For me, yesterday’s conversation came at an interesting time for a number of reasons. One reason is that we are at the end of the semester and so one of the things all of the professors have to do is submit merit reports. And although there have been many efforts lately to alter the merit review process to be more considerate of service and administration, it remains heavily biased toward scholarship and includes little consideration of teaching.
At the same time, just this past Monday the New York Times ran an article about efforts to create alternative teacher certification programs akin to Connecticut’s Alternate Route to Certification. After I posted that article on my wall in Facebook, I ended up in a lengthy discussion with my friend Jim who teaches at one of the SUNY campuses. Jim basically was arguing to get rid of education programs entirely, and I was countering by saying that most professors could benefit from some coursework in teaching methods.
So this was interesting to me as I listened to the young women in my class (I have only one male student, and he was absent that day) talking about their professors. They did praise a few of their professors. One was praised for being brilliant and for being able to facilitate lively discussions that involved the whole class. Another was praised for the quality of her writing instruction, particularly her ability to train the students how to run effective peer response groups. But then there were the complaints about one professor who flat out refused to read any rough drafts of the paper he assigned for the course because it was not a W class and so therefore he had no intentions of doing any writing instruction, even simple proofreading of a draft. Several professors were excoriated for being incapable of leading a discussion. Complaints ranged that they either just liked to hear themselves talk, or they cut off students, or belittled students, or did little more than ask a handful of questions that were answered by two or three of the same students every week, and somehow they thought this constituted discussion. Other students complained of professors whose writing assignments were so narrow and rigid that writing papers for them seemed like nothing more than a guessing game. Or the professor who bragged about giving only ten A’s in his lengthy career. (One student wondered aloud if this didn’t indicate a failure on the professor’s part, that in all his decades of teaching he never learned how to mentor students into doing their best work). And there were many complaints about papers with letter grades and no comments, or papers not returned for weeks, or not returned at all.
Most of this discussion involved English professors, but Education professors did not get universal praise, either. Many students expressed incredulity at the professors whose teaching violates every pedagogical principle they promote. Many were shocked by how many Education professors have spent little or no time in K-12 classrooms as teachers.
I encouraged the students to emulate the many examples of good teaching they mentioned, and to learn by inverse example from the others. I also pointed out a couple of things. One, for many of the professors who lecture rather than lead discussions or who assign papers but don’t teach writing, these were the dominant modes of instruction for decades, including the instruction they received. And two, as a result of that, it has only been recently (and certainly not universal) that graduate students in English have begun to receive extensive pembinaan in teaching, especially the teaching of writing. And it is likewise a recent phenomenon (and also not a universal one) to require students studying to be high school English teachers to have extensive content coursework. I recall when students at UConn studying to be high school English teachers only had to take one English course a semester their ingusan and senior years. Now, students have to take at least eight English courses, which is only two fewer than the straight English majors. And the students who pursue the dual degree in English and Secondary Education have to take thirteen English courses—three more courses than the regular English majors!
To me, these are good signs, at least at UConn. In truth, good teachers do come out of alternate certification programs, and lousy teachers still come out of rigorous traditional education programs. (And some coursework in education does seem pretty superfluous—or at least it did to me twenty years ago!). And many professors figure out how to be damn good teachers without ever having received any formal pembinaan in how to teach. But these tend to be the exceptions. At least we know that UConn is producing secondary teachers who are entering the field with significantly more content knowledge than we used to have. And graduate students, at least those here in the English Department, are entering the field of higher education with significantly more pedagogical pembinaan than graduate students from earlier generations. So hopefully my friend Jim’s criticism of high school English teachers will come to have less and less merit, and my undergraduate students’ criticism of their professors will likewise become less relevant and normative.
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