retain it more than if you don’t name it. We know a lot about what works. For example, using a highlighter when you read doesn’t increase student learning; what does is reading the chapter, then taking out an index card and putting it in your own words. We talk about the three Rs: relationships, resilience and reflection. If you increase those things, students will learn more, and teaching content becomes less important.

We don’t have to teach you the periodic table because there’s a guy online who teaches it. But those guys online don’t know the names of their students. And there’s hard evidence that students learn more when they feel you know and care about them.

You encourage faculty to use Facebook groups, Twitter, email, Skype. Why?

I meet faculty all the time who say they’re sitting during their office hours alone, and they don’t do social media. The first thing I say is: “Tell your students you’ll be online to answer questions for an hour the night before the exam or before the paper’s due. You’ll be flooded with responses, and students will see it as a sign that you really care about how they’re doing.” You can also use Facebook or Twitter to make the point that class is not Las Vegas, that what happens here is not supposed to stay here, that it’s all about connections. If you’re reading Hamlet, find something in the world that you can tweet about that relates to it, to help students learn to make those connections.

What are you doing to encourage relationships?

I gave every single student a voucher for a free lunch at the cafeteria that they could give a faculty member or staff, and my guess is that everybody will use it. In the old days, your value as a faculty member was that you knew more. Now you need to think of yourself as a cognitive coach, more like the trainer who says, “Get back on the bike, you can do it.”

What else is in store for Goucher?

I think about myself as a curator of risk. I want to encourage more innovation, more risk-taking. We are medieval institutions. I’m talking to the faculty about how we might improve things, and the first thing we’re talking about is freshman grades. They add stress and I don’t think we need them. We need to be willing to try new things, even if they fail, because that’s how we get progress. And I’m willing to fail. I don’t know if this video application is going to work, but I do see a problem with how college admissions has been working, so I think it’s worth a try.