How students today view college

cobrat
Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:52:19 +0000

maggiedog:

Cobrat,

So true about the K-12 teachers! But at least they are SUPPOSED to know how to teach, and are given some education related to teaching skills and techniques. Most profs and TAs just wing it and have no actual training in how to teach.



Theoretically, yes. In actual practice, not necessarily. Nearly everyone I knew who attended a teaching certification program or did an undergrad/Masters at an ed school…including top 3 grad programs have said the skills they impart have little/no applicability to the actual classrooms they ended up teaching They learned far more applicable teaching skills from the internships and on the job as new teachers.

Not too different from how Profs learned their teaching skills from what I’ve seen. And despite having little/no training from Ed schools…they’ve all turned out to be better teachers than many K-12 teachers I’ve experienced or heard from countless undergrads.



The fact that some university professors actively dislike teaching and would prefer to spend all of their time on their own research tends to undercut this, of course.



A large part of that is the incentive system at research oriented universities. Hiring, gaining tenure, and promotions/prestigious awards are all conditioned overwhelmingly by one’s research/research potential. Worse, at some research universities…having too many teaching awards/being a good teacher is actually disdained by older research oriented faculty as signs a younger Prof on the tenure track is “not serious” or even “pandering” to undergrads.

Moreover, this carries over into university rankings as amount of research grants gained and research output factor much more heavily than teaching quality.

Why do you think the Ivies, MIT and other peer elite schools became highly esteemed universities not only in the US…but also globally? From what I’ve heard from friends who attended those institutions and my own observations…teaching quality can be quite hit-or-miss depending on how lucky one is with a given assigned Prof/TA of a given course.

In short, the above phenomenon is a symptom of a wider systemic problem of incentives at research universities.