Stanford Professors Welcomed Classroom Observations—and Raised Questions About Teaching

At Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, 35 of 36 professors agreed to have a colleague observe one of their classes. None had previously been observed there to discuss their teaching. That response suggested an appetite for professional conversation—and exposed how little room university life made for it. The distinction matters: the invitation wasn’t framed as a judgment, and the faculty’s response suggests that the prospect of a thoughtful exchange carried its own appeal. A near-unanimous yes is striking, especially in a setting where professors are expected to teach but may have few structured chances to talk about how they do it.

A voluntary experiment in classroom observation

The idea came in the second year of my term as associate dean. I’d arrived at Stanford in 1981 after seven years as a school superintendent, where I had observed more than a thousand teachers. Before that, I had supervised intern history teachers in Washington, D.C. Those roles had made classroom observation a familiar part of discussing teaching. At Stanford, though, I had seen no comparable practice for professors, despite the university’s commitment to education and scholarship.

I had accepted the associate dean role after negotiating a two-year term, the chance to teach one or two courses, and a sabbatical quarter at the end. Those terms gave me a defined period in which to take on administrative work while staying connected to teaching. My first year involved routine administrative work: tracking course loads, responding to students’ concerns about teaching and feedback, and following up when doctoral advisers were hard to reach. The tasks brought me close to the everyday workings of the school, but they also made a broader absence visible: students could raise concerns, yet there wasn’t a regular forum for faculty to examine classroom practice with a colleague.

For the next year, I wrote individually to all 36 faculty members. I offered to sit in on a class and talk afterward about what they had planned, what they thought had happened, and what I had noticed. The observation wasn’t an evaluation. I’d share my notes with the professor, and we’d use them as a basis for conversation. Before each visit, I asked for the assigned readings and the instructor’s goals for the session. That preparation gave the visit a shared point of reference; it also meant the conversation could consider the teacher’s intentions alongside what a visitor could actually see and hear.

Thirty-five accepted. The remaining professor later asked me to observe his class. Two faculty members had already been observed during my first year, after students raised concerns about their teaching and interactions. Both welcomed the later invitation, too. That detail complicates any simple divide between observation as support and observation as scrutiny: even after a difficult episode, a professor might still find value in a conversation that treats teaching as work to reflect on.

I visited two professors each week during the three quarters of my second year. We met afterward in their offices. The visits let me encounter subjects I only partly knew, including education economics, adolescent psychology, and standardized test development. I also saw colleagues lead discussions and lectures, picking up approaches I could use with graduate students. The exchange ran in both directions: I could offer an outside view, but I was also learning from people whose subject matter and classroom choices differed from my own. That variety made the visits more than a check on whether a class had gone according to plan.

Faculty wanted a conversation about teaching

Many colleagues said they appreciated having a chance to discuss the work itself: how a lecture or seminar unfolded, what seemed effective, what fell flat, and what surprised them. For most, this was unfamiliar territory. A few asked me to return, and we arranged further observations. The requests suggest that a single visit could open a conversation rather than settle it; teaching changes with the course, the students, and the questions that surface in a particular session. There was room to keep thinking together.

The value seemed to lie in the chance to talk through teaching with another faculty member. Universities may celebrate teaching in speeches, awards, and support programs, but professors often have few opportunities to examine their classroom practice together. Recognition has its place, but a ceremony or award can’t provide the same kind of close discussion as a colleague’s account of what happened in a particular class. This is more significant than it looks: a teaching culture depends not only on what an institution says it values, but on whether faculty have time and permission to work on it together.

That gap sharpened a question for me: if universities say teaching matters, why do the concrete rewards of tenure, promotion, and salary tend to favor research and publication? The observation project couldn’t answer that question by itself. But it made the mismatch harder to treat as abstract. Faculty were willing to discuss teaching when given a clear invitation, while the larger institutional arrangements still gave them stronger reasons to prioritize other parts of academic work. Here's the thing: good intentions can make space for a conversation, but they don’t automatically change what careers reward.

From observation to a study of university incentives

The classroom visits led me to study the history of teaching and research at Stanford, focusing on its Department of History and School of Medicine. That work became How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890-1990. I concluded that universities had built structures and incentives that kept research and publishing ahead of teaching in faculty priorities. The shift from individual classroom visits to institutional history followed a practical question: why could faculty welcome discussion about teaching while the university’s reward system continued to give research greater weight? The answer, in my account, lay in the structures that shape academic work over time, not simply in individual professors’ attitudes.

I retired in 2001. To my knowledge, the Graduate School of Education held no further rounds of class observations and teaching conversations after the 1987–88 academic year. That limited afterlife is telling. A successful voluntary experiment can show that people are willing to participate, but it can’t establish a lasting practice on its own. Without a recurring place in academic life, even a useful conversation may depend on one person’s initiative and disappear when that initiative ends.

What the experiment says about teaching’s future

The experience left a clear lesson: faculty can welcome feedback when it gives them room to reflect on their work, but a lasting place for teaching depends on institutions making that conversation part of academic life. If you're working in this space, the distinction is worth keeping in view: participation and permanence are different measures of success. An invitation can reveal interest; sustained practice requires time, shared expectations, and institutional support. (And this is the part most people overlook.) The challenge isn’t simply persuading professors that teaching deserves attention. It’s building a university routine in which they can give it that attention without treating it as an extra task detached from the work that advances their careers.

The numbers here are underwhelming in one respect: one round of visits didn’t become a recurring program, at least as far as I knew. Yet the response still offers evidence that professors may value candid, collegial attention to their classrooms. The unfinished part. What this means for you is that a university’s stated respect for teaching tells only part of the story; the more revealing test is whether its faculty have regular ways to discuss and improve it.