Teaching College Professors to Teach

I read “On Being A Double Agent” by Lauren Witherington, an assistant professor of education at the University of Arkansas, she had gained experience teaching in middle and high school English classrooms for seven years prior towards getting her PH.D. The link is here: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/critical-pedagogy/double-agent/.

This article begins with her explaining how she would give advice to fellow and unexperienced TA’s right before they went to teach their classes, because of her experience in a classroom already. Witherington raises the issue of how little or no pedagogy training college professors receive typically before going on the job. As a liaison between the education and English departments she witnessed desires for innovated teaching methods and more challenging curriculum. She calls for college professors of all subjects to be more formally trained in pedagogy since even the best lectures are relatively inadequate. Pedagogy is not valued enough in our education system for future professors compared to the esteemed research. Witherington proposes two possible solutions: challenging pedagogy classes required during grad school and “induction programs” for the newly hired faculty like the one in place for k-12 teachers. Of course, some universities have policies like these in place but not enough of them do. The author concludes that formal training to teach at the university level improves the classes and the students’ knowledge, which is what should be the goal.

I liked this article because it discusses all the things we are doing in our own classes learning about our future careers as teachers (like activities and collaboration) and raised the point of how college professors are prepared to teach. I have had several college professors and I can distinctly recall who was a “good” teacher and who was a “bad” teacher. The bad ones where typically lecturers, unprepared for anything that veered off the schedule or syllabus and seemed to be uninterested in student input. Maybe had they had the formal pedagogy training classes while they got their PH.D. they would have held my attention more. This article reminded me of the article by the New London Group in class today. The authors kept bringing up the change in culture and literacies and how we had to evolve our teaching style to accommodate those changes. Well we also have to change the way we teach our teachers in order to really educate all levels of students the new literacies.

Before reading this article I knew little about PH.D. coursework and I was shocked to learn that many do not learn how to teach at the college level in depth before taking on a teaching position. I have had many experiences teaching a variety of topics and skills to people for years, but I am still learning and am eager to improve or get ideas. This class gives me potential tools, ideas and skills that I will be able to use in my hopefully innovated classroom. I feel that a future professor should also be gathering as much training as possible in order to provide students the best resources. Besides how can we poorly educate the educators and expect brilliant results?