Well, if they work so well outside of class, why mandate anything besides the summative evaluations? If they are self-motivated, they can structure their learning around their own best style. The professor is " In class, there are lectures, here’s a reading list, here’s my office hours, here’s a forum to coordinate study groups, here’s a list of useful websites; combine however you need to master the material. There’s a test in 6 weeks". That’s more or less the traditional way, and it seems to me it makes sense because students can customize the material in a way that works best for them without having to waste time on things that are not productive for them.
Service (to the university, the college, the department, the community). Serving on committees. Participating in faculty functions. The shit goes on and on.
And it would be sweet if they’d let me give students grades anonymously by any standard that came to mind, so long as I finished all the paperwork inside of five minutes, but we live in a world where you gotta put your name to things that mater, and be prepared to back your reasoning. But "Hey–you suck–worst teacher EVIR. Grades students DOWN for picky stuff like missing class, misunderstanding assignments, handing in work late, class participation. Very unfair " attached to an anonymous form doesn’t begin to cut it.
That’s exactly how my education was structured.
We were told when lectures would be held, given a reading list and syllabus, the prof’s office hours, and if applicable the TA’s class times and office hours.
If you didn’t go to the lectures it was your decision. If you didn’t do the reading it was your decision. If you didn’t go see the prof or TA it was your decision.
After all, it was you who was going to have to live with the grade you got, no one else.
It might not be formalized, but virtually all faculty are trained in the sense that many of us were research, graduate, or teaching assistants. In this role you are interacting directly with the faculty member directly responsible for crafting the syllabus, lecturing, creating and grading assignments. All of my courses have strong foundations - let’s be honest, I outright stole (with their permission) much of the content and assignments from my graduate school profs whom I worked under. I’ve been doing this for a while, so I have added my own twists and flair to those courses, but the first semester I was pretty much channeling the course I had served as a teaching assistant for many years.
This is a really, really bad idea. Not that we shouldn’t collect data and opinions from students, but the end of the semester is a really bad time to do it. In my program, I have a colleague who does a fantastic job teaching intro statistics. Most of our students do not come to the program with a strong quantitative background, and he has to work very hard to find a place where they’re actually learning key concepts without going too fast. Some students are quick learners and want to move quickly, while others are out of their depth fairly immediately. I teach a history of higher education course, where I have a lot of freedom over what topics to cover; I can incorporate great speakers and audiovisuals. It shouldn’t surprise you that my course gets really high evaluations, while my colleague doesn’t do quite as well. But when dissertations are successfully defended, there’s a good chance the students will have utilized skills from the stats course far more than those in my history course. Over time students will see the value of the course, but usually not when they’re emerging from a semester of confusion.
And then there are those who will curtail the quality of their courses to hike up their evaluations. Here’s an easy way: have assignments on the syllabus and drop them as a “gift” to the class. Everyone’s happy, the prof’s a hero, right? Well, what if that assignment will provide critical feedback in the synthesis in the course material? The students end up losing in the long run.
How about an optional short course, made available to all students interested in teaching on basics of how to teach; it’s in the Universities’ own interest to have professors with some basic idea of how people learn, after all.
I only briefly went to University, but I still encountered a lecturer who mumbled, utterly misjudged the level of his students current knowledge (so we all had to spend half the time that should have been taken doing homework just finding out what the hell he’d been talking about) and clearly resented having to deal with any students but his chosen grad students.
I’m sure he knew his stuff, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain it at a the level he was teaching, and did not explain novel technical terms (and don’t interrupt!), so everyone was just learning from the set books and getting nothing from the lectures. If he’d literally walked in and said ‘read chapters 4 and 7, and do this exercise’ and then walked out, we would have got more done. It was a waste of everyone’s time.
I’ve heard enough stories (including from friends who are professors) to think he was far from alone in being such an awful lecturer; surely there’s some way Universities can minimise the number of teaching professors like that, without compromising research?
Well, sure. This already exists, as I mentioned upthread: most universities that I’m aware of have some kind of center for teaching and learning effectiveness. Typically they are staffed by experts in pedagogy and they offer a variety of services - they’ll come to your classroom and observe your teaching; help you craft a mid-term evaluation, and instruct you in all the new technology related to learning. They are often very underutilized, though.
It goes back to rewards. My institution would not penalize someone for making these efforts; in fact, they would actually be rewarded in a small way. But not to the level that it makes sense to take time from research and publishing. At my graduate school, there was a $500 grant offered to faculty who attended a teaching effectiveness workshop. That’s a lot of money for a 2 hour session, and only million dollar grant winners would just ignore that opportunity.
It’s also very unlikely that truly bad teachers would utilize the resource - because part of the reason that they’re so bad is that they don’t know, or they don’t care. Like I said, I think if you were one standard deviation below the mean in my college, that would throw up some kind of red flag and a smart tenure-track professor would seek out some assistance so he/she could say, “Sure, I’m a bad teacher, but I’m getting guidance on how I can improve.”
Reply, almost no one here is convinced by your arguments. Who do you think you can persuade to adopt your idea? The universities? The states? The federal government? There isn’t even any law, rule, or convention that states that Ph.D.'s (or master’s degrees or bachelors degrees or high school degrees) are preferred for teaching at universities (although nearly all teachers at anything above the level of community colleges have Ph.D.'s these days). They are nearly all Ph.D.'s because universities and states and the federal government have each decided by their individual choices to prefer Ph.D.'s for college teachers. Almost no one cares that much about having college teachers take education courses except you, while almost everyone who cares thinks that it would be best that college teachers have Ph.D.'s.
Tell you what though. You can start a movement to convince other people of your idea. You can given lectures about it, writes books about it, start a political party based on getting such a law passed, and finally start a religion on that basis. When you encounter opposition from university professors, you and your mob can slaughter them. You can take over the country and declare yourself to be supreme leader for life. You can then order that all college professors (which won’t be many, because they will have all been killed or fled the country) immediately have to take education courses. Nealy all researchers with Ph.D.'s will also leave the country. Nearly all universities will close. There will be no more research in the country. You will spend the rest of your life as the supreme leader of a desperately poor, uneducated country.
Sigh
I’ll explain this yet again. This credential is not hypothetical. It is called a Doctor of Arts (Master of Arts in Teaching for 2 year schools) and though rare it is not non-existant.
Because . . . oh wait that is a strawman.
So because adults can reasonable expected to work more independently without supervision, where did I ever imply that they can function 100% independently. I’m not zoid.
I’m one of the few in this thread that has been saying that professors need to learn how to teach adults (which is different in some ways from teaching children) to adapt their lecture to address a diverse group of learning styles. I pointed out that with adults, there is more independent work but it needs to have the instruction built into it and not just “Here’s the book. Read it.” I’m the only one in this thread discussing the D.Arts and MAT degrees and saying the problem with higher ed is that these degrees are not more available.
Look Manda Jo, there are at least a dozen posters in this thread that have the attitude of “Fuck 'em. They’re adults and motivated and know how to be a student. Talk at them for 4 hours a week and give them 8 hours of independent reading and if they’re not successful it’s their own damn fault.” but I am not one of those.
LOL - I wouldn’t describe my position as “Fuck 'em” even though you might 
I just think there are sufficient tools available and if they’re taken advantage of students will be successful.
I understand not everyone will get the material first time through, but isn’t that what office hours and TAs are for?
Just to clarify your position. Are you talking about the Ph.D specifically because if so you are absolutely correct however most* universities do have a policy that you need Ph.D. equivalent degree to teach.
- Yes I know some fields have exceptions and professors are those with first professional degrees (JD, MD, D.Pharm, etc.) which are more properly master’s degrees and not a terminal doctorate degree.
And that is our fundamental disagreement. I think TAs and office hours are to scaffold the material and not for reteaching someone who isn’t getting the material because the professor was inspired by Ben Stein in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. And from my experience, TAs and office hours are more of the same EXCEPT the time I had a history professor I had who was absolutely brilliant but in the first stages of dementia. There the TA did a great job making it easy to learn what she was talking about.
Well I guess we’ll just disagree. When I was a TA my office hours were spent entirely helping students go over concepts they did not understand. I made sure I had no other obligations that day and though my hours were usually from 1:00-3:00 I never left without feeling comfortabe that the student was back on the right track regardless of how long it took.
Heh, it probably doesn’t come across clearly online, but I don’t care all that much. This is just a casual discussion.
I thought you said only one university even offers that.
And that’s more of a whole discipline unto itself, not a supplemental, no?
Actually a few do and it is extremely rare but it is not hypothetical.
And no it is not a whole discipline unto itself. It is a doctorate in your field so a D.A. in mathematics or history candidate is taking the exact same classes as the Ph.D. student. The differences in programs range from every class the same but the thesis being on application of research to teaching (one school says pedagogy but I believe that should read androgogy) rather than the original research of the Ph.D to taking some classes in teaching methodology and a teaching based thesis.
But since you have studied you field at a Ph.D. level, it is a degree in your field and so you have a doctorate in mathematics or history or whatever and are therefore eligible to teach at a 4 year university.
Incidently, because it is not a Ph.D. you wear the color of your discipline so if you get your D.A. from UMiss in music, you could wear doctoral robes with the chevrons, front velvet and hood trim in pink. D.A.s in math and the sciences would be gold instead and D.A. in history would be white. I believe Frankin Pierce’s DA in Leadership is a business degree so that color would be drab. It would make you stand out from all those Ph.D. in black and dark blue at graduation.
Most professors I know teach a mix of basic classes, intermediate classes, and quite advanced classes for graduate students, often seminars. I’d expect DAs to be limited to more basic classes. And as already noted, research brings in the bucks so DAs will be second class citizens forever.
K-12 teachers will likely be filtered by practice teaching and by the provisional period. Good teachers may turn bad, but real losers won’t make it through. On the other hand real losers as teachers who are good researchers might easily make it through grad school.
The conference I’m involved with really cares about quality presentations. We even have a process to review slides to make sure they are all readable, not too verbose, and in general adequate. But there is nothing we can do about speaking and presentation styles, though we try. I’ve spent hours coaching people who still suck at speaking. Classes can make okay teachers good or good teachers better, but I think you are going to need more than a few hours to ensure reasonable quality for everyone.
And you’d need to hire Henry Higgins.
When I was a TA in grad school at a major research university, my training for teaching consisted of: Here’s the book and last quarter’s syllabus. Go teach!
Recently I took an adjunct gig for a university that doesn’t emphasize research. I had to take three (fairly short and informal) classes on how to teach, before I was allowed to.
And those graduate TAs go onto to be teaching professors - Grad TA work is the only real training.
My wife has 400 in one of her courses, and 10 in a seminar.
No kidding - I’m supposed to teach t the individual in a lecture of 300?