One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that “a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.”
But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their “personal identity affirmation” — in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ “No. 1 challenge” was to make sure that they were “not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.”
Herckis also found that many academics clung to a “very strong” idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975.
David Matthews, ‘Fear of Looking Stupid’