Re: [PSTUM-list] Motivating grad students

PSTUM-List, Thanks for your ideas on motivating graduate students to attend teaching seminars. I wanted to respond to a few contributions. 1) Senior Faculty as Motivators I agree with Ken and Joanne that when mathematics departments (particularly senior faculty) make clear to graduate students that teaching is serious business, graduate students are motivated to excel in their teaching. Having senior faculty involvement in a teaching seminar is a great way to get the graduate students on board. That has yet to happen here. One of the downsides of having a team of junior faculty (preceptors like myself) to make sure the service courses run well is that senior faculty can use that as an excuse to limit their involvement with teaching issues in the department. 2) Culture of Teaching Having a math department that values teaching enough to motivate its graduate students to work on their teaching requires a certain culture of teaching in the department -- the kind of culture that seems to be at Dartmouth given Ken's posting. That culture can take time to build. I'm wondering if one way to build such a culture, at least among the graduate students, is to require certain cohorts of graduate students to attend these kinds of seminars. First-years who are not yet teaching and second-years who are teaching for the first time are likely candidates for requiring attendance. Perhaps once several classes go through such a seminar, some kind of critical mass is achieved that promotes a teaching culture. Does anyone have any experience with this? 3) Logistics Shandy mentioned several logistics issues, including having the seminar on a predictable, regular basis. While our seminar isn't held every week, when it is held, it happens Fridays at 2 pm. That was our best attempt at regularity! Shandy's advice to mention on advertisements not only the content of the session, but the types of activities involved is a good one. I know just what to expect in one of these teaching seminars, but our graduate students may not. We've followed Shandy's advice on this. No improvement yet, but we're still hopeful. 4) TA Input Joanne also mentioned the idea of giving the TAs some control over the topics in the seminar. Back at our pre-fall calculus teachers orientation, I surveyed the TAs to find out what topics they would like to see in just such a seminar. Out of a list of 10 topics, three topics were ranked highly: motivating students, managing an interactive classroom, and making lesson plans. Two those topics we have now covered (the third, motivating students, is coming up in a few weeks), and while attendance at those sessions was higher than at other sessions, it was still just a handful of TAs. However, I'm planning on surveying the TAs who actually have attended one of our seminar sessions to find out (a) why most of them haven't come back and (b) what they would like to see in the seminar. So hopefully, we'll have a more targeted seminar in the fall. 5) Focus Also on Careers Two ideas we had here concern career-minded TAs. One idea we had was to contact former graduate students who have now gone onto academic jobs and ask them to share about the role of teaching in their current careers. Sharing these "testimonies" with the current TAs in some way might help them see the value of spending time developing their teaching skills. Also, we thought we might add some teaching-related career-oriented topics, such as writing teaching philosophy statements and building teaching portfolios. Thanks again for your input! Derek On 2/21/05 11:10 AM, "Derek Bruff" <bruff(a)fas.harvard.edu> wrote: -- Derek Bruff, Preceptor Department of Mathematics, Harvard University Email: bruff(a)fas.harvard.edu Web: http://www.derekbruff.com/