Book Review: The Happy Professor

Coplin, Bill. The Happy Professor: How to Teach Undergraduates and Feel Good about It. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. 137 pp. ISBN: 9781475849059 (paperback).

By Lorena Fuentes-Rabe, University of Massachusetts–Boston

Teaching at the undergraduate level may be a challenging task for professors, who are positioned in a place of authority and usually rely on the traditional sequence of assigning readings, lecturing, and assessing students’ knowledge. Professors in every discipline experience conflicts between their expectations and student performance, and sometimes assume that students’ lack of attention and responsibility are obstacles to what is expected of functional adults with promising career prospects. These discrepancies tend to create unhappiness among professors, who already experience extra pressure to publish, to perform advising work, and to manage administrative activities that take them away from teaching. As an effort to prevent a dynamic that creates anxiety and unhappiness, professors at the undergraduate level are encouraged to make adaptations and evaluate themselves when designing, delivering, and evaluating courses. Such adaptations and self-evaluations are intended to make their lives as scholars more rewarding and happier, while encouraging them to prepare students for careers and citizenship. Yet, this process is not always a success. Bill Coplin calls for readers to recognize that traditional undergraduate teaching involves power dynamics that position professors as the only authority who can dictate what to teach and how to evaluate academic content, and students as mere receptacles of knowledge who need to process information. The divide between expectations of professors and those of students, Coplin argues, is mostly attributable to the fact that professors do not perceive undergraduates as functional adults, but as learners who need mediation and guidance in the form of effective organizational tactics and strategies for engagement. Coplin instead calls for professors to “recognize the importance of the individuality of the learner, of skills for careers and citizenship, and of experiential learning” (Coplin 2019, p. 125). While he does not outline familiar guidelines, tactics, or recommendations for effective teaching to guide professors in all fields to greater enjoyment of their practice, he does advance a more radical call for a revolution in undergraduate education, one more responsive to the social and economic changes of modern societies.

The Happy Professor: How to Teach Undergraduates and Feel Good about It begins with the author explaining his long teaching career and what motivates him to share his anecdotal evidence: he describes the effectiveness of his teaching by documenting successful experiences of what students say and do during their college career and after they graduate. Following this, the author skillfully provides a series of roles, strategies, and tactics, grouped into six sections that explain the meaning and importance of exercising transformational adaptations to the curriculum, which, according to the author, could help professors treat undergraduates more like adults and encourage instructors to “be ready to at least entertain the idea that [their] job should be fun and not just building [their] students’ knowledge base but helping them find viable career paths and become effective citizens” (Coplin 2019, p. xiii).

In Part 1, Coplin discusses the multiple roles that undergraduate professors are required to perform in order to increase happiness and help students help themselves. The author highlights the role of prioritizing professors’ self-interest, happiness, creativity, coaching, advising, and mentoring of students during their college career. The author addresses the significance of these roles as a viable path to becoming a happy undergraduate professor because in this way they create opportunities to satisfy students’ individuality and draw a clear mission to their teaching. Furthermore, the author suggests a list of ten skills sets that most undergraduate students should develop and encourages professors to design and evaluate their courses and students’ performances based on these skills, which aim at developing students’ responsibility, physical health, verbal and written communication, social skills and influence, information gathering talent, use of quantitative tools, cogent formation and response to questions, and problem solving. Coplin outlines these skills and frames them as the foundation for the rest of the book, since he discusses organizational, engagement, remedial, and citizenship tactics by using the skill sets he delineates as reference. Additionally, the author uses the skill sets to promote the development of academic skills, the creation of a sense of independence among students, and the decentralization of professors’ power and authority.

In Part 2, Coplin outlines five broad strategies that have had a revolutionary impact on his teaching because they justify the need to see students as adults and to establish criteria for a minimalist approach to teaching whereby students learn the basics and “are capable to go as far as they want” (Coplin 2019, p. 35). A minimalist viewpoint has the potential to generate pressure and fear, but it also produces effective outcomes that highlight the individuality of the learner and create a balance between effective teaching and happy professors. In this section, the author explicitly outlines the effects of what he calls the “closed trinity” to refer to the sequence lecture-readings-test that dominate undergraduate education. Coplin stresses the importance of promoting teaching and learning through experience so students can function independently and find applications to real life instead of memorizing, repeating, and comparing concepts and theories. In other words, Coplin suggests a pedagogy (or, to use his neologism, andragogy) that moves from dictatorial relationships to a more collaborative stance through which mutual learning and responsibility are shared between professors and students. The following parts in the book (Parts 3 and 4) provide an outline of tactics that professors may use to enjoy their teaching. Each of the tactics the book provides is supported by suggestions on what to do in the classroom, materials needed, and skills sets practiced.

In Part 3, Coplin suggests a list of tactics for achieving educational goals and engaging students in the process of learning. If activities are inviting and engaging, it is likely that professors and students will experience happy and conducive learning environments. Coplin describes engagement tactics, which include activities that are mostly student-centered and require oral discussions in a show-and-tell fashion. Coplin also advises the implementation of small group projects, role-plays or simulation exercises, and lectures that decentralize teacher discourse and allow students to participate more actively. In Part 4, the author describes organizational tactics for consolidating content and facilitating the outcomes discussed in the first three parts. For instance, Coplin argues for the importance of prompting students to talk about their own experiences and incorporating their voices in assignments and research projects, as well as templates that can guide them through the learning process and additional support in the coaching process. Part 5 outlines a series of remediation tactics to help all students perform tasks that fulfill professors’ high expectations. The author describes the importance of motivating students to write to communicate and to develop basic computational skills, which are central to college education. Finally, the author provides ideas in Part 6 about how to help students develop citizenship skills that go beyond any ideological constraints and highlight their experience and character, which are essential for careers and citizenship.

The Happy Professor: How to Teach Undergraduates and Feel Good about It is a valuable pedagogical resource for college professors who may experience unhappy teaching careers due to students’ seeming lack of engagement and unpreparedness. The book offers pragmatic strategies, roles, and tactics that professors across all disciplines may follow to tackle burdensome activities inherent to teaching, such as grading, dealing with large classes, and being a productive scholar. The book further provides examples of teaching that aid in finding a balance in what is supposed to be covered in undergraduate courses and effective and feasible strategies to make teaching more manageable. The idea of integrating students’ experiences and conceiving students as young but functional adults seems to be one of the major contributions of this book. Several of the chapters describe multiple tactics that do not necessarily call for a change in teaching paradigms, but instead for feasible curricular and practical adaptations to guarantee years of happiness and accentuate students’ potential to become professional individuals. The Happy Professor: How to Teach Undergraduates and Feel Good about It aims to de-centralize professors’ discourse within classroom structures without subtracting power and authority, but rather by reframing the role of professors as artists, skill coaches, advisers, and bosses. It further critiques the traditional monologues that take place during lectures in alignment with readings, content, and assessment, which have the tendency to create highly unhappy professors and adverse learning environments. This book promotes undergraduate teaching from a skill-based approach that aims to reduce frustration and anxiety and to prepare students for career and citizenship.