I had previously noticed that most people that do teaching believe
that they are pretty good, including people I would have rated as bad
teachers. Patricia Cross studied this in the 1970s:
"Not can, but will college teaching be improved?" (1977) New Directions
in Higher Education (17) 1–15. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/he.36919771703/abstract
I can't get to the main paper, but a summary in a new statistics
textbook [1] says
In a sample survey of professors at the University of Nebraska, 94% of them described themselves as “above average” teachers.
The abstract of the paper is:
When more than 90 percent of faulty members rate themselves as above-average teachers, and two-thirds rate themselves among the top quarter, the outlook for much improvement in teaching seems less than promising.
[1] The "new statistics textbook" is "Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data" Second edition (2017), by five members of the Lock family.
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