The Philosophers' Cocoon

7 Years Later Excerpt #3: Teaching Competently

In the previous post in this series, I discussed how to approach leading discussion sections. This time around, I'm broadening the scope to the fundamentals of teaching competently. I'll have at least one more post on teaching after this. Afterwards, I'll probably turn to some other aspects of graduate school, such as long-term planning or job market preparation. 

---

When you first start teaching, you might think you should aspire to do it well. By teaching well, I mean teaching in ways that captivate students, educate them effectively, assess their mastery fairly and comprehensively, provide ample support to students in need, and respect university guidelines and regulations. In the abstract, this all sounds great, and it’s an admirable ambition to want to teach well. However, for those new to teaching, it’s not realistic. Teaching well requires a level of skill and expertise that early career teachers will almost never be able to achieve. Even the few newcomers to teaching who have the ability to teach well should probably not try to teach well at that stage of their careers. This notion might strike you as counterintuitive, so let me elaborate a bit.

Teaching well is difficult and requires a substantial amount of time if you aren’t an experienced instructor. I recall anecdotes of graduate students telling me about how they devoted 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course of 25-30 students. Those courses may have been amazing, but this behavior is not admirable or prudent. As a graduate student, you must balance teaching responsibilities with a variety of other goals: making progress toward your degree, submitting papers to conferences and journals, participating in department events, and so on. Devoting 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course does not leave enough time to adequately prioritize these other commitments – at least not if one wants to maintain good mental health and avoid burnout. Moreover, once you finish graduate school, you will never be able to devote that amount of time to a single course. If you obtain a faculty position, you will probably teach at least 3 courses per term, and they might all be different subjects: you definitely won’t be able to devote 30-40 hours to each one. That means you should aim to develop teaching strategies that can later be extended to contexts where your teaching load is significantly higher.

Here’s the general point: trying to be an exemplary teacher when you’re just getting started with solo teaching is not an appropriate goal. Instead, you should aim to teach competently. As I use this phrase, teaching competently means to teach in a satisfactory or acceptable, but not outstanding, way. Teaching competently involves the same general goals as teaching well but sets the standard for success a bit lower. You don’t need to captivate students to teach competently: it suffices to maintain the motivation of those who are engaged and avoid turning off the remaining students. Teaching competently does not require that you be a master of test design and assessment –  something that requires many courses’ worth of exam creation and refinement – it is enough to design your exams so that course content and exam material align and that students have clear expectations regarding exam content.

7 Years Later Excerpt #2: Leading Discussion Sections

By Trevor Hedberg

In the last entry, I discussed how to handle grade inquiries. This time around, I consider how to lead discussion sections -- one of the other core responsibilities of a typical teaching assistant.

---

As a teaching assistant, one of your central responsibilities will usually be leading 1-3 discussion sections each week of the semester. Typically, you’ll have 20-30 students in each section, and they will last 50 minutes, but there is some variance across institutions. So what exactly do you do to lead a discussion section? To some extent, it will depend on the instructor. In some instances, the instructor wanted me to cover some new material during these discussion sections; in other cases, I was told to just get the students talking and not worry about presenting any new course content. Sometimes, I was asked to administer quizzes or conduct assignments; sometimes, I didn’t have to do that.

The one key aspect of a discussion section is that you are supposed to get the students to discuss aspects of the course content. This might seem pretty basic, but you may not receive much direct instruction on how to get the students talking productively. (Some faculty members seem to think that graduate students will just figure it out.) Moreover, if a discussion section is not going well – that is, if the students aren’t talking – then it can get very uncomfortable very quickly. Additionally, if students feel like discussion sections are boring or pointless, their disengagement will get more pronounced as the semester progresses. That’s an outcome you obviously want to avoid, so here are some pointers on having good discussion sections:

• Always present a bit of material to the students – even if it is not required. You might think that you can just come to class with a list of prepared questions about the week’s material, ask the students those questions, and see where the conversation goes. That might work sometimes, but it’s unreliable. Some students will not have done the assigned readings for the week, and some students probably missed at least one of the week’s lectures. That means a large portion of students may not be familiar enough with the material to respond to your questions productively. Thus, you should always present a little material to the students, even if it is only a few of some of the key ideas or themes that were already covered in the week’s main lectures.
• Don’t base all your questions on the reading material. Echoing an important point above, you cannot assume that everyone in class (or even most of the students in class) will have read and understood the assigned reading for the week. If you want to dig into a key idea from the reading, make sure you review this material with the students first. But in addition to that, make sure you have a few general questions on tap that students can respond to even if they have not read one word of the assigned reading.
• Use thought experiments. Students tend to respond well to thought experiments – the trolley problem, the experience machine, Mary the colorblind neuroscientist, the prisoner’s dilemma, and so on. While there’s a legitimate debate to be had about the usefulness of thought experiments as support for premises in philosophical arguments, they remain effective pedagogical tools for getting students to reflect on philosophical problems. If you can identify a thought experiment that’s relevant to what you’re covering, consider using it 
• Use real-world examples. Many students, especially in introductory level courses that they are taking to fulfill a general education requirement, struggle to see the relevance of philosophy to everyday life. You can diminish that skepticism by basing your discussion in part on real-world cases that illustrate the key concepts for that week’s course material. This strategy may be easier to employ in ethics courses (since ethical dilemmas manifest in the real world frequently), but if you’re creative and willing to do some digging online, you may be surprised what you can find.
• Use videos. Students nowadays read less frequently than students from several decades ago but consume far more visual media. A short, relevant video to get discussion rolling can be effective, especially with the wealth of free, easy-to-browse videos available on YouTube.
• Don’t allow only a few students to dominate discussion. Some students will obviously be more prone to participate in discussion than others, but you don’t want your discussion section of 30 students to consist of you talking exclusively with only a handful of them. If you have trouble getting others to participate, consider having them work in groups or write down an answer to a prompted question at the start of class. Some students will be more comfortable participating when they have written remarks they can read or otherwise use to form their answer.
• Get to know your students. Your discussion sections will usually be small: 20-25 students. Find a way to learn your students’ names – either via the creation of a seating chart, sheer memorization, or some other method. Part of making these discussion sections go well involves crafting a relationship with your students so that they are more willing to participate. Also be willing to talk to them before class officially starts. Be polite, and be approachable.

There are certainly other techniques that could be employed, but these are my starter strategies. Do you all have any others that graduate teaching assistants should employ?

7 Years Later Excerpt #1: Handling Grade Inquiries

By Trevor Hedberg

For the first few excerpts from 7 Years Later, I'm going to focus on teaching. Most do not have much preparation for undergraduate teaching prior to the start of graduate school, and I found it to be one of the more challenging aspects of graduate school when I was getting started.

---

One of the more awkward aspects of being a grader, teaching assistant, or instructor is handling students who confront you about the grade they have received. Addressing grade inquiries is an inevitable part of being an instructor – it’s not a situation unique to being a graduate student. No matter how clear your grading criteria or how much class time you devote to recapping mistakes from the most recent exam, there will always be some students who ask you for more information about why they received their grade. However, as a graduate student, these interactions can be particularly vexing since you will have less experience dealing with them. There are at least three distinct types of grade inquiries, and different responses are appropriate to each one.

First, there are grade inquiries that boil down to grade entry errors. One type  involves the score on Canvas or Blackboard (or whatever learning platform your institution uses) not matching the score listed on the assignment itself. Another might involve too many (or too few) points being deducted on a particular question. Imagine a “-3” next to a 30-point question but a numbered score on the page of 25/30. Resolving these kinds of inquiries is straightforward: confirm that there’s a mistake in how the assignment was scored or how the grade was recorded, thank the student for reporting it to you, and correct the score. Obviously, You don’t want these grading errors to happen often – not all students will notice them, which means they sometimes result in inaccurate assessments of students’ knowledge, and persistent errors of this type will cause students to lose confidence in your professional competence. However, you will grade enough assignments that some mistakes of this type will happen. That’s okay; just correct them and move on.

The second type of grade inquiry, which is probably the most common, involves genuine misunderstanding. This is a case where a student sincerely does not understand why they received a particular score on a question or assignment. This could be because written comments given on the assignment were too minimal, they don’t know how to interpret the feedback, or they were absent when you went over the exam in class. Handling these inquiries in philosophy courses tends to be more challenging than doing so in courses like physics or calculus. In STEM courses, instructors can usually reference an answer key and explain how the student made an error in their calculation or defined some term incorrectly. But explaining why a student’s argument is not very strong can be trickier.

7 Years Later: An Introduction

By Trevor Hedberg

I spent a lot of time in graduate school digging up information about what I should expect during graduate school and what I should do to be competitive for academic employment when I finished my dissertation. Back then, information about these topics existed, but it was scattered across a random assemblage of online resources, and the the authors of these blog posts and short guides sometimes disagreed about the best methods for writing papers, finding a suitable work/life balance, teaching effectively, and so on. Things have definitely improved since that time. There are more avenues for graduate students to learn this information, and discussions of these topics have progressed enough that some points of consensus have emerged on these matters. But even now, the main thing I was looking for back in 2010 and 2011 has not been produced.

What I wanted as a graduate student was a single document that answered the many questions I had about graduate and professional life. How do I write a course syllabus? What is the proper conduct at academic conferences? How do I complete a revise-and-resubmit so that the paper gets published? How do I prepare for my first job search? You get the idea. And I did find answers to these questions eventually, but I wanted those answers all in one place and presented in a unified and cohesive voice. Ideally, this document would have also provided some additional resources related to the topics under discussion. The best I could find was typically a short guide that covered a small fraction of the relevant aspects of graduate school or focused on just one in particular (such as how to write publishable papers).

After a while, I decided it might be worth trying to write the guide that I had been unable to find as a graduate student. After working on it intermittently for many years, I am finally getting close to its completion. My plan is to release 7 Years Later: Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy sometime during the upcoming summer. The main title alludes to both the fact that 7 years is about the average length of time it takes a typical graduate student in the humanities to earn a PhD and the fact that my own time in graduate school (obtaining both an MA and PhD) took about 7 years. The broad framework for 7 Years has been outlined on my website for the last several months. Frankly, it has ballooned to a much larger size than I had originally envisioned: it may be about 60,000 words when it is complete.

Leading up to the guide’s full release, I’ll be publishing snippets of the guide here on the Philosophers’ Cocoon. Some of the guide’s content is based on blog posts I’ve written here in the past few years, but the content I will share in these snippets will be new. My hope is that I will get feedback on some of this content that I can then incorporate into the released version. I’m not sure yet how many of these snippets I will end up publishing here, but I’ll be starting with a few related to teaching as a graduate student. The first one of those will go up next week.