Are college professors taught how to teach?

No, they are not. They get their Ph. Ds in their academic field and are hired based on that, their publications and sample lectures they give during the interview process. They do not take any formal classes in how to teach.

Nope. There is a professor in my department who never taught a class until he was hired as a professor.

I did a teaching fellowship program thing during my first year teaching in grad school. It was optional. To be honest I didn’t get much out of it.

There are a lot of professors who take it upon themselves to learn teaching strategies. In my experience, despite their lack of formal training, most professors care deeply about their students and the quality of their teaching.

Not in my experience. I was hired to teach at my current college because I was considered an expert in certain areas in my field.

Not that I would ever consider myself an expert in anything.

I find it rather troubling that college professors don’t learn how to teach. I am paying a lot of money for my college degree and it is frustrating to think that I am not even learning from trained teachers.

@nikipedia, I agree that many professors care about their students, but I think caring can only take one so far. Knowing how to teach seems to me to be a pretty important part of you know, teaching.

Strictly, they are not required to learn how to teach. However, most universities offer a lot of resources so that they can learn to teach. They are often incentivized to take advantage of them. For example, some funding is tied to being a teaching assistant, and courses in teaching are offered for free, and these can show up in a transcript and/or be an asset to a scholarship/admissions/job application. Universities also offer workshops in teaching, and in preparing teaching dossiers (which means the student learns what skills are necessary to be considered a good teacher). And some graduate programs require that the students give course lectures in partial fulfillment of the degree.

In addition to all this, work at the graduate level by definition requires that the student be able to teach his own work to a wider audience. To produce a thesis is only a part of the requirements; they must be able to explain what they’ve done before their committee and their fellow students, then before their peers at conferences and in publications.

It is possible to ignore these, and go on to be a college or university prof, but in my experience most people on an academic path tend to do at least some work on their teaching skills.

But finally, I think that the reason that this process is considered to be sufficient to be able to teach undergraduate students, without formal training in education, is that the burden of learning the material at the undergraduate level is on the student. As an undergraduate, you are expected to figure out what material you need to learn to earn the grade that you want in your course, and you are expected to learn it yourself. What the professor has to offer you personally is beside the point at this level. You have to be able to succeed despite his training, or lack of it. That’s your job. And just as that is the expectation of undergrads, the same thing is expected of graduate students regarding teaching. The university is not going to tell us what we need to do to get our teaching skills up to par. We need to figure that out for ourselves, find the time for it, and get it done. That’s our job.

@glacial but things like how much homework is appropriate or how many pages a paper should be, or how many assignments work best in a 16 week time frame are pretty much trial and error. It seems as though college professors should have some training in how best to present that material at the very least.

@SuperMouse I’m having trouble imagining any professional development workshop about teaching at the university level defining the “ideal” number of pages for an essay, or how many assignments should be given out. I think your expectations may be a bit unrealistic.

But, that being said, the course outline should have indicated what the expectations were at the beginning of the course – was there not an opportunity for you to drop it when you discovered how much work was required? That is generally a “last chance” for students to avoid disaster.

I’m not complaining about a specific class (I am done with coursework), and I am not saying there should be a set number of pages per assignment. Those were just examples of things that teachers need to consider. I think that a 1000 level class with 7 ten page papers is inappropriate. There should be some required training for those types of things.

I have two brothers who are college professors. They both took teacher assistant jobs right after they finished their undergrad work. One was only 22 years old with zero teaching experience. Their only qualification was that they had undergraduate degrees in fields totally unrelated to education with no teaching background or training. This really isn’t an ideal situation for students paying a lot of money for a college course.

@SuperMouse, unfortunately many do not. There’s a really bad disconnect at least in many American universities; professors get jobs at R-1 (top research) schools for their research capability, and not for their teaching. Teaching is just how they earn their bread (as it is mine). As a general rule, good teachers tend to end up in small private schools or community colleges, where the pressure to “publish or perish” is not so severe (but I bear witness to the fact that splendid teachers can be found at top universities as well).

I’m trying to bridge the gap between teaching and research myself, and I know that many other graduate students and professors are as well. I ended up in academia because I was lucky enough to have excellent teachers in my life, going back to high school. I am very lucky in that my graduate department has cultivated an embrace of pedagogy. I have taught small classes with students for 4 semesters already, and I had a teaching workshop my very first semester in grad school. Professors in my department coordinate classes tightly with their TAs; we are absolutely not let loose to do whatever we want. But from what I’ve heard, this is very unusual. Even grad students in other departments at my school often don’t have to teach. They live off their advisers’ grants, or get by on fellowships. I’ve spoken with newly minted PhDs in the sciences, for instance, who never taught a class before they landed a job.

I predict that with the rising disdain for higher and liberal arts education in America, and in view of the continued depression, professors had damn well better focus on becoming better teachers. It’s the only way we justify our position in the university system.

I understand that it must be frustrating for you to compare how much pedagogy you’ve had to study with the lack of teaching training for your professors, but college professors are (supposedly) teaching adults, while targeted pedagogy and psychological understanding is much more necessary for teaching children.

No. They aren’t. I went through all the hoops you did, then taught high school for 9 years. Last fall I started teaching at a community college and jaw-drop big difference in expectations. I’m evaluated on showing up on time, timely grading and whether I keep office hours far more than I am on my teaching.

Professors are not generally evaluated on how well they teach—they’re evaluated on their publications, how many grants they won, what they can bring to their dept, workshops they’ve presented at, etc. My sister’s a professor and she stresses over these a lot—makes herself sick making sure her research gets published and that she gets recognized by the big Associations.

The only place where their teaching skills might, to a tiny degree, be looked at is when the students do the end-of-semester evaluations, and even that does not look at how the materials is taught that much.

SAD. I think it’s terrible. I believe professors should be educators, not just experts.

In their defence, university students are expected to do the work themselves, and not be coddled by the docents.

@ragingloli I agree that college students don’t need to be coddled, but I think with tuition fees they should at least be entitled to classes taught be professors who know how to teach. That really doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.

@bookish1 “It’s the only way we justify our position in the university system.”

Wow, I really disagree with that. I think partly because I abhor the “college education as a commodity” philosophy.

@SuperMouse But then do you disagree with what I said above (and @ragingloli did) that it is the student’s responsibility to learn the material, regardless of what the teacher has to offer in the classroom? Because once a student accepts that, it becomes a lot easier for them to succeed.

@glacial so you are saying that it is the student’s responsibility to spend their tuition on classes from untrained teachers? Where is the accountability for the professors to teach the material in a way that is appropriate for the subject and the students? It sounds like you are trying to convince me that the professors have no accountability for what or how the teach and it is up to the students to get with it or leave. Colleges are charging students for providing a service, they should have qualified, trained professors offer that service.

I work at a university and as I mentioned, I have two brothers who are professors. Whose eyes are you trying to pull the wool ever by disagreeing with @bookish1‘s assertion? It is very well known that “publish or perish” is the battle cry for most major universities.

I would agree with the consensus that most college professors are hired for their abilities in fields other than teaching and education. Many are there because they have a deep interest in their specific field and want to do research. That being said, the best professor in my department by far is the one with a PhD in instructional psychology.

@SuperMouse Sigh. You are misrepresenting what I said. First: we fundamentally disagree about what constitutes “value for money” in the university system, so I am not going to argue that with you.

Next, I did not say anything about @bookish1‘s “publish or perish” comment. He said that focusing on becoming better teachers was the only way we can justify our position in the university system. I said that I disagreed with that. As a scientist and a researcher, my position in the university system is justified by my work as a scientist. If I want to continue to do the kind of research I do, it is going to be within the university system. And I will teach because that will be part of my obligation to the university where I work. The teaching will not justify my position there: my research will. And “publish or perish” is exactly why that is the case. No journal accepts a paper because the author was a good teacher.

Now, that isn’t to say that I don’t want to be a good teacher. Of course I want to be a good teacher, and I do put in the extra hours to hone those skills. But I do this mainly because I care about my students, not to “justify my position”. That’s all I was saying.

@SuperMouse I think we are painting things with a broad brush. Some colleges – small liberal arts ones – are focused more on the quality of the teaching and large, research universities are focused on research. It is usually assumed that at the college level, professors do not have to have education courses. Some are better at teaching than others, of course, but certain issues, such as classroom management that are important to learn at the public school level do not apply to the university. And often word of mouth can steer one to the really good teaching teachers.

@glacial any system that is designed to teach and retains or releases employees based on their credentials as a scientist without any regard for their ability to teach is fundamentally flawed. One’s position in a university system should be mostly justified by one’s ability to teach. It seems rather simple since the purpose of a university is to teach students. Whether I misunderstood your statement to @bookish1 or not, it still sounds like the only people you want to hold accountable for the quality of a college education are the students and that makes no sense.

@janbb even if a university is primarily a research university, students should be taught by someone with at least some training to be a teacher. I do think that students who chose more research focused institutions understand that and may have even picked the school because of it, but that shouldn’t keep the professors from having some training. It doesn’t make much sense to that the only way for students to get a decent teacher is to rely on word of mouth.

@SuperMouse Nope, I don’t agree with a single thing you’ve said there. I hope you can take something from my point of view, but basically i’m out of this discussion. Good luck with your studies.

@glacial I find it sad that a college professor insists on arguing that it is perfectly normal and acceptable for a college professor to have no training as a teacher and all of the accountability falls on the student. What a depressing state of affairs for today’s college students.

@SuperMouse, I agree that in an ideal world, faculty would be both world-renowned experts in their research as well as trained instructors, but that seems to be asking quite a bit of them. In my experience, the current, imperfect system works reasonably well—I have yet to come out of a college course feeling like I hadn’t been taught adequately.

And as I said before, most professors take it upon themselves to become the best teachers they can be. I remember one particularly horrible physics course taught by a person who I was certain was incompetent and just torturing us by forcing us to take quizzes on material we hadn’t been taught yet. It turned out that it was a new pedagogical technique he had recently learned about that had been shown to improve learning in hard science classes by forcing students to interface with the material before coming into the lecture. That way, they were better prepared to understand the lecture and ask good questions.

@glacial: I do not agree with the sentiment that you quoted. FAR FROM IT. I disdain the commodification of “education” more than I can express, but it’s a function of the economic system to which we are all subject.

I know that history is important, even if most of the rest of my country couldn’t give a damn. I know that pure science is important and have great respect for it. I know that philosophy and psychology are important. But the humanities in particular are under siege in the U.S, not to mention higher education in general. I don’t know about Canada. In a Western liberal democracy, being a college professor frequently means that you earn your bread by teaching, because our economic system mandates that students place themselves in debt to earn B.A.‘s in order to achieve or maintain middle class status. It’s something that has been on my mind much of late.

goes back to grading papers written by undergrads who are going to college because it’s the only way to be middle class and therefore a person in the U.S.

This is another reason why I think there is about to be large disruptions in higher education.

Traditionally, if a tenured professor was a poor teacher, there wasn’t much that could be done about it; s/he didn’t have any competition, the students had to put up with it. However, now top universities are putting their courses online for free (e.g. MIT, Harvard, Stanford), taught by some of the best professors in the world. Why would a university use a professor with poor teaching ability when they could accept a course taught by one of the best, for free?

In the humanities we are given some instruction in teaching. Grad students are not simply turned loose on the undergrads to sink or swim; they given progressively more responsibilities (grader, then section leader, then instructor) under the supervision of experienced teachers. Departments that handle large numbers of required courses such as freshman composition may require grad students to take a practicum or other course related to teaching. A well-functioning department will have a system of mentorship in place to pass along best practices to grad students and new faculty. Evidence of competence in teaching is usually a requirement for getting a job and advancing, and those who can’t teach are encouraged to seek other careers.

Still, those who said that the onus is on the student are correct. I had a French professor
observed that in the US we have lost sight of the distinction between a student and a pupil. A student is active; a pupil is passive, merely opening to let the light in. In most European countries, one is not called a student in the grades below university.

The tuition issue is irrelevant. The relationship between a teacher and a student is not the same as the relationship between a waiter and a customer at a restaurant. Talk to your legislators if you think tuition is too high—higher education should be an entitlement in a technologically advanced society—but what you are paying has no bearing on how you should be taught or how professors should be trained.

Interesting video from Clayton Christensen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edq07biGpC0#t=2934s

I wish to God my school offered resources to help us learn how to teach. What @submariner describes sounds wonderful. We are expected to jump into TAships and then assistant teaching with no instruction in instruction. Reading this thread has been a revelation; I didn’t realize other schools offered assistance in this area. I figured it was just another part of being a grad student and the expectation that we ought to figure things out for ourselves. Kinda pissed now.

They are in Holland. Even though shortage may lead to colleges taking short cuts and putting them in front of a class before they finished their relevant training.

At my university while we are not compelled to do it, we are encouraged to complete a Grad Dip in Higher Education. New academics also have to take a training course which covers the fundamentals of good teaching practice. In addition to the mentoring process that goes with working as a sessional (supervised by an experienced course convenor) we also have people to support us in curriculum design and the incorporation of blended learning elements. In our performance reviews, student evaluations (which are done for every course) are taken seriously and a lecturer who was consistently getting poor results would be expected to undertake some professional development to improve their teaching.

However, I do agree with @glacial. We are not teaching school children. We are working in the adult education field and as such there is a strong expectation that students will be (or will become) independent learners. We actually give our first year students (and students further down the track with their studies) with a great deal of support and there are many resources they can call on to help them manage the transition into tertiary study.

While research is still the main and I would say major focus in terms of career progression at my university, increasingly people can progress based on their teaching practice. We can be awarded teaching awards from our university and can apply for grants to research effective teaching mechanisms and ideas.

Does it seem odd to justify no training in teaching for teachers and hold students solely accountable when they could literally be barely twelve weeks out of a high school? It seems kind of a stretch to lay all the responsibility of success or failure of these “adult learners” based on the fact that they are now college students. The “well they are adults” argument makes perfect sense for non-traditional college students, but it just doesn’t fly with kids fresh out of high school who legally may not even be considered adults.

@submariner this question isn’t about complaining about tuition, and I disagree that the “tuition issue is irrelevant”. When one is paying for a product or service (an education in this case), it really it isn’t too much to ask for a trained professional to provide said product or service. Why should college be any different? To my mind it shouldn’t.

^So if you weren’t paying for it, there would be no such responsibility on the part of the instructor? Or if it is paid for by taxpayers or employers, should we then cater exclusively to the needs of whoever is footing the bill, and ignore the needs of particular students?

You’re paying for access to the knowledge that a professor has acquired in their discipline, NOT for the latest baloney the schools of education have come up with. Rather than making college teachers take more courses in education, they should make high school teachers take fewer.

College professors are paid for their mastery of their field, their ability to advance to their field, and their ability to pass that knowledge on to competent students. I’ve had professors who were boring and some who I thought did not grade my work fairly, but none I couldn’t learn from, because I came to college reasonably well prepared and I had at least the minimum amount of ability and motivation. If a student is deficient in any of these three areas (preparation, ability, motivation), it is not the professor’s problem, though the better ones will try to help the student overcome these shortcomings.

That’s the biggest difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education. K-12 teachers do have to try to prepare and motivate students, and identify deficiencies of ability that may require special education. They have to be aware of developmental issues and they have to deal with parents. By the time a student reaches college, they should be ready to take charge of their own education.

[late edit: I meant “advance their field”, not “advance to their field”.]

@submariner I believe all education should be decent, whether it is paid through property taxes for out of the student’s pocket. My point is that K-12 educators get some training in how to teach, college professors should as well. I think it is ridiculous to say the answer is to give high school teachers less training.

I find it really interesting that college professors are working so hard on this question to justify their lack of training as teachers. Each one has said they care about students and want to be decent teachers, yet all have said that the rightfully have no accountability for a student’s success or failure – that all falls to the student. I have had some crappy college professors from whom I have learned absolutely nothing. That reality had nothing to do with my being a grown up or my ability to study and learn and everything to do with the professor’s lack of ability to teach.

A good teacher, no matter what grade level, is not a coddler! A good teacher expects the student, at all ages, to take appropriate ownership of their learning. I taught for 9 years and I despise coddling teachers, especially and particularly in special ed, which seems to attract the worst coddlers.

But I’m a student right now and am taking Generative Phonology at the masters level, which is a difficult subject by itself. My professor is best described as nebulous—he jumps from topic to unrelated topic, does not use visual aids to explain his points, often talks to the board while scribbling in a handwriting that is not legible, even up close and erases it quickly, to write something else in its place. This is a bad teacher—75 minutes of this twice a week, and I’d be better off just reading the book myself and doing research in the library, which I do anyway to take ownership of my education. Now, since I spend time figuring all this out for myself, what is his role in that 150 minutes a week that I’m paying for?

Other students say if you listen to him long enough, he has occasional nuggets of wisdom. Okay. Nuggets at the cost I’m paying? If I’m paying a Tier-1 out of state tuition rate, I expect someone who has some ability to teach. They’re getting paid a good salary, and for that, I do believe it’s their job to make their lecture beneficial. By beneficial, I don’t babying the students, explaining it in primer language, or chasing them for their homework, no, but I do believe professors should at least make their lectures clear, relevant and accessible.

@SuperMouse: For what it’s worth, I’m in-between student and professor myself, and I very consciously try to maintain an awareness of what it’s like to be an undergrad. (With the knowledge that I am different from most undergrads because I was nerdy/masochistic/enough of a loser to go to grad school!)

Something that’s really struck me since beginning as a T.A. is the fact that in the U.S., if you went to a public school, the quality of your education comes down to the tax base of the county you lived in. By and large, the students who dazzle me with their writing ability come from rich ass counties, and the students who are close to functionally illiterate come from very poor counties. Moreover, since we have nothing like a system of national educational standards in the U.S. (was No Child Left Behind supposed to be that? Another rant for another day…), I can’t make any assumptions about what students have been taught before they come to my classroom.

With all of this in mind, I do think that I should have accountability in my classroom. I can’t just set standards that do not correspond to the reality of what my students can reasonably achieve. This is why I will give ungraded assignments early on to establish a sort of baseline for my students’ writing and analysis skills. I do have high expectations to push my students, but I make them known and model the skills that I will require them to use. This is very common practice within my department. I even teach how to make a thesis statement and how to do analysis, which I should not have to teach as a college instructor of history courses, but educational standards are so low and uneven in the U.S. that I feel it is my responsibility to do so, because my students might not have been taught these things by anyone.

@bookish1 from your first post in this thread forward, I have had tons of respect for you as a teacher. It is clear that you are trying to help your students learn by honing your own teaching skills. I applaud you for going out of your way to help your students succeed and not using the facts that professors do research and college is for adults to avoid accountability. Also, I agree 100% with your assessment of the national education system. NCLB just implemented testing and more testing and did nothing to improve the quality of education. I know tons of public school teachers and most of them are dedicated and talented but NCLB did nothing to help them teach, it just tightened the restraints because now they have to focus on “teaching to the test”.

@linguaphile I agree completely with your statement about teachers not coddling students. As a parent and a (student) teacher and librarian, I refuse to coddle students. I try to empower them to succeed for themselves. I think you make some great points.

Not in Germany, which is a shame.

@SuperMouse: Thank you. It’s tough to find the perfect line between being fair and setting high standards to push students to succeed, but I sure try. And I was among the first cohort of high school students subjected to NCLB…. In advanced classes, the teachers and students were frustrated that we had to waste time on those tests at all, whereas in the regular and remedial classes, those standards ended up being all that students were expected to learn. Talk about lowering the bar >_>