Articles on teaching

I want to share links to three different articles related to teaching I’ve come across recently (though one of them is not exactly a recent article :)).

The first one is from the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Prepare-PhD-Students/142893/. The main point of this piece is that post-graduate (or graduate in American edu-speak) programmes in the US pay little attention to preparing their students for teaching.

“The most glaring defect of our graduate programs, however, is how little they do to prepare their students to teach. Doctoral candidates have long had the chance to assist professors in large lecture courses by leading weekly discussions among small groups of undergraduates. Yet only a minority of those assistants report that they receive adequate supervision by the faculty member in charge of the course. In fact, professors often tell their graduate students not to spend much time on their teaching duties, lest it distract them from the all-important task of writing a thesis.”

With several American branch campuses present in Education City, Doha, Qatar, there is on-going discussion about quality teaching, what it means, who actually delivers it, whether university professors prefer to delegate teaching to their TAs, etc. In some cases, there is more stress on research than on teaching, possibly resulting in less effective education than could/should be offered to students. For example, many former students of mine (I teach English in a university prep/foundation programme, functioning as part of Education City) come back from different universities with critical remarks about some of their professors, who spend only the absolute required minimum of their time teaching (sometimes hastily, carelessly, ineffectively), as they focus mainly on their research.

Reading the Chronicle piece, I was reminded of an older essay by Lee S. Shulman, published in Educational Researcher in 1986, where he says that the relatively high social/academic status teachers enjoyed in the past was based on and reflected their superior knowledge. A university degree in a specific subject would lead the graduate to a teaching position where he (it was usually a “he” in those days, with more “shes” starting to enter the profession in the 20^th century as women were gradually allowed to study in universities) would share his expertise with his students (for instance, both Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir taught philosophy in prestigious secondary schools). So, teaching used to be associated with solid content knowledge and was a highly esteemed profession practised by well-educated people who were first and foremost experts in their areas. However, in more recent times that solid subject knowledge has been relegated to a secondary place, with an increased emphasis on methodology. This has become one of the factors contributing to loss of teacher prestige.

Here is the pdf version: Shulman

And finally, here comes another related article, though considerably lighter in tone :).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/galanty-miller/college-professor-tips_b_4384769.html

Magda Rostron