I’m not sure about this - possibly for new lecturing staff. My current employers haven’t made any noises about us all having to train. My soon-to-be employers have a policy of all new (to them) lecturing staff having to get a PGCert. Whether this is in response to some DfES requirement, or their own policy, I don’t know. They seemed pretty apologetic about it being a requirement (since I don’t already have one I can only be offered a probationary period in the first instance)
The training could or should help and is unlikely to be doing any harm, but I don’t think it will necessarily turn out good lecturers any more than having a PGCE automatically means the person is a good teacher.
Another thought about why it’s unlikely that all new lecturing staff are being required to have PGCEs - it would made recruitment of foreign staff virtually impossible.
My dad went to MIT, and this was his major complaint. The profs seemed to regard the undergrads as a nuisance. His concern when we got old enough for college was not to go to one that had “publish or perish”.
There’s an old saying: Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach. I don’t mean to insult teachers and there are plenty of cases where people both “do” and “teach” well, but the fact remains that if you want to do something well, you’re better off learning from those who do those things well. If you want to be a welder, would you study under a welder or a person with a teaching degree who had welded a few things? If you wanted to be a mechanic, would you study under a mechanic or a person with a teaching degree who tinkered with his car now and then? If you want to be a researcher, would you study under someone who did world-class peer-reviewed research or a person with a teaching degree who had some passing familiarity with the field you were interested in?
Whatever your (and my) criticisms of self-involved egotistical professors, the fact is that if you want to do what they do (research, not bad teaching) you’re better off studying under them than in some ideal learning environment taught by people less involved in the field.
I had one professor who would write on the blackboard with his right hand and surreptitiously correct errors with his left while his body was blocking the board. If you paid attention to his words and writing, you never caught the corrections. If you noticed a logical inconsistency and asked about it, the blackboard had been corrected and it looked like your error, not his. Quite a putz. Still, I learned a great deal from him because he had literally written the book on the field he was lecturing on and no one could have conveyed the knowledge better. Granted, he could have done a lot better than he did, but no one else could have done as well regardless of teaching technique.
I’m in a similar situation and agree entirely that there are plenty of professors that would benefit from training in the psychology and practice of education. It is amazing to me the number of professors I encounter who don’t even understand some basic notions of cognitive psychology. (See “What’s the Use of Lectures” by Bligh for a fun review of this material.)
{I’ve noticed that courses I have taken, and texts that I have read, on statistics and experimental design taught or written by psychology profs are far better than those by others. I mentioned this to two faculty here and they reflected that that was also their experience even though they hadn’t noticed that before. }
As I prepare to teach my first undergraduate course, I’m finding that the preparation is making me master some material that I could have avoided and I suspect the students will ask some questions that will send me back to the library to look for the answer.
There is a market for books on learning how to teach at the college level, so presumably some people are buying this books up. Most large schools also have a center for instructional design that faculty are to take advantage of. It would be nice to require phd students who wish to teach to take a class or two or a class and a practicum with group reflection on teaching and on the history of colleges/universities in their nation or the world.
The notion that college students are just to learn on their own is absurd. Just as it is absurd if you are teaching/training people who are middle-aged adults. The teacher had better be able to impart information that is not in the text, help integrate/critique/analyze what is in the text and, most importantly!, help students with learning to freaking write. (The lack of skills among professors in teaching students to write well is really, really sad. The pace at which profs are often expected to publish and read/comment (the so-called “service” work) seems to lead to some pretty nasty writing habits.)
Universities should also require continual reflection on teaching by having a required seminar for professors every few years. I think my college did this over some summers. Profs (or some fraction of them) were given some things to read on teaching, trends in college in society, history of higher education, etc. and had a set of seminar like meetings with the Dean to discuss the readings.
I was told recently that faculty evaluations at research schools tend to place research/publication as 80 percent of the evaluation, teaching as 10-15 percent and “service” (participating in refereeing journals, writing book reviews, etc.) work as another 5-10 percent. There are people who could do a better job of teaching than what we have and still do excellent research but just not prodigious amounts of it (since teaching is time intensive). Unfortunately, I think the current system keeps many of them out or in a stressful situation, thus some of the best teachers are often adjuncts (enthusasiam for teaching is again the key)!
He didn’t, and of course the chalk-covered left hand was a big hint too. But unless you took time to look back and check for smudges or watched his body motion to see when he was doing it, you never really noticed. He lectured at a pretty fast pace and it was a pretty interactive discussion class, so you didn’t have time to keep re-reading the board for changes. And if you mentioned an error in your notes and he pointed out where it was correct on the board, what would you do, accuse him of editing the board based on smudges? Hardly worth a confrontation. It was just one of those things that was pretty obvious to every student after a few lectures and we just dealt with it.
According to administrators, yes they are. You think schools are going to accept a significant drop in enrollment (with the concomitant loss of revenue leading to loss of jobs, etc.) just because “we couldn’t find enough students up to our standards?” Not on your life.
The schools grow bigger and bigger every year, but as with Lake Woebegon, all the children are still above average.
One thing is to accept everyone and another is to let everyone pass. Just because a student is in doesn’t mean he should have it easy (or, better put: mediocre).
My buddy who got his Masters in chem at USC told me his theory was that USC was accepting students sometimes based on demographics instead of ability. The fact that the pass rate for these students wasn’t very good was beside the point, because while they were enrolled, they bouyed the diversity numbers.
Is that surprising? Schools have reasons for wanting diversity that are virtuous (e.g., exposing students to diversity) beyond the appearance or oversight reasons.
(Sorry, I guess were’re getting off topic and off into GD here.)