R3 2.11 June 28, 2024 Reflection: Hospitality, Teaching, and How Far We Still Have To Go
A bestselling book by a quality-obsessed restaurateur has me thinking about the systems within which we serve our students.
In this issue, I want to share some insights that came to mind, quite unexpectedly, while I’ve been reading a recent nonfiction book I picked up on impulse a few weeks ago: Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. In it, Will Guidara narrates how his culinary career led him to become the general manager of a Manhattan fine-dining restaurant sorely in need of strong leadership and a fresh approach. It’s engaging and tightly paced, and offers some novel perspectives and advice that can apply to the work we do in higher education.
The hospitality theme resonated with me from the start, which is probably why I gravitated toward the book in the first place. That may have a bit to do with my background and where I’m from, but more to the point, hospitality is a principle that I’ve always shared with my Teaching Practicum students as a starting point for creating good classroom environments.
It’s true that in classes like the ones my Practicum students are preparing to teach, students are there to work hard and be challenged, not relax and be catered to. But they’re also in some sense your guests. Seeing them in that way, at least some of the time, helps redirect focus from our own plans and performance – the natural starting point for most beginning instructors – toward the human beings gathered in the room. Are these human beings comfortable? Is the temperature okay? Do they need to fill water bottles or even have a snack before class gets underway? Can everyone (meaning, everyone) easily see and hear you?
These may be basic checklist items, but they’re worth reinforcing, especially for those beginning instructors whose overwhelmed state can lead them to seem distant or uncaring. The hospitality idea goes a bit deeper than that, though. Especially as it’s framed in the Unreasonable Hospitality book, it’s also a matter of exceeding expectations, engaging and even delighting the people you’re serving. It also echoes another concept I have been returning to frequently: relentless welcome, drawn from Peter Felten and Leo Lambert’s outstanding book Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. At my own institution, we’ve centered relentless welcome as a guiding principle in the new program I’m helping to develop, an initiative that focuses on supporting, and ultimately retaining, our first-year students.
There are a few specific points about hospitality that caught my eye, as a teacher. There’s Guidara’s philosophy, as a supervisor, that employees who aren’t doing well fall into distinct groups: those who are trying and those who are not. That’s probably true to a degree with students as well. The point isn’t to write off the not-trying group, of course, but to get to the bottom of that issue first, before prescribing the kinds of strategies and supports that are great for helping members of the other struggling-students group. Guidara also reminds us that if we want everyone on a team (or, I’d say, in a class) to speak up, we need to pay particular attention to how people’s initial contributions are received. As he puts it, how you respond the first time a person comments largely determines what they’ll be willing to put forth in the future. He even extols the value of regular testing as a way to build servers’ knowledge of his restaurant’s complex, meticulously crafted food and wine menus – something that warmed my heart as a long-time advocate of retrieval practice.
These were all good ideas for helping fine-tune what we do in any given class. But there was also an unsettling realization that hit me while reading: just how far we in higher education are from unreasonable, relentless, welcoming hospitality on a grand and systemic scale.
That is, even while I identified with Guidara’s advice and lessons learned, I also couldn’t help feeling like we come from two completely different universes. Partly this had to do with another big theme of the book – the obsession with detail that, according to him, transforms fine-dining meccas from merely appealing to truly mind-blowing. While he was describing the good-to-great-to-exquisite journey he was on with his restaurant - one involving bespoke china and floral arrangements that cost more than my car – I could not help flashing back to all the under-equipped, uncomfortable, and plain strange teaching spaces I’ve worked in throughout the years. How so often, faculty’s simple requests for spaces and practices that better enable us to serve students are not only denied, but seen as inappropriate to bring up in the first place.
The reasons for this go back to priorities, and to a disturbing and growing gap between our public image as student-serving institutions and where said institutions actually put their resources, between what mission statements say we are here to do, and what faculty are actually rewarded for doing. I wrote about this last year in another piece on lip service versus action on teaching quality, and it’s something I think about constantly as a faculty developer and as a faculty member who cares deeply about what students learn.
Sometimes I think this old attitude - that it’s fine to leave teaching to chance and that teaching-focused faculty are merely supporting players amidst the university’s more glamorous missions - is a holdover from the golden era of higher ed. Different people will say different things about when and where this era existed; for my own part, it was a time I was already hearing spoken about wistfully back in the mid-nineties when I was looking for my first tenure-track position in a rapidly shrinking job market. It’s the time when hefty demographic waves of college-aged students jostled for space in teeming universities. Growth and expansion were taken for granted, with emphasis on hiring faculty who could help institutions ascend the hierarchy of research prestige.
Perhaps back then, higher education could afford to follow a like-it-or-lump it philosophy of teaching; with so many students flowing in, and few incentives to support or even retain them, putting the entire responsibility for succeeding on individual students was perfectly sustainable. It ought to be obvious that this won’t fly anymore. Shrinking pools of prospective students and changes to how higher education is funded are incompatible with the notion that undergraduates should just take what they get as far as teaching.
Ethically speaking, the old way was never really that defensible, but in light of today’s long-overdue focus on equity, it definitely isn’t. Scholarship on inclusion in higher education is converging on the idea that strategies for engaging, welcoming pedagogy are especially impactful for less-privileged and minoritized students. It follows that the opposite – courses that are non-engaging, poorly structured, or simply unwelcoming – perpetuates inequity.
None of these points mean that we ought to be catering to students as if they were at a Michelin-starred temple to fancy food; learning is inherently hard and uncomfortable some of the time, and that fact shouldn’t be counted against us as we seek to engage students in the challenge. Nor does it mean more lazy rivers and whatnot allegedly built to attract affluent, leisure-obsessed students. But it does mean paying attention to the student experience, particularly the one they get in class.
This, in turn, requires getting comfortable with the idea of teaching as service to students. Coming back to Guidara’s book, this is a topic he also discusses thoughtfully, pointing out that you can’t level up in hospitality if service has a negative connotation among those providing it. As he puts it, “I wanted our team members to understand that hospitality elevates service not only for the person receiving it, but for the person delivering it. Serving other human beings can feel demeaning, unless you first top and acknowledge the importance of the work and the impact you can have on others when you’re doing it.” Students are not our customers, but it’s not hard to see how our service to them can be elevated by tapping into our shared sense of purpose.
Here again, I can’t help but notice how far we in higher ed are from that mindset. But there’s also a bright spot, one connected to the last thing that’s so far stood out to me from this book. This has to do with the author’s contention that deep transformation can’t happen until it’s “cool to care.” A lot of the efforts he puts toward changing culture start with that key shift in norms. This hits home, especially in light of the disparaging way that traditional higher education culture talks about teaching.
Fortunately, it’s one factor that I see changing the most rapidly. Granted, through my work as a speaker and faculty developer, I have more exposure than most to instructors who are passionately committed to pedagogy and student success. But even taking this into account, it is hard to miss the changes over the last decade or so, a time when centers for teaching and learning have been built and expanded, publications tailored to teaching focused-faculty have proliferated, and research in learning sciences has gone mainstream as a source for teaching ideas.
It’s not always been cool or even safe to care about teaching, but increasingly, there is safety in numbers, and also, cool to be found in our own teaching-focused professional communities.
When we faculty can take genuine professional pride in teaching, when we are moving toward shared concepts of what good teaching looks like that are student-focused and evidence-based, when we tackle teaching with an eye to big goals as well as important details – that’s when we will be on a path toward realizing the potential we have to change students’ futures. We’ll get there by welcoming them in from Day 1, and taking good care of them until the minute they walk out the door.