3.1. Success component

The success component emphasized in mainstream reliabilist virtues is a disposition towards reliably attaining true beliefs, rather than a matter of raw success. To use a familiar Gettier-style example, Henry, who passes by the barn façade county (Goldman Reference Goldman1976: 772–3; Plantinga Reference Plantinga1993: 33), is deprived of knowledge because he is in an epistemically hostile environment where his belief that the object he was looking at is a barn is not safe. In that instance, he was unsuccessful in attaining knowledge, but that instance alone does not immediately make him an unreliable believer. After all, he has excellent eyesight that makes him inclined to form true visual beliefs, which makes us say that Henry has virtuous vision, despite not getting it right all the time. On the other hand, an almost blind Ernie who often correctly distinguishes real barns from fake barns in barn facade counties but does so out of incredible luck rather than through visual competence, has a good success record but cannot be said to have a reliable disposition for forming visual beliefs.

Similarly, the success record of a teacher does not necessarily indicate pedagogical virtue. Consider Gilderoy Lockhart, the incompetent Defence Against the Dark Arts professor in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling Reference Rowling1999a). His career is decorated with achievements and awards for things he never did, and the texts he assigns for class are works about these fraudulent achievements, including an autobiography. His students barely learned anything, apart from perhaps Hermione Granger, the ever-diligent student who read Lockhart's autobiography and got a perfect score in his exam. Setting aside the question of what students must learn (which lies more in the subject matter than in the career of the professor), suppose Lockhart was lucky enough to always get Hermione Grangers for his students, diligent students who study whatever their professor asked of them and brilliant enough to absorb all the material that he gives. If excellent teaching is only a matter of successfully inducing some learning in students, then Lucky Lockhart would be a virtuous teacher. Conversely, suppose Remus Lupin, arguably the best professor the Hogwarts students ever had (Rowling Reference Rowling1999b), happened to have only terrible students throughout his career, and despite his best efforts, he is unable to induce learning in the majority of his students. If good teaching equals raw success, then Unlucky Lupin would be an unvirtuous teacher, but this result does not seem right. However, if we posit counterfactually that they be given the same set of students (which Lockhart and Lupin were in the series, albeit in two different year levels), the difference between their dispositional qualities towards teaching is expected to manifest how much more students will learn in Lupin's class than in Lockhart's class.

Additionally, the intellectual virtues that emphasize the success component are mostly reliable cognitive abilities, which could function properly only in a particular set of environments.Footnote ⁶ For instance, our visual belief-forming capacities can only be reliable within an epistemically friendly environment. We cannot reasonably expect Henry to reliably form true beliefs about which barn is real and which barn is fake while in the barn façade county, since that is not a conducive environment for his barn-recognition competence. Similarly, one might propose that pedagogical virtues have a corresponding “normal” environment that is conducive to their exercise, which may include the overall qualities of the students (brightness, attention span, willingness to engage, interest in subject, etc.), their access to well-maintained facilities and learning materials, the physical condition of the classroom, among other things. Adding these kinds of parameters is appealing because it does seem too strong to require success-oriented pedagogical virtues to be effective in all possible learning environments. It seems reasonable not to expect so much from teachers working in harsh learning environments, such as having 100 students from a low socioeconomic background in a cramped classroom, with barely half of whom having a textbook.

However, we must not suppose that the learning environment has the final word regarding pedagogical success. We can expect a virtuous teacher to be able to engage even her most timid students and spark their interest in the content despite not being initially interested, and even to work around the scarcity of learning materials so that her students could learn. This capacity of a teacher to induce learning even in harsh learning environments speaks to the excellence of the teacher, and so is a mark of pedagogical virtue. Identifying a comprehensive list of “normal” conditions that are conducive for teaching and learning is a complex empirical question and is beyond the scope of this paper. The upshot here is that while sub-optimal conditions can limit the exercise of success-based pedagogical virtues, a virtuous teacher is not entirely at the mercy of the learning environment; rather, she can effectively respond to the limitations of her environment in order to reliably induce her students’ learning.Footnote ⁷

3.2. Motivational component

Dispositional success in bringing about learning is one way of cashing out the other-regarding excellence of a pedagogical virtue. Having the proper motivation towards teaching is another. The motivational component of mainstream intellectual virtues towards truth, sometimes called “love of knowledge”, is usually explained in contrast to other dispositions such as having unvirtuous reasons for knowing such as prestige (of which Lockhart is a good example) and wealth, indifference to relevant truths, and perverse concern to know what is unworthy (such as gossip) (Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts and Wood2007: 168–80). Similarly, one might teach without genuine concern for the learning of the students, and do it for reputational status, promotion, a better salary, and power over the students.

But how would we positively describe the other-regarding motivational component of a pedagogical virtue? Suppose Sheldon is a teacher who almost never lies to his students because he values truth and is firmly bound by a sense of duty to share the truth to others, and also thinks that he becomes a better epistemic agent by doing so. If he recites a litany of facts about string theory to a class of sixth-graders, he is sincere in telling truths about science and wanting his students to know these truths. But wanting other people to know truths based on his sense of duty may not necessarily coincide with wanting the students to learn. While Sheldon's truth-telling disposition in his class might be considered a pedagogical virtue if it reliably leads to the students’ learning (though this is very unlikely in this particular example) – if it has an other-regarding success component – its motivational component does not seem to be characteristically pedagogical.Footnote ⁸

In contrast, consider Stella, a devoutly Christian fourth-grade teacher who believes that creationism is true and that evolution is false.Footnote ⁹ However, she does recognize the scientific evidence for evolution, and admits that her belief in creationism is based on faith rather than science. Given this, she does not intend to impose her religious beliefs on anyone else, especially her fourth-grade students, and she acknowledges how important it is for her students to learn the best results of scientific research. If she asserts “Modern-day Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus”, to her students despite not believing the statement, it seems that she is motivated by her students’ acquisition of knowledge (despite not agreeing that it is knowledge), rather than sharing what she believes in.Footnote ¹⁰ If this motivation to impart information (whether she believes it or not) is a stable epistemic disposition, that is, a disposition towards her students’ acquisition of epistemic goods, then it could also be considered virtuous.

It is important to qualify that “learning” here must be understood in an “externalist” way. That is, what matters is learning as a matter of fact, rather than what the teacher takes to be learning.Footnote ¹¹ Using the latter, “internalist” conception can have undesirable implications for the motivational component of our account. Suppose Stella is still genuinely concerned for her students’ learning and that she has epistemic dispositions guided by this motivation, but what she considers “learning” is believing and following what the Christian Bible says literally. Thus, her students would be learning according to Stella's notion of learning but may not necessarily be learning as a matter of fact. Likewise, recall Lockhart above, for whom “learning” is a matter of the students recognizing his fake achievements. He could also be genuinely concerned for his students’ learning but his problematic concept of learning keeps us from considering him to be virtuous. Establishing what “learning” as a matter of fact means is beyond the scope of this paper, but this is what the teacher must be genuinely concerned about rather than her personal conception of “learning”, in order for her dispositions to count as having a motivational component.

From this, I propose the following preliminary account of pedagogical virtues:

While other-regardingness is not explicitly stated in this account, it is implied in how the success and motivational components are defined in terms of the learning of students – these are two specific ways by which pedagogical virtues are other-regarding. Note also that “learning” is used here to accommodate different epistemic and educational aims that may not be limited to acquisition of knowledge and understanding.Footnote ¹²

Having a preliminary account of what pedagogical virtues are, let us consider concrete examples. In the next two sections, I consider two mainstream intellectual virtues and look at their pedagogical virtue analogues.

5.1. Question-answering virtue

Students usually ask questions to their teachers about something they do not know or understand.Footnote ¹⁴ Consider first what kind of answer a teacher should give to questions with straightforward, non-controversial answers. Recall Sheldon, the teacher bound by his sense of duty to almost always tell the truth. Suppose he asked his sixth-grade students to compute the circumference of a circle (up to two decimal places) and one of his students, Penny, who knows the formula but does not know what value of π to use (or probably forgot what it was), asks him this question:

Penny: Teacher, what is the value of π?

Sheldon: Three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-two-six-five-three-five and so on.

While Sheldon's answer is factual, it does not seem that he answered Penny's question well, much less excellently. First, he did not understand what exactly Penny was asking, or why she asked that question. She was interested in what value of π to use to solve one particular problem, so she did not need that many digits of π to do that. As a result, Penny might not even have followed Sheldon's answer at all, in which case Sheldon was not able to help her learn. If he tends to answer these kinds of questions in this way, then his question-answering disposition does not have a reliable other-regarding success component. Additionally, he was not answering the question out of a desire for Penny to learn, but he does so, ex hypothesi, out of wanting to tell the unqualified truth. A teacher who has a question-asking disposition guided by an other-regarding motivation would have considered what the student needs to know in order to learn, and would have answered “3.14”, even if it is not strictly speaking a precise answer.Footnote ¹⁵

Apart from what answer/s a teacher gives, it is also important to consider how she answers the students’ questions, especially when students are asking more difficult and open-ended questions. For instance, smarter students might ask questions about advanced topics which their classmates might not understand. A good teacher would have to try satisfying the smart student's curiosity (she might not need to answer the question comprehensively) without marginalizing the majority of the class who cannot appreciate their exchange. A different case would be a student asking a culturally or gender-insensitive question during a class discussion. A good teacher would have to manifest the sensitivity that her student did not, but also have to explain to the student why her question might be misplaced without embarrassing her, especially if the student did not have malicious intent. The teacher could do any of the following: answering the question through a mini-lecture, answering it partially to tease the students’ curiosity, responding with a question to the student, postponing the answer for a latter class session, and even not answering the question at all – each of which might be appropriate in some situations but not in others. A teacher with a question-answering virtue would be motivated by and sensitive to the students’ learning – both the asker's and her classmates’ – in figuring out the appropriate response to her students’ questions.

5.2. Virtuous pedagogical questioning

A second counterpart of inquisitiveness would be a question-asking virtue specific to the type of questions that teachers ask. Watson (Reference Watson2015) considers good questioning to be the defining factor of inquisitiveness. However, consider teachers who ask good questions during discussions to encourage students to think critically instead of spoon-feeding them, or teachers who design what could be considered a good exam consisting of questions that students must answer. These teachers might have a disposition to “engage sincerely in good questioning” but it seems inappropriate to describe them as “inquisitive”. Why so?

I argue that the issue here lies in the kind of questions being asked. Most questions are information-seeking (Watson Reference Watson2018b): seeking something implies that one does not have what is being sought yet (or at least, one believes so), and we see this in most questions where the questioner seeks information that she does not know yet (call these “Common Questions”). The teacher could very well ask Common Questions to her students (e.g. “What do you mean by this sentence?” or “Do you have an example that illustrates this claim?”), but most of the questions that teachers ask have answers that they know already. This might be why, elsewhere, Watson (Reference Watson2018a: 357) proposes more broadly that the goal of questions is to elicit information, since one could elicit answers that she already knows (whereas “seek”, “gather”, and “acquire” suggests that the questioner does not have the information yet). This nuance importantly qualifies the kind of questions that inquisitive persons are asking, namely, Common Questions. We could therefore amend Watson's account: an inquisitive person is one who is characteristically motivated to engage sincerely in good questioning in seeking epistemic goods that she lacks. Watson (Reference Watson and Battaly2019) suggests this herself, albeit implicitly, when she defines curiosity as having a “[characteristic motivation] to acquire worthwhile epistemic goods that she lacks, or believes that she lacks” (2019: 159), and describes inquisitiveness as “curiosity manifested as good questioning” (2019: 161). In other words, asking questions about things that she already knows or understands does not make a person inquisitive. This is why we do not usually attach inquisitiveness to teachers even if they tend to ask a lot of questions.

Let us call the teacher's question-asking virtue “virtuous pedagogical questioning”. While teachers ask questions in the classrooms and examinations, not all pedagogical questioning is virtuous. Picking up from Watson's account of inquisitiveness, I suggest the following account:

There are some things we need to note in this account. First, for the teacher to have a question-asking virtue, it must be a disposition; having one or even a few isolated instances of competent and/or appropriately motivated questioning is not sufficient to make it an excellent cognitive disposition. Second, I am employing the disjunctive account of pedagogical virtue proposed in section 3 here; the pedagogical questioning disposition may be virtuous by a success component or motivational component.Footnote ¹⁶ Third, note that the types of questions here are left unspecified. Some of the questions that the teacher tends to ask might be Common Questions, and insofar as asking these questions leads to reliable success in or is motivated by the students’ learning, then the students’ question-asking disposition could be virtuous. What is left to be considered is what constitutes the success and motivational components of pedagogical questioning. I spend some time to discuss good pedagogical questioning, and end with a few remarks on sincere pedagogical questioning.

First, consider good questioning in general. Recall that Watson (Reference Watson2018a) defines questions as information-eliciting acts, and from this she proposes that good questioning is acting competently in order to elicit worthwhile information. This competence manifests in judgments about not only what question(s) to ask, but also whom, where, when, and how to ask them such that the appropriate information is elicited. Asking the wrong question, asking the wrong person, or asking at the wrong time or place are examples of incompetent questioning. Additionally, good questioning attempts to elicit worthwhile information, that is, information relevant to the questioner's aims. For instance, a doctor asking her new patient's favourite songs while diagnosing her condition does not exercise good questioning (assuming the patient's music tastes are irrelevant to her condition). Finally, a competent questioning skill does not always translate to successfully eliciting the target information, since the latter may depend on factors beyond the questioner's control (recall that Henry's bad luck in being in barn facade county does not take away his visual competence).

Now, let us consider what makes for a good pedagogical questioning. We have mentioned that most questions that the teacher asks are not Common Questions; in other words, teachers tend to ask questions whose answers they already know. Consider first what we could call “Discussion Questions”, which are usually used during lectures and discussions as thinking prompts for students. This would include literal questions that have specific answers and trigger memorization, inferential questions that challenge the students to process the given information and develop their own reasoning, and metacognitive questions that call for the students’ reflection on their own thinking (Fusco Reference Fusco2012: 15–18). In asking these questions, the teacher elicits information not for her own epistemic needs, but for her students’ (Watson Reference Watson2018a: 360–1). Thus, while Common Questions are good insofar as the questioner is competent in eliciting the information she needs, Discussion Questions are good insofar as the questioner (teacher) is competent in eliciting the information needed by the questioned, in this case the students. This involves a disposition to have good judgment about what information is worthwhile for the students, which questions would best elicit this information, which questions are appropriate for the current epistemic competence of the students, among others. The widely influential Bloom's taxonomy (Bloom Reference Bloom1956) is a helpful guide for teachers in identifying the specific cognitive skills that they want students to learn, and designing questions appropriate for developing these skills.

Next, consider what we could call “Assessment Questions”, the questions asked in formal (exam questions) and informal assessment (those asked during recaps of class discussions to check whether students are following). Like Discussion Questions, the teacher likely knows the answer to these questions, especially if she was the one who made the exam or designed the past lectures.Footnote ¹⁷ But note that the teacher also learns something from the students’ capacity (or lack of capacity) in answering these questions, namely, the extent of the students’ mastery (or perhaps more modestly, memory) of the content. This qualifies what counts as good Assessment Questioning. In designing which information to elicit from her students, the teacher has to make judgments about the extent to which she could adequately assess her students’ level of understanding based on their answers. An exam that is too easy or too difficult might not be considered a good exam, since it does not provide the teacher with useful and precise information about her students’ performance, in addition to challenging their students too little or too much. A virtuous questioner (as far as Assessment Questions are concerned) not only knows how to formulate good formal assessment questions,Footnote ¹⁸ but also to spontaneously use informal assessment questions in the classroom to competently obtain information about their students’ learning progress.

Note that Assessment and Discussion Questions need not be mutually exclusive. Sometimes, questions designed for assessment, such as short essay-type questions, activate the students’ cognitive skills as they discuss their answers in written format, and questions designed to tickle the students’ critical thinking in class also shows the teacher which students are on which level of understanding. The purpose of distinguishing between these questions is not to come up with a taxonomy of different kinds of questions asked by the teacher, but to distinguish how a teacher elicits information using these questions from how a typical person elicits information through Common Questions. This distinction serves to highlight how the success component of pedagogical questioning might be described.

Whichever the type of question is being used, the teacher's pedagogical questioning disposition can also be virtuous by being characteristically epistemically motivated. Consider a teacher asking good questions that are too difficult for the students to answer just so she could show off her own knowledge and feel good about herself, or a teacher asking good questions to students whom she perceives not to be prepared enough for those questions since she likes embarrassing her students in front of their peers. These are just two examples of insincerely asking good questions. In contrast, a virtuous teacher would ask good questions with sincerity, where sincerity is understood in terms of a desire for the student to learn. She asks these questions for the sake of students’ learning and epistemic flourishing.