Institutions need to better prepare graduate students to teach, several educators gathered here for a conference said last week.
“We see this as a crisis of mediocre teaching,” said Kathleen Wise, an associate director at Wabash College’s Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts during her keynote address at the Teagle Foundation event, called “Community of Scholars, Community of Teachers.”
Ms. Wise was referring to the results of Wabash research in which almost half of the 8,200 first-year students who responded to a survey said they experienced clear and organized teaching only “sometimes,” “rarely” or “never.” The research was part of a longitudinal study that started with more than 17,000 first-year students, and involved 49 small and large institutions, including liberal-arts colleges, research universities, and regional universities.
Ms. Wise called teaching clarity and organization “one of the most powerful factors impacting students’ learning in college.” Some characteristics of that teaching, she said, are giving clear examples, making good use of illustrations to make points, effectively summarizing material, and using class time effectively.
Institutions ought to value teaching as much as research, despite challenges that can make that difficult, several attendees said. For instance, time-strapped graduate students are likely to favor research as long as university search committees place greater weight on that.
But many of the 45 or so invitees at the two-day conference expressed optimism. They said teaching and learning centers have proliferated on campuses, younger faculty members are placing a greater emphasis on teaching and learning assessment, and institutions and groups are increasingly having conversations about the topic.
“I see a generational change,” said Rosemary Joyce, an associate dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate division
‘A Big Deal’
The Teagle Foundation focuses on undergraduate student learning in the arts and sciences. Since 2010, it has awarded grants totaling more than $1.3-million to colleges and institutions to develop programs that improve graduate student teaching, according to the foundation’s website.
Columbia University, for example, is using its grant money to prepare graduate students for teaching careers through the use of digital technologies, and a group of students are observing and analyzing one another’s teaching methods.
In small signs, some of the Teagle grantees see major progress in changing institutional cultures. At Stanford University, a group of professors plan to share their syllabi with one another at an end-of-year retreat, said Russell A. Berman, a Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies.
“That’s a big deal,” said Mr. Berman, who is also a former president of the Modern Language Association. Faculty members “talk about their teaching with each other about as often as they talk about their salary with each other,” he said, “which is never.”
Mr. Berman said that, though the tendency for teaching to take a back seat to research “is still endemic in the profession,” graduate students are hungry to become better teachers—a sentiment echoed by others.
Vanessa Ryan, an associate dean of Brown University’s graduate school, said that a third of the college’s Ph.D. recipients complete a voluntary certificate in teaching and learning. The students are equally distributed across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, she said.
“There’s a myth of the Ph.D. student who cares only about research in the lab,” Ms. Ryan said. “Our graduate students do want to teach.”
The ‘Gobbledygook’ Problem
Attendees also discussed how faculty culture can stand in the way of assessing teaching and learning. Charles Blaich, director of the Wabash center, said faculty members often dismiss studies like his college’s as reflecting only students’ perceptions, or say that clear teaching is dumbed-down teaching.
Several people said that language associated with such efforts turns off some faculty members.
“Most people in my discipline,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, “if they hear the words ‘authentic assessment,’ ‘high-impact educational practices,’ or ‘essential learning outcomes’ will run as fast as they can in the opposite direction.”
That is especially the case, Mr. Grossman said, at top-tier research universities. “Nobody is going to flunk the University of Texas or Princeton on their next round of accreditation,” he said, “so no faculty member is going to take it seriously, which means this gobbledygook is something they simply have to forebear for a certain period of time.”
Mr. Grossman said another challenge to embracing a culture of assessment is a lack of quantitative skills, especially in the humanities.
“How can you take assessment seriously if not only do you have no quantitative skills,” Mr. Grossman said, “but you’re proud of the fact that you don’t have quantitative skills, which is the case with many disciplines in the humanities.”
Clarification (4/17/2014, 1:01 p.m.): This article described imprecisely two aspects of Brown’s teaching-certificate program. It meets several times in the fall and at least once in the spring; it is not semester-long. And one-third of the university’s Ph.D. recipients, not Ph.D. students, complete the program. The article has been updated to reflect this clarification.
