New faculty often are excellent researchers and have highly specialized content knowledge in their domain of expertise, however, when they start their first teaching assignment they find themselves in a problem-solving situation.
Even if they know the content they need to teach, most likely they do not have any education degree or very little if at all teaching preparation.
The luckiest have some Teaching Assistanship practice; but many were not TAs in grad school.
To start usually they receive a Syllabus built by the faculty who taught the course in the past semester; or if someone does not pass that along then new faculty think about the best teacher they had and try to remember what exactly did Ms. Taylor or Mr. Glenwood - so they can follow in their footsteps? They also think about the worse course they ever took in college and what especially that teacher did -- so they can avoid doing that.
It takes several semesters of trial and error; possible some education books from Amazon.com, and several nights and weekends of study on the new topic: Teaching 101.
The good news is that even "old dogs can learn new tricks," and hopefully seasoned faculty will find a refresher on education methods used across their career. Hopefully some new ideas to try out as well.
My No. 1 advice for teaching is:
DON'T THROW THE CONTENT AT THE STUDENTS,
SEND THE STUDENTS TO FIND THE CONTENT!
No comments:
Post a Comment