A recent essay in The Chronicle called for doctoral programs to require courses on teaching skills and to better prepare Ph.D.s to teach undergraduates. But there’s another area of pedagogy that academe has entirely ignored: how to teach graduate students.
Why is there no teacher training for graduate faculty members? That question was on my mind this semester when I was teaching a new graduate seminar based on an undergraduate course I had created. Not surprisingly, my graduate students responded very differently to the course material than my undergraduates did.
And that got me thinking back to the first time that I taught a graduate seminar, in the late 20th century. It had been a burning ambition of mine to teach a graduate seminar, but when I finally got the opportunity — after five years of undergraduate teaching — I realized that I had no idea how to approach the task.
So I did what most new assistant professors still do today: I put together a syllabus and hoped for the best. Over the years, as I gained experience, I figured out what I wanted to achieve as a graduate teacher, and I made adjustments. Gradually I got better at the job.
My point: I received no training on how to design or run my first graduate seminar. My new departmental colleagues assumed I already knew — yet they also knew that I had never taught one before. Typically, when you start teaching graduate courses, you have some classroom experience in undergraduate pedagogy. But teaching graduate students is a different game.
Teacher training for new graduate faculty members is virtually nonexistent in the arts and sciences. I’ve visited many university campuses, and I’ve yet to encounter any institutionalized training program on teaching graduate courses. There’s an enormous amount of scholarly literature devoted to undergraduate teaching and learning — it’s a thriving research field. By contrast, little has been written about how to teach graduate students.
That dearth seems to be based on two cherished but rarely examined assumptions:
Assumption No. 1: Any new faculty member should be able to acquire graduate-teaching skills by pedagogical osmosis. You were once a graduate student, right? So the argument goes, you just have to remember what seminars were like when you were in graduate school and teach yours the same way.
That’s pretty sketchy logic. To start with, it assumes that everyone’s graduate-school professors were worthy of emulation. Mine weren’t (with one exception — more on that later). It’s true that I liked the baked goods that one of my seminar leaders brought in every week. But the instruction I received was mostly what I call the beach-ball method: The professor starts off by asking something like, “So what did you think about X?” and the discussion proceeds like a beach ball bounced from place to place by a crowd before a rock concert.
Graduate students aim to please, so they tend to be good at keeping the ball aloft. But the beach-ball method has no telos: no aim. It’s not thoughtful. Instead, it’s unthought.
With experience like that, I didn’t have much to draw on when I started teaching my own graduate seminars. Certainly there are some good graduate teachers out there, and their students probably received better instruction than I did. But the notion that graduate-teaching skills simply materialize when you invert the lectern reduces teaching to a matter of luck and lore.
But really, the whole idea is fundamentally faulty. It assumes that because I was on the receiving end of graduate teaching, I should automatically be able to transform myself from student into teacher. By that logic, the experience of getting a haircut qualifies me to become a hairdresser. Yet somehow, I’m not ready to open a salon.
Assumption No. 2: Another longstanding rationale for this lack of training is that graduate education is faculty-centered, not student-centered. Historically, graduate teaching and learning have always been considered offshoots of faculty research. According to this model, when professors do their research, graduate teaching (and graduate-student learning) takes care of itself. Compare that with undergraduate education, on which we spend vast amounts of time, money, and attention, both for curricular and extracurricular student life.
Put simply, in graduate education, student welfare is not an end in itself. Faculty welfare is.
That’s why so many humanities seminars bear an invisible subtitle: “The Professor’s Next Book.” And that’s why the dissertation projects of students in the lab sciences are literally drawn from the research agendas of their faculty lab directors, whose grants fund the enterprise. When you follow the graduate-school money, it leads to faculty offices, not student lounges.
Unfortunately, graduate teaching is harder today than it has ever been — and I’m not even including advising, which is arguably the most important and challenging kind of graduate teaching these days. It’s become more difficult because graduate-student lives are more complicated than ever. The apprentice model that once governed graduate study (especially doctoral study) long ago disintegrated. Our students go on to diverse careers — mostly outside of higher education — and that fact ought to affect how we teach them.
If we are to meet graduate students’ needs as intellectuals and future professionals, figuring out what that entails is a task that should be on the agenda of any faculty member who teaches graduate courses. Yet giving that attention to teacher training — which would put graduate students’ needs first — remains a radical concept. As a result, too many graduate curricula are still built narrowly, to support the traditional career outcome of students earning Ph.D.s and becoming professors. And too many graduate courses focus less on learning outcomes than on coverage of the faculty instructor’s research interests.
I once heard a professor declare that it was a bad idea for him to teach a graduate survey course in his discipline. That would be teaching other people’s thinking, he said, while the real value lay in his own thinking about his own research. That, he insisted, was what students needed to witness. Surely it’s valuable to watch how professors think about their own research specialty, but learning shouldn’t be a spectator sport. In any case, graduate students need early exposure to the fundamentals of their field — and coursework is the best place to get it.
As long as we put ourselves ahead of our graduate students, we reinforce the message that graduate-level instruction doesn’t matter much. The ones who become professors absorb that lesson and are more likely to pass it on.
To break that cycle, we need to recognize graduate teaching as a separate arm of pedagogy and train colleagues how to do it better. I’m not suggesting we do that in doctoral programs. Instead, let’s train the graduate faculty members who will teach these courses and seminars. Institutions should make it easier for new faculty members to gain both formal and informal training on how to teach graduate students. Here are a few options:
- Go beyond the beach ball. The most memorable course I took in graduate school wasn’t offered by my department. It was a seminar on the art of leading a class discussion, brilliantly taught (via the case method) by two business-school professors. I found myself drawing on that course when I taught my first graduate seminars. My point: Some of the kinds of courses that might train new faculty members on graduate teaching might already be offered somewhere within your university. Survey the local educational landscape for useful resources.
- Draw on other professors as resources. There are good graduate teachers on just about every university campus. Organize visits to observe them in action for new faculty members. Have coffee afterward and talk teaching.
- Graduate schools (or large departments and programs) should convene a semester-long colloquium for new graduate faculty members on teaching graduate courses. Cross-disciplinary discussion is always a good thing, and in this case, it may generate innovation and even possible future partnerships. The colloquium could focus on specific topics during the term, such as syllabus development.
- One particular topic for colloquium discussion (or a workshop) is course assignments (because our changing times invite changing forms of assessment). Most graduate students will work outside of academe, so how does a professor teach the content of a discipline while also giving students an opportunity to develop skills that will serve them in diverse workplaces?
Those are just a handful of ideas. There are many further possibilities. Most important, we have to recognize the need to prepare new professors to teach graduate students — and then do something about it.
