An Informal Experiment in a Community College

I taught world history in an urban community college for several years. The courses were part of a core of compulsory subjects but were unusual in that each history instructor had freedom to create his own syllabus and course structure. The administration granted this freedom to the history faculty, I think, in recognition of a frustrating situation. The students did not like courses in subjects having no immediate applicability to their career training and for the most part saw history as the most irrelevant of the compulsory courses; the history faculty did not like teaching students who felt history was irrelevant. So the students were frustrated, the faculty was frustrated, and the administration was frustrated from hearing complaints from students and faculty. The administration dealt with its frustration by letting each instructor teach what and how he wanted.

This probably added to faculty frustration by giving an increased share of the blame for student learning failures to the individual instructors. And failures there were: half of all students beginning World History I never finished the semester. As students were seldom assigned to the same instructor for both semesters of the world history sequence, each instructor had ample opportunity to observe the results of his colleagues' approaches to teaching history. The faculty dealt with its frustration with three mechanisms: some instructors blamed themselves as inadequate teachers and constantly