Complaints about the lack of attention to teaching in Ph.D. programs are legion — mainly about the perceived disconnect between what we are trained to do in graduate school and what we are expected to do in the college classroom. After years of calls for reform, we wondered, is that disconnect still the case?
Plenty of essays, social-media posts, and books like Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour have tackled the lack of formal training that professors receive on teaching. Still, there isn’t much data on the subject. A 2019 crowdsourced spreadsheet showed that whether (and how) graduate programs require for-credit training in teaching skills varies considerably. That level of inconsistency seems decidedly out of sync with the many teaching-related problems — student disengagement, enrollment drops, grading complaints, worrisome new technologies — dominating our discourse.
Following up on a recent call for universities to stop trying to do everything and “refocus on teaching,” we investigated three disciplines — history, psychology, and biology — to ascertain the degree to which they require their doctoral recipients to learn teaching skills. For each discipline, we looked at the 10 departments (excluding for-profit or fully online programs) that granted the largest number of Ph.D.s in each field, over the three-year period from 2019-21. We wanted to see how many of the 30 programs (a) offered a graduate course on teaching, and (b) required students to take it.
Among our findings:
- History. Only three of the 10 doctoral programs we looked at require their students to take credit-bearing courses on teaching. One of the 10 cautioned students in its graduate-school handbook not to allow teaching to impede progress on their dissertation research.
- Psychology. Applied careers are common for psychology Ph.D.s. However, the websites of the 10 largest programs in the field do state that they prepare graduates for faculty careers. Still, only two of the 10 programs require a credit-bearing course in pedagogy; four others offer workshops on the topic.
- Biology. Here we found slightly higher attention paid to classroom-instruction skills. Five of the 10 programs require a regularly offered course in pedagogy. However, there is a wide diversity of funding patterns and subfields in biology (with some becoming their own independent departments). As a result, two students earning doctoral degrees in the biological sciences at the same university may experience very different training, with one required to take a course on teaching, and the other, not.
In a quick review of other liberal-arts fields, we found three disciplines that often require graduate courses on pedagogy: mathematics, composition and rhetoric, and world languages. (A caveat about foreign-language doctoral programs: We found that, typically, they offer pedagogy courses only on the teaching of language, not on the teaching of literature in translation, despite the fact that faculty positions routinely want people to teach both language and literature in translation.)
We also looked at teaching-and-learning centers on the 30 campuses. Not all of them had such a center, but most did. A cursory examination showed that these centers routinely offer workshops (in-person, online, or both) on teaching skills. Some also offer a credit-bearing course or a certificate credential for teaching at the college level. We were unable to find any data on the percentage of doctoral students who take part in instructional training at teaching centers. But by necessity, those training options are multidisciplinary. So in most cases, doctoral students who participate do so in addition to their departmental requirements.
Finally, we reviewed the standards of the six regional organizations that accredit universities. Only three — the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) — mention doctoral education in their accrediting standards but none of those references relate to teaching skills. All six accreditors do indicate that institutions must maintain high-quality teaching standards. Still, none of them have specific standards for how effective an institution must be at training doctoral students to teach at the postsecondary level.
A few fields — such as chemistry and psychology — have discipline-based accrediting bodies that could require evidence of effectiveness in training doctoral students to teach. Yet they do not.
In short, that perceived disconnect? It remains the reality.
Few faculty members have sufficient preparation to teach because the emphasis of doctoral education is on research. A 2018 journal article, “The Lecture Machine,” argued that a series of entrenched practices in how we admit and fund doctoral students, and how we hire and promote faculty members, combine to “select” for a focus on scholarship, rather than on teaching. And why should academics do otherwise since they see few incentives to attend to pedagogy, and sometimes they are even warned that too much focus on teaching might jeopardize their careers?
American graduate education in the arts and sciences remains trapped in a vicious circle, training successive generations of faculty members for research responsibilities at a time when teaching expertise is needed — perhaps more than ever before.
Four Next Steps to Better Prepare Ph.D.s to Teach
We propose the following to change the paradigm for the preparation of future faculty members in arts and sciences.
Design a required pedagogy course. What might a graduate course on teaching include? We reviewed the literature on the challenges facing faculty members in America’s college classrooms and developed a proposed a minimal list of topics such a course could cover:
- Recent research about learning from cognitive science, psychology, education, and other relevant fields.
- Effective classroom practices in our respective disciplines.
- Learning goals (adapted to the discipline), such as critical thinking, creative problem-solving, communication, information literacy, and teamwork.
- Curricular design, task design, and assessment (formative and summative).
- Best practices for diversity, equity, and inclusion (e.g., understanding students’ identities, our own identity in the classroom dynamic, and applying principles of universal design for learning).
- Best uses of technology for teaching and learning.
- Providing actionable feedback to students.
- Enhancing student engagement through real-world experiences.
- Reflecting on one’s own teaching, and planning for continuous improvement.
Require at least one if not two credit-bearing courses on teaching. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, given that people earn a doctoral degree in order to teach at the postsecondary level. Here’s how a two-course requirement might work:
- Students could first take a universitywide graduate course on the teaching of the liberal arts, developed and taught by experts in schools of education and campus teaching centers.
- The second course could focus on how to teach your discipline effectively. The goal would be to develop what Lee Shulman has identified as “pedagogical content knowledge” — meaning not just expertise on the content of your field but on how this particular content is best taught.
Evaluate graduate-student teaching. Once they have completed one or more courses on pedagogy, students should apply what they’ve learned in the classroom. Programs could ask doctoral students to:
- Observe other faculty members in the classroom (in their field and in other disciplines), and reflect on their teaching, syllabi, and task design.
- Develop a syllabus for a proposed course.
- Be observed and evaluated in their own teaching.
Make the commitment to classroom training official. Last, but not least, the accrediting bodies should consider adding expectations for doctoral programs to include instructional training.
Besides providing essential career preparation for graduate students, the changes we propose here could enhance faculty satisfaction in teaching and student satisfaction in learning. We see few downsides to doctoral programs producing better-trained scholars and practitioners.
We believe, most fundamentally, that the doctoral degree constitutes a license to teach at the undergraduate level. The steps we have proposed here could, finally, help doctoral training escape the vicious circle in which it is trapped.
