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:
PSTUM-List,
This year we have been running a seminar on teaching undergraduate
mathematics designed to help our graduate students improve our teaching.
The seminar is optional, and attendance has generally been low. I'm
wondering if anyone on the list has experience with attendance-optional,
math department teaching seminars. What, if anything, have you found
particular effective in motivating graduate students to attend?
If it helps, here's the seminar's web site:
http://abel.math.harvard.edu/preceptor/tums/
Thanks in advance for your help!
Derek
--
Derek Bruff, Preceptor
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University
Email: bruff(a)fas.harvard.edu
Web:
http://www.derekbruff.com/