Are most doctoral students equipped with the essential skills and abilities to be effective teachers? Are new faculty members who recently graduated from a doctoral program prepared to lead an undergraduate course? What can doctoral programs do to ensure that all new graduates and future faculty members have been fully prepared and vetted for classroom teaching?
Unlike K-12 teachers, new faculty members who recently graduated from a doctoral program in the U.S. do not have to go through a certification process to ensure that they have met the minimum expectations to successfully assume university classroom teaching responsibilities at any level of instruction. While most universities consider teaching as a primary activity of their faculty and central to their missions, doctoral programs rarely make teacher training a primary responsibility. Universities invest heavily in first recruiting and then providing the resources that new junior faculty members need to succeed in the creation and dissemination of new knowledge by publishing in top journals and attracting large-dollar grants. Teaching, which is the activity with the highest visibility, immediacy and impact, might not fare well in these priorities. This paradox needs to be addressed in such a way that everyone recognizes how knowledge creation and teaching (i.e., “good” teaching) can be fully integrated to generate synergistic outcomes.
How do we solve this problem? As a starting point, it is important to acknowledge that becoming an effective teacher is a multifaceted and multi-year project that requires effort, time, and other resources to accomplish. The idea of expecting individual junior faculty members to develop both competence in and love toward teaching and a commitment toward continuous improvement on their own is a fallacy that has led many faculty search committees to be less vigilant in the vetting of prospective faculty members for teaching purposes. “We expect you to be a good teacher,” the search committee typically tells faculty prospects. With a few rare exceptions, the majority of doctoral students do not naturally possess the necessary skills and abilities to be successful in the classroom. It is also naïve to assume that by observing good teachers teach during the doctoral program, doctoral students can magically acquire the skills to be good teachers. It just does not work that way. Yes, mentoring and observation are important parts of the teaching development process, but they are not good and complete substitutes for all other intricate parts.
New faculty members are expected to be in the classroom on their first day at their new place of employment. There is very little room for experimentation or finding one’s way through teaching. When students or their parents invest in their education through either a lifetime of savings or loans, they do not expect a teacher who will be figuring out whether they know how to teach, discover whether they like teaching in the first place, or are committed to a life of continuous teaching improvement.
What is a possible solution then? A holistic approach to faculty development in teaching needs to start at the doctoral program level. First, doctoral programs should vet prospective students for their potential to be good classroom teachers in addition to their potential to perform research at a high level. GMAT or GRE scores say very little, if anything, about the potential to excel in the classroom as a teacher. The application process should capture information about the intangibles that often lead to good teaching: good communication skills; eagerness to share knowledge with others; willingness to learn how to teach; individual drive to improve one’s own teaching, patience, and excitement about teaching, among others. After they are admitted into the doctoral program, students should go through rigorous and formal training on teaching that covers such basic ideas as classroom learning techniques, developing syllabi, dealing with difficult behavioral student challenges, and having a clear understanding of learning objectives and corresponding class activities and assessments. Knowing what learning means and developing a clear understanding of how to teach students to learn should be fundamental knowledge taught and practiced in the doctoral program.
Second, each doctoral student should demonstrate in a real classroom setting that they can perform good teaching. Peer observations and corresponding reflections should accompany one’s application portfolio for an academic position. Referees of job-seeking students should clearly address how a student is prepared to succeed as a teacher in the classroom as much as they are ready to produce the next groundbreaking idea to solve the world’s problems. Prospective faculty members should demonstrate with evidence how they were able to use feedback they have received to improve their teaching. Applying for a faculty job without a teaching philosophy or a teaching portfolio that includes this evidence is akin to an individual entering a medical career without first going through medical school, completing a residency program, and obtaining licensure. I am reminded of the TV commercial featuring a surgeon who is just okay. Well, even in teaching where lives are not on the line, just okay is not okay.
Third, doctoral-granting institutions should offer a teaching certificate to each graduating student. The certificate should show that at the very minimum the student has attended and completed worthwhile teacher training, engaged in and led learning in an actual classroom, and was observed (and provided feedback) in the classroom. While implementing this might require additional resources, it is important to start conversations about formalizing teacher-training in the doctoral program, in a way that it provides an advantage to a job-seeking candidate who received such a certificate.
Fourth, each doctoral program should expect a graduating student to have completed a widely accepted teacher training program such as the one offered by ACUE and their course in Effective Teaching Practices (It should be noted that ACUE is a product and requires funding to support). If such an organized course is not a viable solution for doctoral programs, then multiple other resources are available in academia to help future faculty members enhance their teaching and learning skills. One such resource for STEM disciplines is the CIRTL Network, which promotes the integration of research, teaching and learning. CIRTL Network offers many teaching and learning programs for future faculty members. There needs to be a minimum hurdle and uniform standard that all future faculty members must pass in order to demonstrate their ability to lead a classroom of well-intentioned and captive audience of undergraduate students.
Fifth, accreditation organizations should engage with universities to develop new ways to assess the credentialing of faculty for teaching purposes above and beyond the idea that they have completed a certain number of hours in a particular field of study. The current approach to credentialing does not account for the potential quality of teaching that someone can perform in the classroom. The number of hours in a field of study might show expertise in that particular area, but it signals very little about expertise in teaching. A new approach to credentialing that perhaps relies less on the number of hours of coursework completed in a particular field of study and more on the quality of preparation to teach will certainly encourage changes in the preparation of future faculty members at the doctoral program level.
Think of providing a form of assurance that a graduating doctoral student can perform well in the classroom as the minimum and common entry-level expectation in academia. Passing on the entire teaching development responsibility to institutions who hire new doctoral program graduates is a direct disregard of professional norms. Above all, it is really unfair to our students! To be clear, I do not suggest that all faculty development needs to be done in the doctoral program. Nor do I advocate the creation of new rules and more bureaucracy to make this happen. In fact, as long as doctoral programs recognize the importance of developing their graduates to teach effectively and actively engage in preparing them to do this, there is no need for rules. Equally important is the fact that hiring institutions not only have the responsibility to properly vet faculty candidates regarding their teaching credentials, but they should also continue to monitor their development progress through an official programmatic effort.
Let’s put teaching on par with research when it comes to training and expected outcomes, and let’s back it up with the necessary support and a culture change that elevates the importance of teacher training in doctoral education. The ideal faculty member is one who can perform at a high level in both teaching and research, and of course be a good department citizen. While this is a lofty goal, do our students deserve anything less?
