Teaching
Professors How To Teach
Phillip C. Wankat,
Purdue University
The observation has often been made that being a college
professor is the only learned profession in which practitioners
are not trained for their major tasks. Graduate students
are trained to do individual research, but they generally
are not trained for teaching or for mentoring others
in research. Instead, most college professors are forced
to implicitly adopt the techniques that they observed
from their teachers whilst they were students. The new
professors then try to adapt these techniques to the
context of their first academic position. This procedure
is enormously wasteful of time since the new professors
are trying to learn how to teach with very little assistance
at the busiest time of their career. In addition, there
is no organized method for learning how to employ new
teaching methods and/or new educational technologies.
A number of engineering professors interested in improving
engineering education have claimed that a better approach
would be to ensure that graduate students learn the basics
of how to teach. Approaches to teach how-to-teach courses
and workshops will be explored.
Unfortunately, the professors advocating this education
in teaching methods have had very little data, other
than anecdotal data, to show that courses or workshops
on teaching methods actually improve teaching. And the
most extensive of this data has been for workshops taught
to faculty, not for courses for graduate students. The
skeptical position, “I didn’t take such a
course and I became a good teacher,” has been hard
to refute without becoming personal about the skeptic’s
teaching ability. To help satisfy the need for data,
we conducted a survey in 2004 of graduates of an engineering
course on how to teach. The graduates took this course
between 1983 and 2002. The results show that graduates
who followed academic careers believe that this course
had a very significant impact on their careers. Perhaps
surprisingly, graduates who followed industrial careers
indicated a smaller but still quite significant impact
on their careers. In addition to exploring these results
in detail, the results of a small survey of teaching
courses in universities in the USA will be discussed.
These results indicate that the impact on students who
follow academic careers can probably be generalized to
these other courses.
Finally, other approaches to teach professors how to
improve their teaching will be briefly explored.
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