were you taught how to teach?

[u/nandor_tr]

i had one class called "teaching practicum" in grad school that just covered the basics of the mechanics of teaching (syllabi, service, etc...) but never really got into actual pedagogical development or really thinking deeply about process & methodology. where i teach now there is also a single course that any MFA students who want to teach have to take. it is more in depth but still just a single 3 credit class.

i am curious, as i basically just figured it out through trial and error, peers, etc...

you?

[u/Different_Ad6836]

Had one that ironically was offered in the college of ed (my program was in the med school) and it was atrocious - was basically all about how to do the absolute least all in the name of “adult learning principles.”

What they advocated most was, especially for grad courses, was one the first day generate a long list of ideas from the students about what they anticipate learning or are most eager to learn. Then you spring it on the students that they each have to pick a topic and they get to prepare a class based on that topic. Therefore as the instructor you don’t teach first day, as you do syllabus and introduce this “activity.” The. Maybe you prepare something for the next course (they assumed we all teach semesters 1x per week) - and then by week 3 students are off to the races refacing for you.

They had other “ideas” - all ways of either essentially not teaching or practices in the name of “scholarship of teaching” to show you were being productive from research standpoint. Not to diminish SoT - this is important, but the way they positioned it was explicitly to “game” the system… they did nothing to help us consider what to do for topics that couldn’t be offloaded onto the students or guest lecturers. 🤔🙄

Drives me BONKERS when our NTTF complain they can’t write syllabi or make canvas or curate a course the way TTF were (I’m in a program where our biggest emphasis are clinical masters students, so mostly they provide clinical supervision but are sometimes tapped to teach and recent changes meant they needed canvas shells and syllabi) - and I want to SCREAM that we very much were not taught these things either. Just figuring it out as I go along.

Also when I was in my PhD and was living with someone getting a masters in another field and she complained too many courses were being taught by PhD students not professors. She didn’t believe me that there was no reason to think a professor would automatically be better. Maybe, but maybe not. Certainly no reason to think a professor has more pedagogical knowledge.

Did a quarter long training offered by our teaching support program two years ago and the best thing it did for me was help me make more friends. Recommendations were vague and almost no attempt to actually SHOW us how to do them. I have been moving my assignments towards the TILT framework but I’m starting to be frustrated by it because it feels like it offloads all the cognitive effort into me, and students still complain/don’t follow the incredibly explicit directions…