In this episode of Social Learning Amplified, host Eric Mazur talks with David Gooblar, associate professor of English and director of General Education Literature at the University of Iowa, about his latest book, One Classroom at a Time. David takes us through how his research exposed a gap between what we know helps marginalized students learn and what most equity initiatives actually do, and why he came to see teaching itself as an act of social justice.

David and Eric explore why grades so often override meaningful feedback, and how starting conversations with shared goals rather than methods can win over skeptical colleagues. They look at what institutions need to change, from tenure incentives to class sizes, to back up equity commitments with real structural action in a grounded, research-driven case for putting students, not systems, at the center of teaching.

Eric Mazur: Thank you for joining us today for this episode on the human side of education in the Social Learning Amplified podcast series. I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and our guest on the episode today is David Gobbler. David is an associate professor of English and the director of general education literature at the University of Iowa. Before his current role, he served as associate director of Temple University's Center for the Advancement of Teaching, a true, I would say, teaching first advocate. 

David is widely known for his long running pedagogy unbound column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he bridges the gap between academic research and classroom practice. He argues that while most professors are trained as world class researchers, they're rarely taught how to teach, viewing teaching instead as a second discipline that requires its own set of skills and rigor.

His books, published by Harvard University Press, have earned critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Review of Books, which hailed his writing as wise and necessary. And you might know him from his 2019 book, The Missing Course, which became a staple for early career faculty. While that was a general how-to for teaching, David has been a featured speaker on teaching, including at my own institution, Harvard.

And when his latest book, which we'll discuss today, One Classroom at a Time, was released in 2025, he joined us at Perusall as a featured author for a Perusall Engage event. David, thank you for being here today.

David Gooblar: Thank you so much for having me. Such an honor to be included in this podcast and to get to talk to you, someone whose work I've long admired. I'm really excited to have this conversation.

Eric Mazur: Well, I'm the one who is honored to have you here, David. And your career has been a master class in bridging the gap between theory and, I would say, the actual messy reality of the classroom. But while your work has always championed the student, I think one classroom at a time really feels like your most urgent call to action yet. So I'm curious, what was the catalyst? What led you to focus so intently on equity in the classroom right now or right then? Because that was already 2025, but at this time in history.

David Gooblar: It was really, came out of the research for my last book when, you know, for the missing course, I had to read, I got to read so much research on teaching strategies that worked within college classrooms. And what I saw, particularly toward the end of the research for that book, so talking about 2017, 2018, was that there was an increasing number of studies that were looking at what individual instructors could do to help marginalize students in their class. have well-known, well-established achievement gaps at American universities known for decades, right? That white students graduated higher rates than African-American students and Latin American students, that men graduated higher rates than women, particularly in STEM fields, that wealthy students graduated higher rates than poorer students. So these are well-established problems and I'm seeing all this research on what individual teachers could do in their classes. At the same time,

I was of course paying attention at my institution to what our office of DEI was doing to help the marginalized students at our institution. And one thing that I noticed was that they were doing nothing that had anything to do with the classroom. And the more I read about what these offices were doing, which do lots of great work, at least some of them, some of them that still exist can do lots of great work, was that there was very little they were doing about teaching. Or learning for that matter. There's lots of structural reasons for this and that's part of what I get into in the book, but it was that gap that originally drew me to the research for this book was looking at why does this group of academics know this stuff about what works in classrooms, but this group of academics whose job it is to help marginalize students and institutions not seemingly putting that knowledge to use. So that was the initial charge was how do I connect these two people? How do I connect up what we're learning about what individual instructors can do and what we want institutions to do.

Eric Mazur: Now you've spent years writing about pedagogy, how to teach. I understand that the data compelled you, what was sort of the specific aha moment that made you realize that pedagogy is not just about learning, but really about social justice, as you argue in the book?

David Gooblar: I mean, the thing that I continue to learn over and over again is that most of us in academia, because we weren't trained how to teach, we have this idea of teaching that is really a kind of broadcasting of information.

We get in the classroom and we tell students what we know. And we work very hard to put into the right words what we know, to make it engaging, to make it entertaining. And I don't want to completely discount the value of telling students what we know and of making it engaging. I had so many great lecturers when I was a student that really turned me on to the life of the mind and life of books. But what this does is it basically says to the students, take it or leave it.

Here's the information, you do with it what you will. And what slowly dawned on me, the more I thought about this sort of status quo approach is that it basically says whatever issues students might have, whether that's coming from a poor high school or not having enough materials to buy books or hire a tutor or dealing with racism, sexism, any of that stuff.

We leave that to students to sort out. We give them the information they figured out. So that model is a recipe for continuing inequality. We know there's inequality in the world around our universities, and we have a model of teaching that says not our problem. And everything I was learning about what a good teaching practice could be is the other way around. Instead of saying, I handle the information, students can do with what they want. A good model of teaching is: student learning is my business My business as a teacher is are my students learning the things that I'm to get them to learn Sometimes the route to that learning is me telling them information But the goal isn't the telling them the information the goal is that they learn so if we start with students Then we're going to have to encounter and confront all of these Residues these scars of inequality that our society heaps upon our students almost automatically, right? Because if the call is to work with students and help them develop, help them learn, we need to work with the actual people in our rooms and those students are living with everything we know is wrong in our society. And that it just, it changes the responsibility of professors. So that, that kind of realization really made me an evangelist for not just teaching as the right thing to do for education, but the right thing to do for society, for helping, you know, at least a little bit, make our world more just.

Eric Mazur: Well, everything you're saying has resonated incredibly strongly with me because there are so many parallels. I was never taught how to teach. I went into the classroom, focusing on information transfer. Another thing from your book that resonated incredibly strongly with me was your mentioning that we often teach to an imaginary student of the past, which often is a projection of our own memory of our own of ourselves being a student. So was there a specific moment in your own classroom where the real student eclipsed that imaginary one for you? I love the concept of an imaginary student, so I'd love to hear more about how you managed to connect to the real ones or the real ones would eclipse the imaginary ones.

David Gooblar: Yeah, I mean, I think it happens. Yeah, I think it happens every class I teach. It's the nature of what we do is that, you know, we can put so much energy into planning a class and making a syllabus, choosing the readings, thinking about how we're going to draw things together and approach the texts and the ideas. And then you meet your students and you very, I very often realize I need to change. I need to change a lot. need to adjust because I mean, sometimes these are, these are unhappy surprises. They're not at the level that I thought they were. You know, I think I keep talking to, I work in my current role with a lot of graduate instructors who teach general education in interpretation of literature as the name of the class. it's a, it's a literature class for gen ed students who this may be the last English class they take in their lives. It may be the only English class they take in university.

And so one of the surprises that my instructors come across is that these students aren't good readers. And I don't mean good readers of difficult texts. I mean, they aren't good readers. seeing, we're seeing the residue of COVID interruptions. We're seeing the product of bad schools, whatever it is. But my bright young graduate instructors who have chosen to do a PhD in English are being really blown away sometimes by a gap that they didn't know they had to fill. And suddenly they need to do some remedial work in their classrooms because you can't teach them the higher order things before you do some of the lower order things. And so this doesn't need to be a matter of race, class, gender. can be on any number of axes where our students turn out to be individuals with their own histories and their own levels of skills. And it is our job to figure out where they're at so that we can help them. I find that it's often when we don't do that work at the beginning of a semester that we get to the end of the semester and go, I wonder why that didn't work. I wonder why it was such an oddly quiet discussion class. I wonder why they did so poorly on the exam. It's often because we don't do that work at the beginning to find out what they know where they're coming from, what their preparation is, how much time they have for the class, et cetera.

Eric Mazur: And in part as an instructor, you're also dealing with what Susan Ambrose in her book, Learning Works, calls the expert blind spot, right? We don't know that we know things that other people don't know, right? mean, and we forget what it's be to be a novice. Exactly. And you can't...

David Gooblar:

Yes, and we forget what it's like to be a novice.

Eric Mazur: You can't undo time, you can't go back to your own past and realize what it took for you to learn something. in general, it's easier said than done. How do you find out where your students are in any given discipline?

David Gooblar: It is a difficult challenge, I agree. I start every semester with a survey. I give my students a survey that asks them about their preparation in the particular subject, that asks them what has made, what was something that helped your learning last semester? What's going on in your life that might get in the way of you doing the best you can in the semester? All sorts of questions about how they're approaching the class and what might, what I should know about their lives. That helps, I think doing, really taking the time in the early weeks of the semester to have them do work that one has them do good work, but also has a double value of being a diagnostic tool for you. So really try to think about the early assignments as ways to assess where they are, particularly in a formative way so that you can adjust the rest of the semester. But you got to think about that in advance when you design these quizzes or homework assignments. But thinking about particularly early, having your assessment be formative rather than summative.

Eric Mazur: I love that because you had mentioned in your previous answer a word that I wanted to return to which nicely dovetails in what you just said, and that is the word exam. I am more more convinced that any type of high stakes exam is not only failing to tell us what we really need to know about students and also in a sense, pushing students to exhibit a shallow learning rather than a real deep learning. But in addition to that, I think it's an exemplar of a social injustice and that there are huge differences in the way people deal with the stress and the pressure of exams. So what is your view there? I've abandoned exams in my class for the past 15 years or so, I realize it's sort of a medieval hazing ritual in my opinion. So I would love to hear what you think.

David Gooblar: Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of different angles that I come to thinking about this. One is that the very nature of putting all your eggs in one basket seems a bad way to assess something as complicated as how much a student learned in a semester. Trying to represent that all in one exam seems like a really difficult task for a teacher. It seems like almost impossible. Two, making an assessment high stakes works against getting the best out of your students. And I don't mean this in the form of trying to placate soft students who need everything taken care of them, only that you're trying to see what they really know. And if what they really know can't come through because they're stressed about doing poorly on this exam, that's not in your interest either. Unless your class is about how, you know, making students, you know, deal with stress in a different way, which some classes might be about. But my class is about how do you interpret literature, or your class might be about physics. Clearly, you want to know how much they know about physics. Having that high stress environment is going to get in the way of you finding out what they know. And the last thing I want to say is this really interesting study that I came across in writing this book, which is in particular about economically disadvantaged students.

One thing we know about students that are in or near poverty is that being in that situation makes it much harder to focus on long-term goals. Living in or near poverty is a life of immediate concerns that need to be tended to now. And so one thing that happens there is that students in those situations quite rationally prioritize short-term goals. The thing that needs to be done today over the thing that can be put off because I need to figure out how to pay rent next week because I need to figure out how to feed my kids this week because I need to figure out how to find the bus because my car broke down this week, right? So it's a life of immediate pressing concerns. So you get very actually good at handling short-term things that worse at long-term concerns. These researchers looked at, they had, they were looking at psychology classes and they had one of these big psychology lectures with lots of different sections, so they were able to divide up half the sections on one, know, half the sections on the other. Half the sections, they did it how they always did it, which is that the majority of the class grade was tied up in one big exam. The other sections, they divided up that exam into a series of quizzes throughout the semester. So, same questions covering the same material, but in one class, the students had to sort of save up all their knowledge and

Aim for that one exam at the end in the other class they were able to get you know a 10 question quiz every week or every other week again to be tested on the same material what they found is that the the economically insecure students did much better on the multiple quiz version of the class than the example class and that the students of means it didn't really affect their Effect them that much at all. And so there are things that we can do particularly for students that are struggling or students that are dealing with things that we may not see outside of class by thinking about lowering the stakes by spreading out what they have to do so that it's, you know, sort of, it rewards that kind of short-term emphasis that we know some of our students are really good at.

Eric Mazur:

What I really appreciate in what you're saying and a lot of what you're doing is that your advice is grounded in studies, like the one you just mentioned, in data. Whereas in education, certainly when I go to faculty meetings, most of decisions in education are driven by anecdotal data. And I'm sure you've had to deal with a lot of skeptical colleagues in your profession, in your career. I certainly had that in my career. So how do you help a skeptical professor let go of a traditional method that the data proves is actually harming student equity?

David Gooblar: Yeah. It's really hard. It's very hard. And it's not helped by the fact that our industry does not incentivize people spending time on their teaching. It just does not. so teaching is a really difficult art. It's not easy to figure out how to help disparate people learn and develop. So it takes time and energy and we assume that teaching can be fit in among our more important activities. And so it's hard to persuade someone to put in that work, particularly within academia. 

I usually try to talk to people about their goals. If you can help actually get people to talk about what they're looking to achieve with their teaching, usually I can get a good conversation going. Because most teachers, when asked to think about what they're hoping for their classes, we'll usually start with student-centered language. We'll start talking about, want my students to know this, I want my students to know this, to know that. And from there, I can start thinking about, right, well, then what's the way to make that happen? What's the best way to do that? If we start with goals, I think we can get to where we need to go in a lot better than if we start with methods. I don't start by saying, everybody knows lecture doesn't work. But if I can get someone to acknowledge that maybe students these days aren't getting what they used to out of lectures, then maybe we can have a conversation about what else to do instead.

Eric Mazur:

I think we may be overestimating here how much people ever got out of lectures. I wish that everybody knew that lecturing was not the best way of developing mental models. So we've been focused. Yes, go ahead.

David Gooblar: I think that's true. I think that's true. I mean, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, I do think that one of the trickiest things is that lecture can work really well for people who end up becoming professors. This is part of the problem is that the precise population of people that end up to be professors overlaps almost entirely with the population of people who learn from lectures. They're self-motivated, they're already interested, they want to do the further reading, they're processing the information, right? And most of our students are not like us, I would say, in that way.

Eric Mazur:

I would argue that most people become professors learned despite of lectures. In other words, they have sufficient intrinsic motivation to fill the gaps. Maybe the lecture serves as an inspiration or a way to avoid looking into something on your own, even for us, ultimately we learn by doing rather than by listening.

David Gooblar: Absolutely, that's correct.

Eric Mazur: Yeah. So I want to move now because we've been talking about the individual, the professor, the student, and we're all members of institutions. So what can or should institutions do to support equitable teaching?

David Gooblar: Well, what I just mentioned about the time it takes to improve your teaching not being really supported by our institutions, that's something that think I would start with. There's no reason why even research-centered institutions could not reward teaching innovation for promotion and tenure.

If an institution decided that they wanted their instructors, their professors, to put in work to change their teaching, to overhaul their courses, we have a structure for rewarding the kind of work we want professors to do. It's called tenure. It's called promotion, right? We reward research above all else. At most research institutions, it doesn't need to be that way. So that's one. Two is hire more instructors. And give them the smaller classes and the fewer classes so that they can do their work properly. I know you know this, but a lot of people still don't. More than three quarters of the instructors at American colleges are off the tenure track. And that means that they teach more than they should. It probably means it almost certainly means that they make far less money than they should. And so that's that's, the great majority of the classes taught in American universities are by people without enough time to teach them as well as they could, let alone to do the work that might require them to overhaul their teaching. So those two things to me are the first big things that come to mind is to invest in hiring teachers so that there's less work to do for each individual and to incentivize teaching innovation in the tenure process.

Eric Mazur:

Yeah, I mean, what you're saying definitely resonates with me. I think hiring more instructors is, you know, the whole problem is, you excel in scholarship and there are many rewards. You get invited to conferences, you write papers, they get cited, you invest your time in pedagogical innovation. You may get recognition from your students, which is an intrinsic reward mostly, but there's not the same extrinsic reward. And over the past decade, how have institutions addressed equity, in a sense, by launching massive DEI initiatives, but completely ignoring the classroom? And now that universities are slowly retreating from these massive DEI initiatives. I'm worried that that line item in the budget that was allocated for DEI initiatives is not really going into pedagogy. What can we do to convince institutional leaders to reallocate that money to really becoming a living practice in every classroom?

David Gooblar: It's obviously a very difficult time. It's a very difficult problem you're describing and it's a real problem. I do think that institutions, if they are to survive in this climate, really need to emphasize what they exist for. I think that institutions of higher education on the whole, I'm obviously generalizing there are 4,000 institutions of higher ed in this country on the whole need to reaffirm their commitment to education for lack of a better term. Our big most wealthy universities do far too much. They are serving far too many masters and that's great when they do a lot of good work, but it's not great when they get distracted from their mission, which is to educate students at all levels.

If you can remind yourself of that mission, then you start to think about this is just like when we were talking about conversing with instructors about their goals. Then you start to think about, okay, well, how do we better educate our students? How do we recommit to this mission? That has to start with the classroom. It's just, it's still no matter how many bells and whistles colleges adapt, no matter how important research is, no matter how much money can be attached to athletics. The classroom is still where students spend the important part of their college education. It's still where we do the work that we measure ourselves by. and it's not easy. I mean, the two, the two main things I, I, I suggested both cost money, you know, and it's the one thing every institution in this country is looking to, to, to cut, right now. So I'm not saying these are easy answers, but I do think that they're imperatives if we are to back up our lofty mission statements with action.

Eric Mazur: So switching to a slightly different subject, last November you led an engage event on perusal. And during that event, hundreds of educators were annotating your book simultaneously. And I always say, Perusall sort of provides a window into the brains of your students. And as an author, did that window into your reader's brain change how you think about the impact of your own work? Or was there something that surprised you?

David Gooblar: It did a little bit, yeah. I would say that it's, I love Perusall as a teacher and as an author, I think it can be a little bit of a rude awakening. And I say this with affection. I wish that I had it with my manuscript. I wish I had the experience before the book was published because there's, you but I will say that one thing that I saw, a theme I saw in some of the surprising reactions I saw were people complaining that the advice I was giving maybe didn't apply to their specific situation. How would this work if you have 70 students in your class? How would this work if you have to teach five classes a semester? And these are all absolutely valid responses and a known limitation. In my work, which is that I really try to write to as broad an audience of academics as possible. And what that means is that I'm neglecting a lot of specifics. And so not every bit of advice I give is going to be applicable to every situation, obviously. And we have an incredibly diverse system of higher ed. And so this is certainly something I knew, but it was absolutely eye opening to see the varying situations in particular that instructors were coming to this book, they were all coming to this book wanting to make their classes more equitable. And I wished that I could tailor the book to each one of them, because it does sometimes seem as if you need a sort of tailored approach to your particular situation, which of course is not is not going to be possible in one book. But that was one thing that really struck me in the interaction.

Eric Mazur: Well, there's always a second edition. We're reaching rapidly the end here of this podcast. a short question, and maybe you can answer it with a short answer. If an instructor only has the bandwidth for one strategy, what is it that you would recommend?

David Gooblar: There's always a second addition, that's right. 

I love this approach that comes from Jeffrey Cohen called wise feedback. It's an approach to giving feedback to student work, but I think it can be abstracted out to an approach to dealing with students in general. It's got three parts. You invoke high standards for the students work. You basically say, I have high expectations for the work you do. I think you can do really good work. And then you back that those high expectations up with specific help for how they can reach those standards.

And the third part is basically an expansion of number two, which is that your feedback needs to be really detailed. So the idea is if we just give high standards to students, just tell students that we expect a lot from them, but don't tell them anything else. We're going to induce stereotype, threaten them. We're going to add too much pressure to them. They're going to feel like it's highly competitive. So we need to also give them the help to reach those standards. And we need that help to be really textured and detailed. So.

I expect a lot from you, but my job is to help you are the sort of two poles of, think, what our approach to students can be.

Eric Mazur: So that actually prompts me to ask a follow-up question because I think there's ample research that shows that if you give students feedback and a grade, they just look at the grade, especially for summative assessment rather than formative assessment. They look at the grade and they ignore the feedback. If you remove the grade and you get feedback, they look at the feedback. Which is yet another argument, I think, that we should probably find a different way of evaluating students that's more based on a narrative rather than a number, which becomes meaningless very rapidly once you graduate anyway.

David Gooblar: Yes, I agree. I tell the instructors that I mentor that grading is the least important part of their job. It's important insofar as it's important to their students. And so you want to take it seriously. You want to be fair, but I don't want them spending a lot of time thinking about grading because that's time taking away from helping their students. So I typically, I actually think that that rating and summing up students on the grading scale often pulls away from the good work we should be doing.

Eric Mazur: David, thank you so much for a thought-provoking discussion. I could go on for another hour, I think, here. I would like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everybody to return for our next episode. On behalf of all our listeners, David, thank you again for joining us today.

David Gooblar: My pleasure. This has been fun. Thank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Eric Mazur: You can find David's latest book, One Classroom at a Time, on the Harvard University Press website, as well as at Amazon and other bookstores. To find out more about our Social Learning Amplified podcast, go to perusall.com slash social learning amplified all one word. Subscribe to find out about upcoming episodes, and I hope to welcome you back on a future episode.