Why aren't collega professors taught to teach?

Factual Questions
41

That, and there is a lot of teaching education in graduate school (as mentioned) in the form of learning by doing. Grad assistants take light teaching loads when they start out and they get heavier and heavier. By the time one has a Ph.D., one has four to six years of classroom experience. (I would also mention that every teacher I’ve asked has assured me that teachers’ education doesn’t do squat.)

Also worth noting is that professors get a large degree of intellectual freedom and dictating teaching style to them would be problematic.

In the K-12 schools, minor children and being placed in the daily care of adults who are strangers and who are entrusted with the kids’ health, safety, and welfare. Perhaps the OP has the perspective all wrong; the question should not be why college profs don’t need education in educating, rather the question should be why do K-12 schools have such stringent requirements.

If you ask a hard-core behaviorist, she’ll tell you that what professors do is basically silly anyway. The lecture dates from the days when books were so expensive that the professors stood at the podium and read the book to the class. Over time they started to add their own comments and asides, and ended up taking over for the books.

Based on my experience, college teachers are generally pretty good. I’ve had very few bad instructors in college. Be a good student, sit up front, engage in active listening, and get to know the prof, and the results will surprise you. Whether they’re in a research or teaching college does not change the fact that they’re doing what they do because they love it. If you’re the only person in the class who isn’t a stone-faced zombie, you’ll find yourself in a completely situation.

To say that they’re supposed to teach is true; however, the college student also has a job to learn. The days of being a passive vessel are over.

42

This is a very informative discussion. I hope I don’t annoy too many people with this tangent – I was suddenly reminded of a scene in an old Blondie and Dagwood movie, in which Dagwood decided to go back to college for some reason. The episode was full of racoon-fur coats and cocked porpie hats and beanies and gowns and mortarboards – all things that I’m guessing were years out of date even for the movie’s time.

Anyway, I remember a scene in a classroom in which Dagwood is desperately trying to understand, but the lecturer is speaking in gibberish (from the viewer’s point of view). The scene struck me because it seemed to reflect a mid-20th century view of college classrooms and life as impenetrable and arcane. Anyway …

43

I really respect the way you articulated this. Mom was a teacher, my wife is a teacher ( yeah, yeah… :wink: ). I teach college students and adults a particular skill in a workshop setting. I also spent 18 months sub teaching grades 2-12.

I’m subbing one day. Grade 5. We’re talking the Boston Tea Party the day I sub taught. ( I don’t tolerate subs who do fun crap all day. I got hired to teach, and each teacher left me full lesson plans. These were always executed fully, subject by subject ).

I talked through the basics of the Tea Party and the response from the King across the puddle. Then I realized the kids were sitting glazed-eyed. Bad…bad. I put down the book and said loudly, " Okay, this isn’t clicking". They all looked at me aghast. I said, look. ( We live in NY State ). How many of you have family near Boston?" A couple of hands went up. " Any idea how long it takes to get to Boston by car? It takes about 3-4 hours from here. Any idea how long it takes to get to London from New York by plane? About 5 or 6 hours. A little longer than a drive to Boston. Now, it’s the autumn ( which it was ). In the time it will take the letter from the Tories in the colonies to reach the good King in London regarding this Tea Party, 3 months will have passed. Then, he will get mad and write back. That letter from him will take three months to reach Boston. We’re talking writing a letter now, and knowing that help from the King will not arrive until JANUARY." I had em. It was fun, too. " Now, the Tories try to punish people and set new laws decreed by the King in England, and the revolt continues. They write letters back to the King. ANOTHER three months to get there. See how much time is taken up. Meanwhile, life here in the Colonies goes on, people plot revolution, they fight, and so on. There is no immediate answer in a life where a letter takes a half-year to be answered. "

I’m not brilliant teacher of 10 year-olds, but that day… they really got it. Because I put down the book and tried to have them understand time and communication on their level. I’ll tell you this, it was highly gratifying. I greatly enjoy teaching college students and adults the skill I teach them. Invariably, each one “gets it” before the class is over.

For the poster who is angry at paying tuition for access instead of paying tuition to be taught, how about considering this: You are old enough to glean information from those around you, from what you read in your house, from the Internet. You may not understand all that you hear and read, but you are old enough to try to parse out the important stuff from the chaff. Is it reasonable to think that your college-level teachers/professors are there to give you the tools to filter, instead of there to spoon-feed you?

You should never consider yourself to be too old to learn. I’m about to turn 43 ( god… ) , and I am eagerly pursuing a new skill. I have to read up on it, make an awful mess a few times, break some prototypes and hopefully learn the skill.

In college, those teachers who were so dogmatic as to be closed-minded were a waste of time to me. Those who believed in their point of view but respected the point of view of others were a source of enlightenment.

Regard your college teachers as guides, not food sources. :slight_smile:

Cartooniverse

44

Why would you want to do that?

45

There’s no accounting for taste…

46

I would really like to hear someone who has attended university in Great Britain add to the point that groman is trying to make. As I understand it, the British model of education at the college level fits in pretty well with what he is describing.

As for Profscam, it is, indeed, one view of “What’s Wrong With Tenured Professordom In America” (as of a decade or so ago) but IIRC it’s not exactly an unbiased discussion of the issues.

Every other point I was going to make has already been addressed here.

47

I think there is a misunderstanding here. A BEd is not required in secondary education. I think that most states do require a certain number of education courses for certification to teach, but most of the teachers that I have known began teaching with either Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts degrees with one or more majors in specific subject areas other than education.

It doesn’t take that many courses to be certified. Further, teachers are expected to participate in continuing education programs once they have their jobs. It is common to find career teachers with masters degrees and not unusual for them to have their doctorates.

Students pay tuition for the privilege and purpose of learning. It’s not going to happen in the same way that it did when you were a child. Do what is expected, and you will learn – just as your professors did. Don’t do what is expected and you will flunk out. Whine, stomp your foot, toss your curls, hold your breath and turn blue. It won’t matter.

“If you ain’t where you are, you ain’t no place.” - Col. Sherman T. Potter

48

Actually, I don’t think this is a good idea at all. I vividly recall, as an undergraduate student, attending a class given by a man who was the acknowledged expert in his field.

It was an exhilarating experience, being taught by someone who knew so much, and was willing to share, with exquisite courtesy and enormous patience, his passion for his field of study. To this day, he exemplifies for me the phrase, “a gentleman and a scholar”.

As a direct consequence of that experience, I majored in his subject area, so beguiled as I was, by the vistas of knowledge he opened up before us poor, ignorant students. Some of my other teachers were also acknowledged leaders in their field, and it was always an exhilarating experience, even as an undergraduate, being taught by them.

For me the experience of being at university wasn’t about being, “taught stuff”, but exposed to entire fields of knowledge, guided by good minds with knowledge and enthusiasm for their subject. I doubt I’d have enjoyed my undergraduate years as much, or learned as much, had not been exposed to the researchers.

But to answer the OP more directly, increasingly universities are concerned by the quality of teaching that takes place within them, and universities have any number of teaching and learning committees and professional development opportunities which exist to improve the pedagogical skills of academics.

49

Oh, I just had a lecturer who was really awful.

  1. Spelling mistakes scattered throughout the course outline.
  2. This was a management course. One question on the final exam: “What does ‘malapropism’ mean?”
  3. The books we had to read for the course? The Alchemist, which is a fable about finding one’s “personal legend”, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Need I say more?
  4. In the second lecture a fellow came in to talk about The 7 Habits. He used a coke bottle to illustrate a point. So, one of the questions my lecturer put in the exam was: “What was the point of the coke bottle example?” This was from the second lecture. And when I’m notetaking, I take down important notes, not cute little metaphors.

Sorry for the pit post in GQ…

50

Ooh, I just thought of some more wonderful questions from the exam.
“What was the main character doing at the beginning of the book?”
and the main essay question.
“Take one of the 7 habits and relate it to your life.”

The pain, the pain…

51

I’ve noticed this. I started college in 1995, and graduated in 1999. Then I went back to my alma mater this past semester to pick up a few extra classes before returning to grad school.

I took five upper-level classes. In each and every one, the professor handed out detailed course notes for every lecture…and then repeated the material during the lecture. Often, there was little in the way of “extra learning”; everything was in those notes. In about half the classes, the lecture notes were taken straight from the textbook and contained little extra material. When I was earning my undergraduate degree, not one professor ever handed out lecture notes–not even course outlines beyond the syllabus.

More of my classes resorted to multiple choice and easy short answer questions. Actually, I did not write a long essay exam the entire semester. The tests required only knowledge, comprehension, and occasionally application in order to get an A. Analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of information was required rarely to never, depending on the class. When I was earning my degree, my exams were primarily very rigorous long essays requiring primarily the higher levels of thought, even in intro-level classes.

The curve was also much, much more lenient, even though the professors now adhere to the supposedly strict curve prescribed by the College of Liberal Arts. When I was earning my degree, professors routinely ignored it and made up their own curves.

There was more class discussion, but the discussion almost always centered around questions from students who simply hadn’t done the reading and didn’t mind showing that fact off to the class.

I used to disagree with people who said college was being dumbed down, but in just six years, I’m seeing a difference so huge that I believe it can’t be ignored.

52

I’m glad to read that from a student’s point of view.

I’ve been carrying on like a stuck pig on those points for a while now, especially since they are the main theme of my evaluations. “This course is too haaaaaaard,” " the professor doesn’t explain every thing four or five times like a teacher is suppose to," “this guy gives out Cs if you don’t do the reading–WTF??? ,” etc.

As I’ve previously complained, I’m also under some considerable pressure (I got a form letter from the University Prez yesterday making this point explicitly) to act as a “student-retention officer.” I was asked, in other words, to make the college experience as student-friendly as possible. I’m not sure if this stops fully sort of performing oral sex on students (of all twelve genders) immediately upon request, or if I can schedule the sex breaks, beer runs, snack breaks etc. outside of class.

53

Glad to hear it. Right after I hit “submit,” I thought, “Who cares about this shit?” :slight_smile:

I am not your typical college student though. I already have a law degree. After the rigorous nature of those studies, I realize that my undergrad classes were only moderately hard the first time. They had degraded to ridiculously easy by the time I went back. I don’t think that’s just because I’d been through something much harder, though, for the reasons stated above.

As for pleasing students: professors do students no favors by giving As and Bs to papers that contain mistakes, or by giving them a long time to write a relatively short paper. In the real world, they will find that work is not acceptable if it contains even one mistake. And, in my real-world job, I often had to turn around 5-10 page research papers in a day. I don’t think the standards need to be that tough–work and school are not totally analogous–but they don’t need to be relaxed any, either.

54

I still want to have some copies printed of your post(s), to distribute to the next whiner I get. I teach for students like you–they’re rare, but still I teach for students willing to work hard and learn stuff, and if the students there to kill time after high school don’t like it, and write me up as being “mean,” “crazy,” “a maniac” (these are all quotes from my last batch of evals), so be it. Students willing to work are students willing to learn, and they 're the only kind worth teaching.

55

So…who moved your cheese?

::d&r::

Stranger

56

Yes, the British model of university education is very much more research-oriented than the American one seems to be. A PhD student will not necessarily gain any teaching experience whatsoever - on the other hand, a PhD course normally takes three years.

There is very much the attitude that students are there to learn - or indeed to ‘learn how to learn’. The expertise of experts in their field is available to them, with lectures only being a small part of this - particularly in the latter years of a course, seminars and one-to-one tutorials are the main contact between students & lecturers/professors. The best teachers are those who are able to talk with students on equal terms, and who are open and receptive to students’ opinions and ideas.

I would get extremely angry with students complaining that they were not ‘being taught what they needed to know’. While one of the biggest libraries in the country was a short walk away, and they’d never explored it. Explicit in the course documentation was the expected breakdown of workload of the course: for every one hour of lectures, they were expected to do five hours of individual work. Those that complained, and who got poor degrees, didn’t do this work.

Somebody earlier noted the importance of university staff being able to develop individual styles of teaching, which I agree with strongly. My department would, as part of the recruitment of new staff, require them to deliver a lecture which would be aimed at second-year-undergraduate level. All students were able to sit through these lectures, and an open discussion about them was held. This very efficiently sorted out those who were so obsessed with their own research that they couldn’t talk about anything else, from those who were capable of actually understanding the needs of undergraduate tuition.

I also find it astonishing that any degree examination could use multiple-choice answers. I can’t recall anything, in any examination or test, at any point in my degree, that didn’t require at least several pages of writing (or the equivalent - it was a music degree).

57

Well, if you think you need my permission to do so, you have it.

58

Oh, and you can tell them that I’m 28, and not some crotchety old geezer who thinks those young whippersnappers are all ungrateful little hellions because I had it so hard back in the day.

59

That describes Mrs. Stone exactly. She was teaching at a major university and was actually told by the head of her department that she was teaching her students too much! Because her students had to really work and learn the material during her class, they still knew it when they took the next level course the following year. They were bored during the refresher part of it. Also because she taught them multiple ways of using the same information and a broad base of related information to the subject, she essentially already covered most of the information that the next level course covered as well.

There were two other professors who also taught the introductary course as my wife and they only covered the minimum of information, taking twice as long to cover each section, repeating the information, etc. It was readily apparent at the next level which students had Mrs. Stone as their introductory teacher and which had the other two professors.

So what did the head of the department do? Tell her to slow down and not cover so much. (After all, the other two professors had lots of publications and prestige to their name.)

She didn’t argue. We were already planning on leaving the state at the end of the semester anyway, she just hadn’t told them yet. … So she taught her regular way anyway.

60

Are we sure the OP is really concerned with poor teaching skills, or is it really poor communication skills?

I went to an excellent liberal arts college within a small university for undergrad. The quality of teaching was generally excellent. Even as an undergrad, I was primarily taught by PhDs.

There were, however, some who had stronger communication skills than others. I can see how some could have benefited from better communication skills. Honestly, these skills would also benefit them in the research and political aspects of their work.

On the other hand, as far as I have ever been able to tell what would have been covered in “college of education” type courses–pedagogy–would have been completely worthless. I’m not sure it’s about restricting the labor supply, but that is definitely some type of gatekeeping agenda. To me it seems related to the political environment of the US public schools more than anything that would actually help increase learning of undergrads.

Back to the communication skills side of it, it’s not very helpful when the professor approaches the room full of undergrads with tangible disdain. That makes adequate teaching seem like poor teaching. I realize it can get frustrating. Someone needs to tell even undergrads that “how do you spell that?” is not a question you need to ask a full professor. And by the time you are a graduate student, at the very latest, “is it on the test?” needs to be purged from your vocabulary.

This is quite rambling for a post on communication skills, I just realized I may be too tired to be posting anywhere but MPSIMS…