My one data point: I got my PhD in math in 1993, with the intent of teaching. I had had no opportunity connected with my graduate programs to get any training in teaching; I would have had to step outside them and seek training elsewhere - not that I have any idea where I might’ve been able to find any.
To GreasyJack and RealityChuck: Sure, by the time you’re hired to teach, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to observe teachers. But lots of things that look easy to do when you watch them being done are considerably more challenging to do well than it appears.
I always thought that by the time you are in college you should know how to learn. Nobody should have to take you by the hand and show you what to do.
Some are better than others at conveying information, but that is life.
When I was in college I had professors who spoon fed us everything we needed to know, I had others who said, “This is what you are expected to know, here are your resources, go find the answers”. I taught my computer science professor a few tricks, and my law professor thanked me for finding something she didn’t know.
In my experience, MS students don’t get TA jobs, because they come with tuition and a salary, and are reserved for PhD students. For them, one doesn’t know yet what you are going to do. When I got into grad school I assumed I would become a professor - by the time I left I went right into industry without even applying for academic jobs.
My experience is from a while ago - so long ago that I did Gong Show era Chuck Barris for my class. But my daughter is a PhD student now, and things don’t seem to change. Grad students can teach anything from very small quiz sections to classes of 20 - 30 that are supplemental to the main lecture to the entire course pretty much. No one ever taught me how to teach, no one even came in to see how I was doing, and I taught before evaluations were popular.
Being successful as a grad student doesn’t have much to do with teaching ability, assuming you can do it with minimal competence. The same goes for doing conference presentations. I know some really brilliant people who get high marks for papers but really low marks for presentations. There are definitely language barriers in engineering, which I can testify have zero to do with intelligence.
A truly brilliant researcher might see connections between things in a way that new learners just won’t get. Plus a good teacher must be a good performer with high energy, which is not a requirement for success in doing research.
I decided not to become a professor when I realized that I taught to the smartest people in the class, and going to a school where these were scarce was frustrating.
The bottom line is that the same people doing research is an artificial thing stemming from the grafting of research onto the traditional teaching role of the university. If professors got paid based on classroom attendance, like they used to, you’d see them step it up.
Which goes along with my post that you got the wrong degree to teach college. You should have gotten a Doctor of Arts in mathematics. Of course since the degree is so rare (ISU is the only school I know that offers it) what what degree are you reasonably expected to get to teach college? The natural questions are:
Why don’t more schools offer it?
What does it say about our university system where the emphasis is on research degrees and not teaching [D.Arts] degrees in any discipline? At best you may get someone with the practicum degree as a professor.
As more and more of our college students (2 year & 4 year) are ill-prepared for college both academically and in terms of work habits, can we make the assumptions that a student in college is ready to learn (cf. sahirrnee’s post)? Should ACE look at encouraging more D.Arts programs?
Why is there the assumption, especially in this thread, that a university professor merely needs to spew out information? Are there no techniques for actually educating adults? Do we not hear people complain about a class/training that was horrible because all the teacher/trainer did was talk?
As modalities change such as online classes, isn’t there a call to know best practices in teaching using the technology?
RealityChuck claims that after 6 years of college you have observed what works. Is that serious all that’s needed to teach adults? No research into brain-based education? The connection between teaching and learning styles (cf. sahirrnee’s post who believe a student should adapt to the teacher and not vice-versa)? Academic resilience? Intervention strategies? Motivation re: GE classes or why do I have to take English Lit if I’m a physics major? I love how he distinguishes that after 12 years of K-12 a teacher may still need more training even though they have had twice as long to observe “what works”. And am I supposed to be sitting there learning topology at a master’s level and simultaneously analyze the effectiveness of the teacher’s androgogical approaches?
As I’ve mentioned a few times, there are universities that are addressing those concerns, and yes, there is research on adult learning and techniques that can improve teaching to them. Unfortunately, in part because of the nature itself of graduate school, only those that are truly interested in teaching (either as a graduate student or as a tenured faculty) attend those lectures/seminars/classes. The rest do not care/do not find it beneficial/cannot fit into schedules.
Also, I’m amazed by the idea that what one enters as during their first year in graduate school will be what the person wants to do several years later, as he/she advances through the program and career and life goals changes.
I started vet school with a completely different idea, and now I am somewhat closer to finishing a graduate degree (with a boarded specialty), my goals are even somewhat different. I entered grad school not wanting to teach, and now I’m in the crossroads that, if working as a teacher takes me closer to home, then by all means, I’ll teach if that means being closer to family. I know students who entered grad school thinking of a job in academia, and finished the program to go straight to industry.
K-12 is a bit different. First, all kids have to be in there, so you get a much wider range of abilities and motivation. Theoretically people in a college class have been screened, and are paying and are thus motivated. Second K-12 teachers do it full time (more than full time). TAs have classes and need to work on their research, while professors have research and grant writing and advising.
And K-12 teachers have gone through a lot more years of training than any grad student can. It would be interesting to compare the performance of teachers who have gone through the standard Ed classes with teachers who perhaps came out of industry to teach math or science.
O/T but important contrarian tangent: I disagree with the OP’s bias.
The real question is, why do we require K-12 teachers to have a “teaching education”??
Obviously, there are certain fields where specialized education may come in handy: early development, special needs children, etc.
But after 15 years of professional experience in my field (political science/history) and an advanced degree, most** every state in the U.S. will still tell me I’m unqualified to teach, say, American Government to a seventh grader unless I went back to school to get a master’s in education.
It’s a union racket, I tell ya. And it does absolutely nothing to help children who could benefit greatly by learning from experienced professionals.
** Some states have alternative means of certification for teaching that are equal parts bureaucratic and insanely complex, and likewise there are national programs that enable this kind of movement… but scandalously few, IMHO.
To address your point about the motivation of college students, you would think but as someone who taught basic (arithmetic through algebra) math in community college, your expectation does not match reality. I had a woman that took the algebra class 3 times and could have gotten an A but each time took weeks off knowing she could not get a refund. Or half my arithmetic class that wanted to get a pass to move on and were horrified that I expected more than showing up to pass my class. As a personal example I was less than motivated to take English classes in college for my GE requirements. Just because I’m paying doesn’t mean I want to be there or want to learn the material.
And the point being ignored that there are ways to teach adults. Why do we not require college professors to take classes in how to teach? The biggest determining factor in academic achievement is a connection between the teaching style and learning style. A student that learns best with hands-on learning will not do well in a traditional class or a student that just wants to memorize the material by themselves will not do well in a class focused on groupwork and projects. What you and many others in this thread are claiming is that the student should adapt to the professor. I contend that it is the professor’s professional and fiduciary duty to conform to the student’s style. But how would a professor learn how to teach with the focus on Ph.Ds and not D.Arts?
To davekhps: Just because you know a topic doesn’t mean you can teach it to someone else.
I was going to ask you for a cite for these claims. Instead, I did a little searching myself, and came up with Wikipedia’s article on learning styles, in which I read
Also, when you say that “it is the professor’s … duty to conform to the student’s style,” you make it sound as though each professor only teaches one student at a time.
I was going to say something about community colleges, and it agrees with this. In California community colleges are so cheap that students don’t have much motivation. I know of someone who went only to stay on his parents health insurance - he never actually attended classes. My daughter and wife both took some classes, and found that the college age kids mostly disappeared after the first lecture, while the adult students stayed. It is not true for everyone. However, I’ve known people who found community college deadening, not because of the teachers but because of the total lack of motivation of many of the students.
When I was in a GATE support group I heard enough discussions on differentiation from senior teachers and school psychologists to not dispute the education theory. But to a large extent college prepares people for work, and no employer is going to care very much about learning styles.
Another thing is if you are preparing students to succeed in the long term, you need to teach them how to learn, not material, and they might involve exposing them to lots of learning styles, like it or not. Almost everything I learned in my major is now obsolete, but I do fine having learned how to learn stuff. In grad school I think learning how to interact with a research group was far more valuable than anything I got out of a class.
I have a bunch of friends who are tenured professors at good UCs, and when they talk they talk about minimizing their class load. They much prefer to teach small seminars to large basic classes, and one big incentive for bringing in money is to do that. My experience is with research universities or at least research departments, and they are not about to force some professor bringing in a big grant to take ed classes. I think it is good to give TAs some training, and especially some feedback from mentors not just students, but I think teaching is too complicated a subject to do anything but scratch the surface in any realistic course.
I’ve seen little evidence that teacher education has much correlation to student performance in K-12. Oh sure people clamor for more requirements, but that may not do more than create artificial barriers to entry. If we are going to require more training for college teachers, we first need to show that it makes a difference. If it does, we then need to determine if the time spent on this training is worth taking away from other activities.
That’s how it worked for me. As a grad student, I was offered a choice of a research fellowship or a teaching fellowship. I was at that time cripplingly shy, and I took the teaching fellowship specifically because I wanted to overcome that condition.
I was given the syllabus and schedule for my first class (trigonometry), and that was it for training. The day before class started I wrote up an outline for the first lesson.
When I walked into class, with thirty pairs of eyes staring at me, I just about turned around and ran out of there. Fortunately, I had the class list, and ran through it to get an idea of who was who. That got me moving, and I was able to transition from that into a few definitions, and from there it went smoothly.
As it happens, I turned out to teach math rather well. When I retire, I’d like to find a spot as a lecturer at a college - teach maybe three or four sections a semester ond otherwise take it easy.
There are different ways to learn. Some students memorize facts (your traditional top achievers) while some need experiential learning. Some take spacific examples and generalize concepts while others take concepts and apply them to specific situations. Some student work well in a shell and some (most) need an opportunity to talk it out.
So what I do is I will cover the same material a variety of ways. A lab and direct instruction. Practice where students can work with others if they choose. A unit long project covering a lot of the ideas I cover in class. It’s not as difficulty as many would make it out. 3-5 instructional methods will usually cover everyone - it’s not like I teach 37 separate lessons for 37 students.
Teaching isn’t necessarily a hierarchical, one-way transfer of knowledge. It could be the collaborative development of mutual skills.
(But this only works when people enter with at least some baseline level of knowledge in the field. So a bunch of undergrad freshmen getting together isn’t the same as a bunch of teaching professionals trying to collectively advance their art.)
Nothing personal, but IMO it’s exactly to save students from people like you – industry professionals who believe experience trumps teaching ability and never bother to make an effort to engage their students.
Now, maybe you’re a seasoned vet AND a naturally gifted educator. Sadly, most of the industry pros I’ve had weren’t. The nicer ones, you could at least tell they were making an effort and even get disappointed when students don’t quite get it. They try to be helpful even if they’re not the greatest teachers. Then there are the absolute douchebags who vomit information in monotone, never bother to stop for questions, and let the TAs (if any) perform the actual education.
Yes, there are people who can learn from both types. The majority of the class will probably pass both. But that one professor could be the difference between a future prodigy discovering his or her passion or never touching the subject area again. The bad teachers are mere databases. The good ones are inspiring mentors.
I think the tremendous volume of material covered in a college course makes this a lot more difficult: for example, in my AP Macroeconomics course–which mimics a college intro to economics–I have FOUR 45 minute class periods to cover: the basic definitions of scarcity and opportunity cost, the production possibilities model showing both constant and increasing opportunity cost, the factors of production, the circular flow model, supply and demand, moving along a curve vs moving the curve, factors that shift either, changes in equilibrium price and quantity, complex changes, price ceilings, and price floors. I also have to fit in introducing myself and going over classroom procedures, taking roll, etc. There’s simply no time to do everything in a couple different ways. I tutor a lot to fill in the cracks, but I have 150 kids in various AP preps and they all have 5 other AP classes going just as quickly, so scheduling is a nightmare. But we manage because we all try to adapt to each other–my kids don’t expect me to do all the work and make it easy for them to learn. They have to meet me half way.
This was my thought. It seems like I had the same ratio of good bad & indifferent instructors all through my education. The university professors were on average no better or worse teachers than my K-12 teachers, who all had extensive backgrounds in education as well as their primary subjects. I can tell you I learned more in college, though. I was highly motivated and eager for the experience. I had to go to high school, but I wanted to go to college.
