I SUSPECT that most undergraduates have already been through their fair shares of mediocre sections. One simple fact goes a long way toward explaining this phenomenon. Graduate students have little direct incentive to teach well.
Although most teaching assistants work hard and do a decent job, the fact is, our career prospects are determined by the quality of our research, not the quality of our teaching, and there is little the University can do to change that. What the University can do to improve teaching quality is to put more resources into training graduate teaching assistants and encourage their developing sense of professional responsibility.
First let's establish the reasons graduate students have little external incentive to exert effort on teaching. Start with pure self-interest. For graduate students who are planning to seek an academic posting, one's teaching history plays a minimal role in impressing employers. Graduate students in their fourth and fifth years here often don't teach at all which makes teaching evaluations even less relevant to the job market. Graduate students planning to enter non-academic careersare even less likely to be judged by their teaching history.
Also, the University has not created strong negative incentives against poor teaching. Although it can happen, it is uncommon for a graduate student to lose funding because he or she couldn't teach well, as opposed to earning low grades or failing qualifying examinations.
On the other hand, many graduate students have a strong internal incentive to teach well insofar as they feel a sense ofprofessional responsibility to do so. Still, as graduate students we have limited time and must divide our attention among several activities, including learning course material, conducting our own research, working on faculty research as well as teaching. Our sense of professional responsibility is spread pretty thin by all these demands.
From the undergraduate perspective, I can imagine students would not want the University to rely primarily on the intrinsic professionalism of its graduate students to guarantee a decent level of teaching quality in its discussion sections. But there is no real alternative.
The University has very little power over the structure of career incentives graduate students face, as these come about through market mechanisms over which the University has no control.
Further, it is very difficult for the University to enforce teaching quality among graduate students through negative incentives. Professors themselves rarely want to come down hard on their own graduate students about teaching, especially since many professors focus almost entirely on research and put minimal effort into their courses. Additionally, talented graduate students would be less willing to come to the University if it came to be known for punishing its graduate students for mediocre instruction. Graduate admissions committees are more concerned with applicants' potential for scholarship than for pedagogy.
That leaves the cultivation of graduate students' professionalism as the biggest opportunity for the University to improve teaching quality. The Teaching Resource Center already offers an August teaching workshop at the beginning of the fall term that many departments require their incoming students to attend. This is a good program, but because many challenges become apparent only after one has some experience in the classroom, the teaching workshop is not a complete solution.
Departments should also encourage each new teachers to receive a Teaching Resource Center consultation during their first semester in front of the blackboard. This is a low-pressure and highly informative way for teachers to learn about how students perceive their strengths and weaknesses. Director of the Teaching Resource Center Marva Barnett believes, "Faculty and TAs who take the time to analyze their own teaching and to consider a variety of teaching techniques and strategies are likely to improve their teaching." TAs should be encouraged by their departments to take such proactive steps. If this required a moderate increase in the Teaching Resource Center's budget, it would be a worthy investment given the relatively low cost and high potential return to instructional quality.
It would also be a good idea for each department to assign a professor to review student teaching evaluations each semester and work with TAs to understand criticisms and how to address them. Without this kind of support, reading semester evaluations can become an exercise in defensiveness rather than a useful way to improve classroom performance.
Undergraduates themselves can play a positive role enlivening their own sections by being more engaged. The inner professionalism of teachers is not encouraged by a room of students who have not done assigned reading or are disinterested in the discussion. If students are only going through the motions and dispensing the minimum of effort to get through their classes, most graduate students will follow suit.
Andrew Winerman is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer. He is a graduate student studying economics.
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