I did have the opportunity to take a course called “Teaching in the Community College” when I was in grad school. It was a pretty useful course - the professor was a guy who’d been a professor at CCs for years. We sat in on some CC classes and created syllabi for imaginary classes. We also talked a lot about how to handle certain situations that might arise in a college classroom.
At UChicago I had some brilliant professors but a lot of them were terrible teachers. I think their attitude is that it is up to YOU, as a student, to learn something from them in whatever way you can, and they’re not responsible for meeting you part way. It works for them because their students are for the most part highly motivated to learn as much as they can.
That is basically what does happen, but it is done in informal ways in informal settings. Attempts to formalize it risk killing of the actual value that such exchange of ideas and experience does have.
With regard to matching people’s learning styles, good universities do (or used to do) much of their teaching via small group seminars or even one-on-one tutorials, which provide the opportunity to really get to know individual students and find out what they know and what they need to be helped with. Unfortunately, that sort of thing is very labor intensive and thus very expensive, and these days most places do not have the money to hire enough faculty to teach in that traditional way, that worked, but instead cram hundreds of students into lecture theaters, and leave most of the teaching to TAs (who only half know the subject, let alone how to teach it) and part-time adjuncts, on minimal pay and no benefits, who never know from one semester to the next whether they will still have a job, and who will strongly resent being required to attend courses and meetings on reaching methods unless they are paid for that time (which, almost invariably, they are not). Good education takes dedicated people, and dedicated people cost money - not, in this case, higher salaries, but a lot more people getting actual salaries and a degree of job security, rather than TA stipends (for grad students suckered into preparing themselves for a virtually non-existent academic job market) and part-time adjunct wages that are not enough to live on. Courses on teaching methods, where they exist, are mostly an ineffective band aid attempting to hide the real problem, which is that society is unwilling to pay for the people to provide sort of education that it thinks its young people ought to have.
I disagree because in college the student is expected to do a lot of the work on their own. Groups are assigned (but wait, does the professor know about group dynamics and assigning them based on ability or is it random?) Rote practice is called homework in college. Projects are assigned with only a little bit of class time devoted to them. Imagine you class if you could count on them to work twice as much out of class as they do in class.
And to stress yet again, that is androgogy vs pedagogy and so your AP class may not be analogous. Adults can work independently more than children and the key is putting the instruction in the lesson instead on counting on the teacher to doing all of the instruction and supervision.
> 1. As opposed to master’s students who won’t be teaching at the university
> level or PhD students who primarily want to go into non-teaching jobs.
This distinction does not exist. You’re assuming that people know when they enter grad school what they will be doing when they graduate. You’re assuming that they know for sure whether they will get a Ph.D. or will stop at a master’s degree. You’re assuming that they know whether they want to teach or to do research or whatever. Sometimes they think they do. Often they are mistaken. In general, people aren’t sure when they enter grad school how good they are and what they want to do, and they certainly don’t know what they will get hired as when they graduate. Life works out the way it works out. There’s no way at present to make the distinctions you want to make.
Saint Cad writes:
> You should have gotten a Doctor of Arts in mathematics.
As you say, this degree (D.A.) is rare. Perhaps it should be more common. It’s not. Are we discussing how the educational system works or how it should work if we completely rehaul it at great expense of time and money? What the people on this thread who want grad schools to spend a lot of time teaching their students how to teach college is a major change in our educational system. How are you going to get that done?
Most colleges and universities have centers for teaching effectiveness or something similarly titled where there are resources for faculty and staff to improve teaching. I can call this office and get someone to observe my teaching, give me feedback, instruct me in new modalities (like using clickers), you name it.
But at a flagship research intensive university such as mine, that doesn’t count for a whole lot. What matters more is a peer evaluation, preferably from a full professor. He or she will come to my class, write a letter about how I did, and certify that I’m not incompetent. Bonus points if that colleague is recognized as an excellent teacher.
Our teaching evaluations matter too. We have a 5 point scale. As long as you’re in the high threes you have nothing to worry about (college mean is a low 4). But there’s a lot of noise there: teaching an advanced quant course will invariably have you with lower scores than say an intro ed research course.
I’ve observed a lot of college teaching in my discipline. There are engaging faculty and those who are less so. If you are intelligible and knowledgeable, there’s a general expectation that the students need to adapt to your teaching style. Most of the problems I’ve observed are more about classroom management and grading rather than pedagogy.
That applies to every level of education after high school, but it doesn’t stop universities from offering specializations and specific curricula. People never know what they end up doing (or they end up changing careers) but they still get to pick what they want to study. I don’t see why a teaching supplement would be any different.
That’s a bunch of BS they tell you so they don’t have to teach. Think about it. If they weren’t there to teach you, there would be no reason to go to class in the first place. I can learn by myself pretty much anything by looking it up online. The only reason I go to college is to learn what I can’t learn by myself. In other words, I go to be taught.
I would agree with this at a bachelor’s level, but honestly once you’re in grad school you should be beyond that. I was happy to meet with a prof one-on-one every week to two weeks to discuss where my reasearch was headed and get general direction. I would never expect to have one of them go through an article with me and explain it. If you’re in grad school and you need that kind of attention you probably don’t belong there.
I was using it to explain how college works. Universities are interested in hiring researchers and not teachers. Community colleges will hire you with a master’s degree and while there is a master’s equivalent of the D.Arts called the MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) that is a graduate degree in your field so for example and MAT in History would be considered a graduate degree in History and allow you to teach it in a community college, they are likewise very rare.
This trend in hiring researchers led many schools to focus on Ph.D. programs at the loss of practicum degrees. In the 80’s this distinction was so great that ACE determined that holders of Ph.D.s would wear dark blue in their academic dress to distinguish them as researchers independent of their field of study.* The trend seems to be moving back but how many practicum terminal degrees are there? Try to find a DBA or SJD or D.Litt program. More and more are starting to appear but they are still very rare. And that STILL does not address the issue that someone with a SJD may be extrordinary at practicing law but it doesn’t mean they can necessarily teach it at a university level.
*IMO, this decision was based on a research article by Strickland (I’d have to find my cite. It is a very obscure paper) where holders of Ph.D.s viewed themselves as researchers and not doctors in their field.
The teacher’s colleges do such a wonderful job of preparing elementary teachers that we have the best elementary schools in the world. Not.
I would cringe at the idea of such courses taking over in the universities. Yes, there are some lousy teachers in colleges, but some wonderful ones, just like in the elementary and high schools. Think of this. Although I taught math for nearly 40 years and there is a dire shortage of HS math teachers, I could not get a job teaching in any HS in the US or Canada because I lack courses in teaching. Is there any research that shows that the average HS teacher does a better job than I would?
Teaching at the high school level is as much about classroom management as it is actually conveying information. If all your experience is with college-level teaching, then yeah, you’d get killed out there.
I’d have to hunt it up but here is my opinion based on my experiences FWIW.
California: should produce the best teachers since their education classes are at a master’s level. In fact many teachers go on to get master’s degrees in education considering it only takes 2-3 more classes to do so. Any multiple subject teaqcher (elementary and sped) must pass the Reading Instruction Competency Assessment (RICA) to prove they can teach reading. When California mandated that every teacher pass the Cross-Cultural Language and Academic Development (CLAD) test, some teacher rebelled since they don’t teach second-language learners. The state said that since a teaching credential allows you to teach anywhere like inner-city San Diego that all teachers needed the CLAD.
But underneath all of that is the fact that when the MICA (math equivalent of the RICA) was field tested, most established teachers would have failed it. Realizing that if the MICA were required that the pool of elementary teachers and sped teachers would be almost non-existant, the state’s solution was to get rid of the test. Also, in my experience many California universities are credential mills to meet demand and when that didn’t produce enough teachers district were allowed to certify teachers. For math ed the school of choice is San Diego State - all others are meh. For special ed, CSUN is great for DHH but for general sped Cal State LA and San Francisco State are top-notch while the others only give a passible education in all of the intricacies (law, writing IEP, pedagogy) involved.
Arizona: bachelor’s degree and a heartbeat? Be a teacher. Best thing I can say is that they have the least amount of teacher credentialing bureaucracy.
Colorado: In general the best group of teachers I’ve seen. Since Colorado is an approved program state, I’m assuming that’s because of the teacher credentialing programs in the state.
So the bottom line is that a lot of educators are good if they are naturally good teachers and that the educational system is strengthened by the fact that the truly incompetent are usually weeded out in the first three years. The only program that I think is accepted as making a teacher better than the would naturally be is the national certification program by NBPTS.
> That applies to every level of education after high school, but it doesn’t stop
> universities from offering specializations and specific curricula. People never know
> what they end up doing (or they end up changing careers) but they still get to pick
> what they want to study. I don’t see why a teaching supplement would be any
> different.
So say that there’s a requirement that anyone teaching at college level has to take an extra year of courses which are strictly about how to teach at college level. So a student graduates with a Ph.D. but doesn’t do this extra year of courses about college teaching. His work in grad school has been brilliant. He has already published a number of first-rate papers and all his recommendations say that he’s the best new Ph.D. graduate in his field that the recommenders have ever seen. He interviews with a number of top-notch universities and with some big companies that do research in that field. So the universities, which desperately want him, tell him that he has to wait another year, at which point they will consider offering him a job, while he takes that extra year of courses. Do you seriously think that he won’t just tell them to take their offer and shove it while he takes a job in research? He’s not going to take another year of courses. Remember, by the time someone finishes a Ph.D., they’re not a fresh-faced kid anymore. Even if you go through college and grad school relatively quickly, you’re 26 when you graduate. (If you’re a real child prodigy, you might do it slightly faster.) The average person earning a Ph.D. in the U.S. does it at age 32, since they probably took off time in college or after college or stretched out their work in grad school. Furthermore, do you seriously think that these top-notch universities won’t just decide to ignore the rule about the extra year of grad school for teaching courses? How are you going to enforce that rule?
In case you think that the extra courses could be condensed down to just one semester or one quarter, that would still mean that these top-notch universities would have to tell this brilliant Ph.D. graduate that they can’t offer him a job until the end of summer after he’s crammed in those courses. By that time they already have to have all their open positions filled. Even if you could somehow force all these top-notch universities to obey the rule that everyone teaching at a college level has to have these extra courses about college teaching, what this rule would do would be to persuade the many of the most brilliant new Ph.D. graduates in each field to forget about teaching at college level.
I just flat out disagree with the premise.
If you’re at a decent university you shouldn’t need a lot of hand holding. Read the damn book take good notes in the lectures do the work and see the prof during office hours. As I think was stated earlier it’s expected that you’ll be putting in significant work outside of the classroom, at minimum 2 hours of solid work for every hour in class.
Even if all this is true, the teaching ability of college professors can range from brilliant to abysmal, and it’s legitimate to ask whether any of the things that make the good teachers good can and should be taught to aspiring college teachers.
When I did my Ph.D. we had a 2 credit course on how to teach. I remember we each had to present a couple of times in class, with feedback from the professor. And once we were videotaped, which is how I know I say “um…” a lot. I know we had a little paperback textbook, and I imagine it told us stuff like how to put together a syllabus, etc. But I am pretty sure that when it came to actually developing a class and teaching it, I basically winged it.
(And to all who’ve answered, thank you. If I didn’t reply to something you said specifically, it’s just because it stands well on its own and I didn’t feel any need to contribute or discuss it. Thank you for all the excellent points made here so far.)
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if we weed out the less motivated would-be professors. Or maybe change the system so that PhDs become researchers and professors need only be MS/MA + this hypothetical higher-ed teaching credential.
Professors should want to teach. And they should also get much better pay, both to reflect the importance of what they do and also the additional time investment of this hypothetical thing.
I think this is a false dichotomy. I have any number of colleagues who would primarily identify as researchers, or practitioners in the field. They are not trained as pedagogues. But they are certainly are among the most engaging and popular professors in our department.
If you immerse yourself in research on a topic, or spend your life working in a field, you will more likely than not have a vast expanse of knowledge. You can talk with ease about your work and make it interesting to those who are engaged in the topic. This is much different than teaching in the K-12 context (which I used to do) where much of the pedagogical training focuses on bringing students’ attention to a subject that they are not necessarily engaged with.
That’s not to say that some types of college teaching really do require training. Large lecture classes, keystone courses that are needed for success in later years (think organic chemistry) are just two examples of courses that absolutely need some additional support because of the uniqueness of the learning environment. But the average college seminar course? Not so much. You just need to know your subject and have some enthusiasm for it.
I direct a master’s program, and I deal with student complaints about professors by asking two questions: one, is the professor treating you differently than other students, and two, does he or she know his content material. If the prof isn’t discriminating against you and knows his or her stuff, my general response is “Not every professor is going to be an exact fit to your learning preference - this is part of being in graduate school.”
There’s an assumption at selective admission universities, and that is that students are adept enough to adapt to a variety of learning styles. At selective admission universities with a research intensive focus, you have this assumption plus a very clear understanding that the core university mission is to produce research, and develop researchers. Teaching is derived from one’s research ability, and failing that, they call in instructors to do the teaching. (Sometimes I hear students complain about being taught by graduate assistants - often times, they are the best teachers. You don’t want some faculty members teaching an intro chemistry class, even if he or she is a giant in the field.)
At universities such as mine, a high level of research ability is the key to the kingdom. You won’t get hired here otherwise. It so happens, in my experience at least, very excellent researchers also make very good teachers. The skills in one domain translate well in the other. When I am lecturing and I’m able to talk about the work I’ve done in the field, or articles/books I’ve written, it brings the topic to another level of understanding. Those are absolutely my best classes, and I wager, those who have had similar experiences in the classroom would say the same thing.
I’d also mention teaching evaluations. There are few jobs where the audience, as it were, gets to tell you in no uncertain terms what they think of your performance. I don’t know any faculty members who don’t worry about their evaluations, and truly take to heart criticism from students - granted, critiques about the syllabus or length of reading assignments don’t get a lot of traction, but if three people complain about something I’m doing, that will typically get me to look really hard at, or even change that aspect of the course.
Note that when many university faculty are hired, their time commitments are usually split three way (research, education, and something else I can’t remember). Each faculty member may have a different proportion on how much teaching vs research they have to do, and it reflects on how they are evaluated.
It is very likely many of our terrible college teachers only had a minimum of teaching expectations, and were doing their duty and nothing beyond to keep the job. Meanwhile, those we saw as awesome probably had a higher teaching commitment load, so they got better with practice on how to best teach their subjects. Also, these are more likely to have/make time to attend any professional development seminar offered by their university or association.
Some are still claiming a false dichotomy, because again, when one person enters grad school with one idea, does not mean that they have that idea at the end of it. Maybe they entered wanting to have and run their own lab, but at the end, even though they may love their research project, they may decide it is better if they go to teaching or industry.
It’s not so much an either/or thing, just supplemental teaching instruction before they teach. They can still do both if they want, the same way they currently sit on committees and such in addition to their research.
If there were more transparency in the process, that’d be great. It’d be nice if universities tied salaries to ratemyprofessor.com ratings.