Many liberal-arts colleges and the new professors they hire often wind up like a married couple who awaken one morning and wonder why they ever got together.
While newly hired assistant professors, sporting fresh doctorates from big research universities, are usually competent scholars, they`re often awkward teachers more accustomed to the solitary pursuit of research than the communal activity of the classroom. This is especially true at small colleges that stress close contact between students and professors.
For their part, new professors frequently find themselves unhappy victims of culture shock.
Their large-university educations did not prepare them for liberal arts colleges-the juggling act of preparing and teaching classes, grading tests and papers, working on faculty committees, all while continuing their research.
It can take years for new professors to adjust. Some never do.
Now a novel program, the Preparation of Future Faculty Project, is giving some doctoral candidates a chance to take a close look at liberal-arts teaching before they leap into it.
Loyola University in Chicago and University of Rochester in upstate New York are part of an apprenticeship program that allows graduate students to teach at small colleges under faculty who serve as their mentors.
If the approach succeeds, the program could become the prevailing model for training new college teachers.
”This has been in the making for a long time,” said Beth Henschen, an associate professor of political science at Loyola who oversees the Loyola graduate students, who have been assigned to Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle and Rosary College in River Forest.
In New York state, the University of Rochester is working with three local colleges, Nazareth, Roberts Wesleyan and St. John Fisher.
”Liberal-arts faculty and deans were concerned about the lack of teaching preparation they saw,” Henschen said. ”Some people have the knack, and some don`t. Research universities simply produce students who`ve never been taught to teach, and faculties were becoming frustrated.”
Allen Splete, president of the Council of Independent Colleges in Washington, D.C., said his organization, which represents 325 liberal-arts colleges with 5,000 or fewer students, was the project`s catalyst.
”As a former college president (of Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa.), I can tell you it takes almost two years for a new professor to become acclimated to the small college environment,” Splete said.
”What we want to do is provide an early immersion that will allow new teachers to hit the ground running.”
The traditional grooming of a Ph.D. is based on the historic German method, which has very little to do with readying a scholar for teaching.
Instead, a graduate student is brought along as though he were going to be primarily a researcher, with little emphasis on the art of teaching. But, in reality, most Ph.D.`s wind up mainly in the classroom.
”You`re just supposed to pick it up by osmosis,” said Henschen.
Teaching is treated as an afterthought, with graduate students normally serving as teaching assistants who often instruct large groups of undergrads. The project is in its third year. Graduate students working on their dissertations are given a part-time teaching load at the participating colleges, usually one class that meets twice a week. They`re paid $4,500 a semester for their efforts, while the mentor gets $1,000.
Loyola was selected for the project partly because it already had a Teaching Fellows Program, now in its fourth year, designed to help graduate students learn to teach and also balance teaching and research.
Besides learning to prepare lectures and discussing teaching tactics with their mentors, the future professors are expected to contribute to committee meetings that help decide curricula or the content of honors programs.
For those students who participate in the program, the teaching experience they gain gives them a edge in the competitive college-teaching job market, where news of an opening in certain popular departments like English can generate hundreds of resumes.
”That`s one of the side benefits,” said Henschen.
And there`s another benefit. The pay the students earn in the program far exceeds what they`d make teaching without the program. Paul Catterton, a former bread truck driver, is working toward his English doctorate and teaching through the program at Illinois Benedictine.
A job teaching one 16-week class at a university might pay $1,200, he said, while a junior college would pay $800 to $900. ”Those are McDonald`s wages, really” he said. ”Anything that provides grad students with more funding can`t be too bad.”
