“The State of Teacher Training in Philosophy”

By Jerry Green

I recently came across an interesting paper published in Teaching Philosophy, “The State of Teacher Training in Philosophy”. This paper, authored by David Concepción, Melinda Messineo, Sarah Wieten and Catherine Homan, investigates the training given to graduate students in philosophy programs. You can access the paper here or here. I thought the results were worth sharing here; they’re not exactly surprising, but still worth highlighting.

The tl:dr version of the paper is that the state of teacher training in philosophy isn’t very good. The vast majority of grad students and faculty agree that teaching is an important part of one’s professional obligations and that PhD training should include training in pedagogy. But most grads get little explicit training, and what they get is often (i) not very targeted or practical, and (ii) run by faculty that have no particular expertise in pedagogy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving the state of things, focusing mainly on what they call “high impact’ training, which basically amounts to structuring pedagogy courses more like seminars, with required reading and assignments.

One particularly interesting facet of the paper is the disconnect between how competent people feel about teaching versus how good they feel about the training they got. Basically, people tend to think that they didn't get sufficient training on how to teach, but feel that they're sufficient teachers anyway.

There are some reasons to be a bit hesitant about fully endorsing the results of this survey: the authors note that the respondent demographics don’t quite match what other surveys have found, for instance, and there’s always the worry that the sample is skewed in favor of people concerned enough to fill out the survey in the first place. But I don’t think this makes a big difference. The numbers may change a bit, but probably not enough to affect the overall results.

The main thing I wanted to do was simply bring this paper to everyone’s attention. But I also thought I’d open the floor to see if any of our readers had particularly good experiences with their own pedagogy training. At UT Austin we have a required course, usually taken in the 2^nd or 3^rd year, that involves making a few syllabi for intro level courses.  Many of us have found this useful when we’re put in charge of our own class down the road. And there are often university teaching and learning centers that offer training and certification, which you can use to supplement what you get from your department. I've done a couple of these certificates, and I've found them useful, but I've heard others report the opposite. But like many of the paper’s survey respondents, the bulk of my pedagogy education has come from a combination of (i) copying role models, (ii) trial-and-error, and (iii) outside research (like, ahem, here). So I’d certainly like to hear more about how folks do things at their own institutions. It might also be nice to hear from anyone who’s been involved in changing the way their department runs things. Have any tips for how to improve the state of teacher training in our own departments?

Comments

[Some Person]

My own experience is that while the amount of training given by graduate departments is insufficient, the sort of training you would receive by outside "experts in pedagogy" is largely pseudo-science and gimmicks designed to sell books and programs to gullible administrators. The problem is really one that philosophers need to step up to fix themselves.

[Jerry Green]

Thanks for your thoughts, Some Person. I've heard the same reaction from some of my peers about outside experts. There are a few certification programs at UT I've done, and while I my particular sessions were quite valuable, my colleagues who did the same things with other instructors were less happy.

And you're right that there's a danger about pseudo-science in pedagogy. For example, "learning styles" is a popular but unjustified way to think about teaching and learning. [1] So there's definitely a caveat lector attitude needed. I hope to do the occasional book/article review post about good work in pedagogy; maybe I'll start that sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately, though, I think philosophers have no choice but to do the hard work of weeding through the bad pedagogy research to find the good. The alternative, seems to me, is to rely on our own intuitions about how good teaching works, and that hasn't worked out so well.

[1] See, e.g. the articles here: http://top.sagepub.com/content/42/3/266.full.pdf+html or http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2012.04273.x/epdf)

[Stacey Goguen]

I was really surprised when I discovered that academics in education fields and the humanities and social sciences have already written a lot about pedagogy. I had assumed there was just a pedagogy vacuum all throughout academia.

So while in some sense, yes I think philosophers will need to end up doing their own research if they're interested in pedagogy, it's not the case that there is nothing good on the topic out there, and that we'll need to wholly reinvent the wheel ourselves.

I received my only really pedagogy through a writing program, but I found it incredibly helpful for thinking about teaching in general, and for teaching philosophy where we focus on argumentation. (The writing program focused on argument, too.)

One book we used was this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Composition-Background-Professional-Resources/dp/0312469330

It includes this essay/letter, where the author talks about getting students to approach college writing not as about expressing a point/opinion, but as about "making a point" through argument and evidence:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/sweetland/Home/About%20Us/Newsletters/1999-3%20SWCNewsletter.pdf

[Jerry Green]

Thanks, Stacey: that essay/letter puts things in a very nice way for philosophers to think about or use. But boy, the more things change...

[Kate Norlock]

Graduate school at Wisconsin (as it happens, David Concepción and I both went there) included a quite decent orientation day or two for new teaching assistants in the Humanities, which included some well-informed presentations from older and wiser graduate students, especially on conducting discussions, marking/grading, and designing in-class activities, good sessions. My memory of the orientation was that it was largely fueled by the graduate student association, and it was not (at the time) supplemented by any efforts within the department (although I hope this has changed since the 1990s). Ideally, Philosophy departments would not just prep you to make syllabi, they would further connect the more general offerings of TA training at the university to philosophy of education and to empirically informed contemporary research in pedagogy and philosophy.

I got much better instruction after I arrived at my first TT job at a SLAC and the first-year teachers' training was organized around McKeachie's Teaching Tips. (Better late than never!) Like Stacey, I was a bit surprised to learn that multiple journals existed on pedagogy in higher ed, and I was kind of ticked to learn that the journal, Teaching Philosophy, had been operating for years. The best works from that journal should be required reading for all would-be philosophy instructors.

[Jerry Green]

Thanks Kate. Totally agree about departments doing a better job about making resources more widely known, especially discipline specific resources. I'm glad to get the input of somebody who walks the walk on this stuff!

[Jerry Green]

Future reference, there's a guest post at Daily Nous by one of the paper's authors. The comment section there collects some of the same info as the comments here.

http://dailynous.com/2016/04/06/should-philosophers-train-graduate-students-to-teach-how-guest-post-by-david-w-concepcion/