It’s A Mystery To Me

Let’s see, of the 368 “usable” data points (less than 28% of the sample), the average age of these folks is almost 40 and they have, on average, 4 years of full-time experience and a little more than 2 years of part-time experience. Almost 80% are tenure track.

And even though they love their jobs and have apparently been putting in more than 50 hours per week (on average), the percentage who consider themselves (self-assessment) to be (very) effectively prepared remains embarrassingly low on everything except proficiency in teaching undergraduates. Not that one should be inclined to extrapolate from this small, non-random sample, but it is a bit disconcerting that one-fourth of our undergraduates are apparently being taught by individuals who are not confident that they are well prepared to be doing what they’re doing ... and that’s, by far, their strongest point as faculty members. And this in an age when establishing self-esteem is all the rage in the academic world.

On the other hand, if you flip on over to another InsideHigherEd article today (the one discussing the study by James West and Scott Carrell), you will discover that ...

“For math and science courses, students taking courses from professors with a higher ‘academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status’ tended to perform worse in the ‘contemporaneous’ course but better in the ‘follow-on’ courses, according to the report. This is consistent, the report asserts, with recent findings that students taught by ‘less academically qualified instructors’ may become interested in pursuing further study in particular academic areas because they earn good grades in the initial courses, but then go on to perform poorly in later courses that depend on the knowledge gained from the initial courses.”

These young faculty members are a mystery to me.

Frizbane Manley, at 7:15 am EDT on July 11, 2008

Preparedness of new PhDs

Is anyone surprised by the fact that new college teachers don’t feel prepared? Most graduate programs teach students nothing at all about teaching, or about how colleges are run (what deans do, where the money comes from, who oversees whom), or about how to find out about the students one will be teaching. And this is nothing new.

As with so much survey data, this just puts more padding on something we all knew and know and do nothing about.

J. B. Schneewind

Jerome B. Schneewind, Professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, at 8:50 am EDT on July 11, 2008

The study gives us data on variation in opinion respondents have about their performance; it doesn’t tell us what they actually accomplish in the classroom. It would have been interesting to run this survey alongside peer and student evaluations. It would have been interesting to know what the respondents views are on good teaching so we can better understand their self-evaluation.

Most grad programs don’t worry about pedagogy because those doing the training are dedicated to giving their PhDs the content of their discipline, and holding forth and mentoring are the principal delivery tools for this content. Pedagogy is, in this model, just form.

I guess as long as undergrads, or their parents, continue to pay for the degree-granting process, and as long as hires are made based on qualifications other than teaching (pedigree and fit for example), then pedagogy will never really matter to PhD granting institutions.

Andrew Schlewitz, at 9:20 am EDT on July 11, 2008

Keep it Real

After 34 years in the profession, I have to concur with Schneewind. My various experiences in directing cross-curricular programs and serving on search committees reveal that new profs are well-prepared in a specific area of a discipline, but need much better training in functions that will be a part of their daily work, especially at liberal arts colleges. Programs training Ph.D’s for the undergrad classroom should:

1. require a course in counseling. Undergrads have some tricky needs beyond the classroom, and a teacher who can call up valid techniques for dealing with certain emotions and behaviors will be less subject to surprise and paralysis. Yes, all campuses have counseling centers, but often the prof needs to know what to do on the spot—sometimes in charged situations— before formally referring the student.

2. Provide training in legal questions. Higher Education Law is a growing field, and concerns about racism, sexism, free speech, and professional treatment are less and less adequately addressed by good old common sense.

3. Require a course in teaching reading and writing. Doing these skills and conveying these skills are significantly different processes. How to read in a discipline, and how to construct an effective writing assignment, are much more complex than one-size-fits-all. Telling students what to do should always derive from sound and specific techniques of pedagogy.

4. Address collegiality. Teaching-oriented schools tend to be more communal than R-1’s, and knowing how to be a good department member, faculty member and committee member complements a happy career.

5. Provide an exit strategy. A Ph.D. program should address the likely culture shock of the new teacher’s moving from an enclosed environment sparsely populated by like-minded persons, to a whirl of freshmen, professor emeriti, floormates, deans and, last but not least, parents!

W Snyder, Saint Vincent College, at 10:55 am EDT on July 11, 2008

To Frizbane Manley

Ooops. I meant to address you in this thread; went out to fetch a link, and accidentally put my response in today’s IHE article “Evaluating Faculty Quality, Randomly” instead. Even there perhaps my comments and questions are not wholly off topic.

James W. Gettys, at 11:20 am EDT on July 11, 2008

Confidence gap for new profs

New faculty are receiving more assistance today than ever before. They get very large start-up packages, often with no requirements that some of the money is a match for a grant proposal not any restrictions on how to spend it. Our university and many others have instituted individual mentorship programs, workshops for new faculty, single semester leaves midway to tenure, lighter teaching, advising, and committee loads (at least during the first year or two), and many other forms of assistance. We also teach classes in professional practice and development to our graduate students. So I am perplexed about why they feel they are not prepared for being a professor.

When I entered both graduate school and a faculty position, I would never have admitted that I was not prepared to do either job, for fear that the department would have thought it made a mistake in admitting or hiring me. Instead, I looked around, asked questions, and got to work to show them they did not make a mistake.

John Pastor, Professor at University of Minnesota Duluth, at 1:35 pm EDT on July 11, 2008

I think it’s interesting that we’re all assuming that the graduate institution bears all the responsibility to prepare the student for the varied activities that come with a teaching position. In reality, a graduate degree is merely an entrance-level requirement for the job; the best one can do in hiring is get some sense that the potential professor has a good grasp of the field and the ability to learn on the job. I like the ideas presented by Professor Snyder about courses that would be very helpful to new faculty members, but I’m not sure they can or should be included in the graduate school’s educational program. Some of us were fortunate to have doctoral mentors who engaged us in a discussion of what the teaching profession entailed; some of us were even more fortunate to have a mentor or mentors in our first job who made sure we didn’t fail so miserably during the first months/years on the job that we gave up completely. But I don’t know of any institution that spends enough resources training its new faculty to cope with the demands of the professoriate in general and/or the specific institutional culture. If a new hire doesn’t “fit,” we let her or him find a new position and hire someone else.

No one likes the salary compression that often extends across the faculty. But most of us knew we were risking/forfeiting some income potential in order to be a part of a learning community. It’s not always just about the money. Sometimes it’s also about having the resources to feel as if one can do one’s job and be happy.

Steven Sheeley, PhD, at 4:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2008

Some of this is a disciplinary thing. In the natural sciences, a postdoc is all but obligatory for a professorship. I can’t say that it prepared me for grant writing, but it did prepare me for research. Having at least some sort of adjunct teaching experience is also quite common. I won’t pretend that a few courses as an adjunct were sufficient preparation for teaching (teaching is an art and a skill that I will spend the rest of my career working to improve) but it did get me through some of that initial learning curve.

At new faculty orientation last fall, virtually everybody had some sort of adjunct teaching and/or postdoc research experience. These things are not sufficient, but for me they were crucial. As difficult as my task is, I know that there’s no way I could have done it straight out of grad school.

Assistant Professor of Physics, at 6:15 pm EDT on July 11, 2008

Helpful Hints for New Faculty

In Late 2005, my colleague DCAvid Dredw and I wrote a serieds of 4 pieces in Inside Higher Ed on “What They Didn’t Tech You in Grduate School” which gave many helpful hints about life after graduate school. These hints and many additional ones are now collected in a paperback “What Thedy Didn’t Teach You in Graduate Shool: 199 Hedlpful Hints for Scusseds in Your Academic Career” by Paul Gray and David E. Drew in May by Stylus

The book is available through Amazon. We the authors think this guide will be of great help to students with a confikdence gap.

Paul

Paul Gray, Professor Emeritus at Clremont Graduate University, at 5:30 am EDT on July 12, 2008