By Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu, Forbes
A dirty little secret of higher education is that faculty members at most American colleges and universities have never taken a course on how to teach. This is true of faculty at elite institutions like Yale University as well as those at broad-access campuses like those in the California State University System.
college professor
This troubling reality is compounded by four additional problems that make the matter worse for students who are seeking to learn.
First, a majority of courses at many campuses across the country are taught by part-time—or “adjunct”—faculty, who are paid per course and may teach at three or four different institutions over the course of a week. Because they are not tied to a particular school, adjunct faculty are unlikely to have participated in even a workshop on improving their teaching.
Second, although faculty may have served as teaching assistants in a course or two while they were studying for their doctorate degrees, their supervisors were there to guide their research, not their teaching. Few help their teaching assistants learn the skills of effective teaching, even if they have those skills themselves. As a result, new faculty teaching a subject for the first time may use the same approach to the subject that was used when they took it as a student. They may even use their old class notes. This means that poor teaching is passed down from generation to generation.
Third, faculty are chosen for doctoral programs—the gateway to faculty status—because they were outstanding students in the fields where they do their graduate work. As a result, they often do not recognize why students in their classes have difficulties understanding the issues and problems that they raise in those classes. The faculty have what is called “unconscious mastery,” and this makes it hard for them to explain a concept to struggling students.
Read the full article by Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu from Forbes.
