Doug Henwood :
>Do any graduate programs actually teach people how to teach?I'm a TA at St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, and at the British equivalent of a community college, after the grand total of one day's training. But I don't think that we need to teach teaching at the university level. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' methods in terms of student presentations vs Socratic dialogue, or Power Point vs old-fashioned lecturing. At universities, teachers succeed or fail largely on the basis of how compelling their material is, and no amount of training or gimmicks will change this - although they might make students think that they are getting better value for money.
The problem in the UK at the moment is that the bean-counters are trying to standardise 'best practice', down to specifying national standards for the number of overheads to be used in each lecture. Alongside this, increasing student consultation inevitably produces demands for more handouts and simpler assessments, and less reading and thinking. Calling for universtity teacher training is likely to institutionalise the 'dulling down' of teaching.
Better to leave people to their own devices, in my opinion.
Michael Savage
Edinburgh
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