If you’ve ever taken or taught an introductory science course in college, you will recognize this scenario: The professor stands at the front of a large auditorium, lecturing to hundreds of students, only some of whom are actually paying attention. Sometime later (maybe much later), in a building across the campus, a teaching assistant oversees a lab that sports only the thinnest connection to the lecture.
It’s a disjointed, tag-team teaching method that rarely challenges students to ask questions, build hypotheses, test their ideas, or connect what they’re learning to the real world. It’s also not an especially effective model for instilling in students, early in their academic careers, a passion for scientific inquiry.
Universities use that model because we have for too long focused on making our instructional efforts—our inputs—more efficient. It’s time to make how well students learn—our outcomes—the priority.
To that end, we’re trying something new at the University of Delaware.
We’ve added a third person to the teaching team: a preceptor who works in the middle space between our professors and our teaching assistants in introductory biology and chemistry courses. Preceptors are full-time, experienced teachers, with master’s degrees or higher, who provide instructional continuity and help students connect what they learn in the classroom with what they experience in the lab.
We believe that preceptors—along with established, problem-based learning techniques and better coordination of classes and labs—will not only improve students’ understanding of these foundational subjects but also engage students in compelling content, and help us recruit and retain them in vital science fields. And we believe we’ll be able to replicate the practice in other disciplines.
Our preceptor model borrows heavily from medicine. In fact, the term itself is familiar to health care. Nurse preceptors, for instance, help nursing students develop their knowledge and clinical competence, while bringing them fully into the culture and standards of the profession.
The preceptor model’s emphasis on effective teaching also mirrors the recently reinvigorated role of the clinician-educator in medical schools, where for the latter half of the 20th century, faculty members’ skill in teaching had become secondary to their clinical superiority or research productivity. In an increasingly complex health-care environment, medical-school leaders are realizing that their students need the guidance of good clinician-educators, who marry biomedical expertise with an understanding of the teaching-and-learning enterprise.
At Delaware our preceptors supplement but don’t supplant our faculty members. In each course section, one preceptor works with a faculty member and two graduate teaching assistants. So professors still teach and assess proficiency, and TA’s still run the labs. The preceptor is the teacher in between, moving with students from lecture to discussion to lab, helping them connect the conceptual and curricular dots.
It’s not only the undergraduates who are helped by the preceptors; our TA’s benefit, too. Teaching assistants are rarely taught how to teach. We offer intensive advising and mentoring, grant-writing workshops, and dissertation boot camps to turn them into scholars, but we offer little in the way of rigorous training to turn them into teachers.
If TA’s never have good teachers to emulate, it’s more likely they’ll become the professors who find teaching a challenge or a chore. Preceptors model good teaching methods and strategies, showing the TA’s how to explain and engage, reinforce skills, evaluate learning, and structure class time and topics.
We’re using preceptors in our new Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory, which opened this fall. The laboratory is the university’s largest academic building and mostly houses faculty research labs. Yet this large building also has a teaching and learning wing that is characterized by smallness. No classroom in the teaching wing holds more than 48 students. Four of those classrooms are each flanked by two 24-student learning labs—the spaces between the classrooms and the labs separated only by large windows. In the classrooms, students investigate real-world problems—how to best protect skin cells from damaging ultraviolet light, for example; and immediately thereafter, in the adjoining labs, they test possible solutions—comparing commercial and laboratory-made sunscreens, perhaps.
By shrinking the space and the time between classwork and lab work, by joining the two through the preceptor’s consistent guiding presence, by employing the best problem-based learning strategies, we’re strengthening the learning-by-doing construct that’s proved so critical to deeper engagement and understanding. This, in turn, develops students who are eager for further study and able to excel in it.
Of course, students learn not only from faculty members, preceptors, and teaching assistants, but also, and powerfully, from one another. So we’re building a community of learners by using some tested methods, like housing first-year biology majors in the same dormitory and gathering them in the same first-year seminar courses.
We’re also offering group tutoring inside the new lab—eight hours a day, every day, weekends included—to help students tackle difficult concepts in biology, chemistry, physics, math, and writing. In and out of the classroom, there’s a support structure to help students become adept at collaboration, problem solving, communication, self-evaluation, and independence.
Adding preceptors to our teaching team, designing buildings that encourage problem-based learning, and offering students free on-site tutoring late into the night are all part of an effort to find what works—whatever works—for students. We hope to expand preceptors beyond the science and engineering disciplines to any course incorporating hands-on learning. Annual evaluations of preceptors’ effectiveness will help us use them where they’re needed most.
We want to go on to replicate an engineering model in which researchers and industry professionals team-teach courses that tie theory to practice. We also want to adopt health care’s clinical-rotation model—splitting up courses into units that are taught by faculty members whose expertise best matches the modules. We want to untie students from the campus and teach them where the content—not our convenience—dictates, and put them face-to-face with the people their scholarship is intended to serve.
Because that’s the whole point: Our scholarship is service. And it’s well-educated students who have the curiosity and intellectual flexibility to join their knowledge to others’ and envision new solutions to persistent problems.
With that goal in mind, let’s take learning apart, not just course by course, but concept by concept. Let’s determine how to deliver knowledge, coax discovery, and advance understanding in a way that works the most effectively for the most students. If we scrupulously set priorities for outcomes, we’ll invest in the right inputs. Ultimately the strategies, the platforms, and, yes, the hiring of people to teach must be dictated by how students learn.
