A Look at Teacher-Training Programs for Graduate Students

Here are some of the efforts to help graduate assistants become more effective teachers on the college level.

Boot camp: At Clarkson University, all incoming teaching assistants in the arts-and-sciences college are now required to go through a full-time, five-week teaching program before their doctoral programs begin.

Teaching Ph.D.s How to Teach

Doctoral training hasn’t traditionally been concerned with whether future faculty members are good teachers. New programs are meant to change that.

Co-teaching programs: At Stanford University, some doctoral students in the humanities are paired up with their research advisers to co-teach a course. The program allows graduate students to see how a course is put together and to observe their adviser in an undergraduate teaching setting.

Special orientation sessions: Michigan State University offers daylong orientation sessions, one for all new teaching assistants and another for international teaching assistants. These programs cover topics like sexual harassment and include case studies about undergraduate student success.

Pedagogy courses: The University of California at Berkeley requires all new graduate-student instructors to have completed or be enrolled in a semester-long pedagogy seminar or course specific to their discipline. Students who don’t pass must take the course again before they are eligible to teach again.

Workshops: Many colleges, often through teaching and learning centers, offer seminars and workshops for teaching assistants looking to pick up classroom skills. At the University of Iowa, for example, one workshop being developed would advise graduate students on how to handle difficult classroom conversations.

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.