RSSThose Who Profess to Teach
August 8th, 2006 | View Comments
A reader wrote in response to my post about terrible research presentations:
Great job on expressing what I have always felt about professors and public speaking.
I am a proponent of home schooling for adults returning to college (external degree) for the reason of professors who read their lectures out of the very books we were supposed to read.
It’s for that reason that I skipped probably half of my undergraduate lectures. Why spend an hour in class when I can read it at home and teach it to myself in twenty minutes?
Also unhelpful: Professors whose lectures are completely unrelated to the books we were supposed to read.
Not only do most academics never receive formal training in public speaking, most academics also never receive formal training in teaching. In fact, many faculty members at leading universities actively dislike their teaching duties, consider it to be less valuable than their research, and cheer when they get grants to buy off so many semesters of teaching.
Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if universities didn’t keep insisting that research faculty were the best people to teach undergraduates.
The flaws of this system are highlighted by Roger C. Schank in his epilogue to the Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2006), titled “The Fundamental Issue in the Learning Sciences”. Issue #2 on his list is universities allowing their faculty to determine the curriculum.
Well, why not? Faculty are the experts. Wouldn’t they know what students who are studying in their field should learn?
This is indeed an interesting question and one that strikes at the heart of what is wrong with today’s universities. The average student goes to college intending to graduate and get a job in a field relevant to what he studied in school. Not a radical thought really? Seems right no?
A professor who teaches the field that the student has decided to study has a number of problems with this pretty straightforward idea however. The first problem the professor has with this idea is that he cannot relate to it. In general, professors have not actually worked in the real world versions of the disciplines they profess. A computer science professor for example (this was my primary field when I was professor) probably last wrote a computer program when he was a student in school. His specialty in computer science (mine was artificial intelligence) is what he wants to teach. Unfortunately, the average student needs to learn this specialty like he needs a hole in his head. But, the professor really doesn’t care about this. The professor wants to teach what he knows best, what he loves to think about, and what is the least work for him. So he makes up a dozen rationalizations about why his esoteric field is really very important for any computer science major to know.
Bear in mind that there are a lot of professors in any given department in a large university. and, they each want to teach their own specialty. And very few of them have real world experience. So, when all is said and done, the curriculum is a compromise hodge podge of specialty subjects that are surely “very important for every student to know” which when taken as a whole will not even come close to getting a student started in his profession in the real world. (p. 588)
Let’s just say that I let out a small cheer when I read this chapter, that finally, someone of import had validated all of the dark mutterings I had launched at the UW-Madison Computer Science Department in my undergraduate days.
That said, getting a college education is not a pointless endeavor, nor is “my professor sucks/is full of himself/doesn’t know what he’s talking about” legitimate justification for chronic bad grades. The best professor in the world can’t do anything with you if you don’t mentally engage in your studies. It’s a fallacy of today’s No Child Left Behind culture to put all of the blame for students’ lack of progress on their teachers.
There are many, many faculty members who do value teaching, who actively seek to improve their teaching, who are in touch with the real world, and who challenge and inspire their students. The practices of those professors are laid out in the book, What the Best College Teachers Do and I encourage anyone who’s interested in teaching or education to read it.
The principles in that book are the ones I keep in mind as I prepare to TA another course for fall semester. How to challenge my students and get them to really think about the material in a way that’s meaningful to them. How to identify students’ misconceptions and correct them. How to grade so that true learning is rewarded and shameless point-grubbing is minimized. How to create an open environment so that students feel comfortable coming to me with questions and suggestions for improving my teaching.
After all, engaging with my students and learning from them might be some of the best teaching training I’m going to get.
Reference
Schank, R. C. (2006). The fundamental issue in the learning sciences. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, (p. 587-592). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yvonne posted this on August 8th, 2006 @ 4:43pm in Education, Graduate School | Permalink to "Those Who Profess to Teach"
Discussion
No Comments
There are no comments yet. Be the first to leave one!
| Trackback |
And then keep track of the discussion by subscribing to this post's RSS feed.
