Jason Cody vividly remembers his undergraduate days as a chemistry major at the College of Wooster in Ohio.
“I remember feeling very lucky that I was in a chemistry section that had very established professors–professors who really knew how to teach each subject,” Cody said.
“But some of my friends were in a section that had a brand new professor. He was teaching for the first time and had no prior teaching experience, no clue as to what teaching was all about, even though he knew the field of chemistry very well. When my friends and I would talk after class, they were shocked at the difference in how our classes were conducted. They kept saying about their classes, `Oh my God, what is this?’ The entire semester, they were miserable.”
Now Cody, of Lake Forest, is in his first semester as assistant professor of chemistry at Lake Forest College. He’s teaching introductory chemistry and its laboratories. Although the curriculum is far simpler than his doctoral studies at Northwestern University, Evanston–and his international postdoctoral fellowship in Nantes, France, through the National Science Foundation–Cody believes he is prepared to tackle the challenges of teaching 18- and 19-year-olds.
Before receiving his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from NU in 1995, Cody participated in the school’s Preparing Future Faculty program (known as PFF).
The program is for doctoral students in any field, and its goal is to introduce participants to the ins and outs of faculty service and responsibility at four diverse Chicago-area institutions: Chicago State University; Lake Forest College; Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago; and Oakton Community College at its Des Plaines and Skokie campuses.
Through workshops, colloquia, mentorship and hands-on teaching experiences at these “cluster” institutions, NU students are able to learn what experienced faculty members already know: Good teachers do not spring from test tubes. They slowly emerge through lots of practice in front of classrooms, Cody said.
Throughout Illinois, from smaller liberal arts colleges to larger state campuses, programs similar to NU’s are cropping up in every discipline. The repeated message from deans is that it’s time to smooth the rough edges off first-time faculty.
“Beginning teachers can often have unrealistic expectations of the students, especially underclassmen,” Cody said. “That’s because new teachers have just come from cutting-edge universities and now find themselves in basic, introductory classes with students who don’t know how to study at the college level and certainly don’t know how to behave in a lab.
“And beginning faculty are often unable to communicate expectations,” Cody said. “It’s difficult to verbalize what you expect and what you assume.”
College campuses have generic and individual qualities, and the program is designed to make students familiar with both aspects of faculty life, said Leila Edwards, senior associate dean of the graduate school at NU. “No one tells a grad student how faculty govern themselves. Is the faculty unionized, or is there a senate? We also cover academic freedom, time management, and we make the students write their teaching philosophy. That way when they visit a campus for a job interview, they’ll know if that campus’ philosophy matches their own.”
Cody said NU’s program enabled him to come to Lake Forest and teach with experience. “Instead of coming in totally green, I knew what to expect and more of how to be a professor. As a student, you don’t appreciate the time demands put on faculty. And likewise, as a grad student, you don’t realize the different things pulling at the students. Things that compete with their studies, like their personal lives or the cultures they come (from). The cluster institutions showed me that there are different issues about students’ lives that the campus has to address. I would never have known this if I hadn’t participated in PFF.”
Educators say learning how to be a professor requires learning how to balance every institution’s triad of research, teaching and service (such as faculty committees). At some universities, research is the predominant emphasis for choosing faculty; other campuses encourage faculty to juggle all three.
The teaching programs do have some disadvantages, however. There’s the push and pull between the time graduate students spend practicing teaching and the time their professors expect them to be in a research laboratory. More than one graduate research student in the Chicago area admitted some faculty members had opposed his enrollment in a program designed to give hands-on teaching experience.
“I can see their point,” said a student, who didn’t wish to be identified. “They came to a school years ago to do research. They’re promised they’ll receive the brightest students to help in their work. Then a program comes along that takes a lot of the students’ valuable time away from the lab. Just when a professor is awarded a research grant–and some grants can be up to a million dollars–his best student is somewhere on or off campus teaching.”
Yet officials of several schools noted that major research institutions are not growing.
“Research funding is getting more difficult to acquire,” Edwards said. “The period of unbridled growth from government support is past. The end of the Cold War introduced a whole new set of variables, which impeded the federally funded research programs.”
But more than one campus spokesman said that the number of graduate students is increasing, resulting in a more competitive faculty job market in the future. One spokesman said that universities must reorient themselves to a new fiscal and cultural reality: The bottom line, money, is getting more important every year; the cultural reality is that more and more people will be expected to get a college degree.
“I would say that graduate students are savvy apprentice professionals. They’re more keenly aware of what it takes to get a job than they were 20 years ago,” said Elizabeth Chandler, associate director of the school of general studies at the University of Chicago.
“Students know it’s not enough to become an expert in a particular field. You have to be able to communicate that knowledge (to get a teaching position). We’re finding that students are demanding that the institution prepare them more effectively.”
But the professors who rely on teaching assistants in the classroom say that’s where honing teaching skills begins, sometimes at the undergraduates’ expense if the T.A.’s aren’t properly prepared.
“We have worked with our T.A.’s for years (on curriculum and classroom teaching) and didn’t join the campus program to help graduate students become better teachers,” said Michael Pleck, associate professor of general engineering and associate head of the department of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “That’s because very few engineering students go on to become faculty. But in 1994 we had a situation arise in the classroom that made us realize we needed outside help.”
A student thought a teaching assistant became antagonistic during class. Although the situation was unintentional, it became “nasty,” Pleck said.
“We asked for help from Marne Helgesen’s (teacher training) program and (the staff) were excellent,” he said. “They not only worked with the T.A. in question, they invited all of our T.A.’s in for a special workshop. Since then, we’ve made sure that all of our T.A.’s attend the workshops. I’ve never seen such immediate results.”
Helgesen is head of instructional development and the Office of Instructional Resources at the U. of I. She oversees the Graduate Teacher Certificate and Advanced Graduate Teacher Certificate programs designed for students getting their masters and doctoral degrees, respectively.
In each program, Helgesen said, the graduate students receive first-hand teaching experience and attend workshops, and they are either videotaped or visited in the classroom by a faculty mentor who gives immediate feedback.
“Every professor knows that the first year you teach is simply dreadful,” she said. “Rarely do you get good ratings. So, even though we give an end-of-semester evaluation in both programs, we also give one in the middle of the semester. That way the graduate student has time to make changes, so (he) can actually experience an improvement in the classroom.”
Nancy Ma of Buffalo Grove received her doctorate in mechanical engineering from the U. of I. in January. She currently is in her first semester as assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so far ahead in lesson planning,” Ma said, “and I can only come to one conclusion. . . . It’s got to be my experience at the U. of I.”
She already has two-thirds of her lessons written for the semester, she noted, and she has time to do research.
“I used to write out my lessons (as a graduate student) and rehearse them out loud, over and over again so I wouldn’t get so nervous in front of the class,” she said. “I still write out the lessons, but now I know what to expect and how long certain portions will take. I know a lot of professors don’t practice at all.”
Unlike Ma, who met weekly with her mentor while teaching as a doctoral student and received countless hours of attention from various faculty members in the engineering department, Randall Albers received his graduate degree “back when good teachers had to make themselves become good teachers”–before there was a trend to properly prepare future faculty as teachers.
Currently, Albers is chairman of the fiction writing department at Columbia College Chicago, and he’s found that it’s hard to be a good teacher and not be a good writer.
“But you can be a good writer and not be a good teacher,” he said. “However, I see a close relationship between strong writing and having the potential to become a good teacher.”
For almost 30 years, Columbia has included hands-on teaching experience in its Master of Arts in the Teaching of Writing degree, Albers said. In addition to heavy emphasis placed on writing and pedagogical methods, graduate students are required to spend nine credit hours teaching and tutoring undergraduate literature students.
Because Columbia has open enrollment to anyone with a high school diploma or GED, graduate students receive their teaching experience before very diverse classes.
“I’ve taught writing classes with students ranging from 18 to 63 year olds,” said Drew Ferguson of Crystal Lake, who has finished his coursework at Columbia and currently is writing his master’s thesis. “I’ve had ex-gangbangers, international trial lawyers and every kind of economic, ethnic and religious background represented in my classes. I don’t believe that when I go to look for a full-time teaching position, I’ll have a problem getting a job. Any issue an interviewer might present and ask: `How would you teach under these circumstances?’ I’ve probably already had to think about.”
When Cody was a graduate student at NU he co-wrote an article with fellow grad student Michael Hagerman of Springfield, for the Journal of Chemical Education. The article, which ran in May, was titled “Transforming Graduate Education: A New Vision of the Professoriate,” and it featured NU’s Preparing Future Faculty program.
Hagerman, who received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from North Central College in Naperville, and his doctorate in chemistry from NU in 1995, is in his first semester as assistant professor of chemistry at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.
“We wrote the article so more chemistry professors can see how many advantages a program like PFF can be in a department,” Hagerman said. “If these (graduate teaching) programs are going to succeed, addressing full faculty support will be an issue. If the professor is concerned about the time the program takes away from research, then we need to pioneer an initiative to explain the benefits of getting teaching experience before we become faculty.
“A suggestion that might help ease a professor’s concerns is to somehow build the teaching experience into the coursework requirement. Or perhaps students could gain teaching experience while they write their thesis. By then, the research is pretty much done.
“After all, the question must be asked: You know your field very well, but do you know how to bring that field to your students?”
