Teaching Professors How To Teach

Phillip C. Wankat, Purdue University

The observation has often been made that being a college professor is the only learned profession in which practitioners are not trained for their major tasks. Graduate students are trained to do individual research, but they generally are not trained for teaching or for mentoring others in research. Instead, most college professors are forced to implicitly adopt the techniques that they observed from their teachers whilst they were students. The new professors then try to adapt these techniques to the context of their first academic position. This procedure is enormously wasteful of time since the new professors are trying to learn how to teach with very little assistance at the busiest time of their career. In addition, there is no organized method for learning how to employ new teaching methods and/or new educational technologies.

A number of engineering professors interested in improving engineering education have claimed that a better approach would be to ensure that graduate students learn the basics of how to teach. Approaches to teach how-to-teach courses and workshops will be explored.

Unfortunately, the professors advocating this education in teaching methods have had very little data, other than anecdotal data, to show that courses or workshops on teaching methods actually improve teaching. And the most extensive of this data has been for workshops taught to faculty, not for courses for graduate students. The skeptical position, “I didn’t take such a course and I became a good teacher,” has been hard to refute without becoming personal about the skeptic’s teaching ability. To help satisfy the need for data, we conducted a survey in 2004 of graduates of an engineering course on how to teach. The graduates took this course between 1983 and 2002. The results show that graduates who followed academic careers believe that this course had a very significant impact on their careers. Perhaps surprisingly, graduates who followed industrial careers indicated a smaller but still quite significant impact on their careers. In addition to exploring these results in detail, the results of a small survey of teaching courses in universities in the USA will be discussed. These results indicate that the impact on students who follow academic careers can probably be generalized to these other courses.

Finally, other approaches to teach professors how to improve their teaching will be briefly explored.

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