Under the old model of preparing future professors, a graduate student walked into the department chair's office, was handed a book and told to go teach.
With today's emphasis on undergraduate teaching, college administrators realize that's not enough. They recognize teaching as an art that can be studied and improved.
Over the past 13 years the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at Boulder has been a consistent national leader in preparing future faculty, with one of the oldest and most highly regarded training programs in the country. Its Graduate Teacher Program presents a wide variety of activities aimed at helping graduate instructors become outstanding teachers.
The activities include three days of training each fall and a yearlong array of conferences, workshops, classroom observations, evaluations and individual consultations. "The Graduate Teacher Program offers two to three times as many activities as any other program in the nation," said program director Laura Border.
Professor James Slevin of Georgetown University, following a recent review of the CU-Boulder Graduate Teacher Program, said it "seems to me the best of its kind in the nation. I have already mentioned it to several other universities I have visited and intend to do so regularly. It is truly a national model that brings honor, as well as prestige, to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½."
A unique feature of the program is the Lead Graduate Teacher Network, started in 1992, which pays for 40 experienced graduate student instructors to act as liaisons with nearly every academic department on campus. Each liaison receives extensive training, including a weeklong workshop each May, and in turn provides discipline-specific training and consultation to other graduate student teachers in their department.
"The lead training is one of the great experiences that this university offers," said Toby Terrell, coordinator of the network and a former lead graduate teacher himself.
Applicants to be lead graduate teachers at CU-Boulder go through a competitive screening process. To be selected is an honor. "The ideal lead is a doctoral student who has been in a department for several years and has completed everything but his or her dissertation," said Border. Those selected are paid to hold regular office hours, observe graduate instructors labs and recitations, provide videotape consultation, and offer workshops on teaching to other graduate instructors in their department.
One of the training exercises graduate students find extremely useful is being videotaped by their lead graduate teacher while delivering a 4-to-5 minute lesson to a small group of other graduate instructors. The entire group then reviews the tape and provides constructive feedback.
"It gives them confidence when they go into a classroom for that very first time," Border said. The exercise also helps to coalesce a disparate group of new graduate instructors into a cohesive support group.
"Another big advantage of the Lead Graduate Teacher Network is that no one knows an academic department better than those who are in them," Terrell said. This allows the lead graduate teacher to provide instruction on something as unique to a department as how to teach a class on a specific topic, what teaching skills or practices are needed in their discipline, or advice on which faculty member to go to for assistance on a particular issue.
"It's a real asset for us because it not only benefits the students by helping them become better teachers, it also is attractive to recruiting good graduate students into our department," said political science Professor Claudio Cioffi. "We view it as part of the training leading to an advanced degree in our department."
Meetings between lead graduate teachers in related subject areas, such as the social sciences or the humanities, also allow the sharing of interdisciplinary ideas across departmental boundaries. This provides a potent channel for the spreading of good teaching ideas campuswide.
One of the strengths of the Graduate Teacher Program is its focus on preparing graduate instructors only. Whereas many other institutions now have offices that offer help with teaching, they usually are oriented primarily toward faculty.
"Graduate instructors have unique needs because they are not only students but also teachers. But they are not yet professors," Border said. "When you are neither fish nor fowl as a graduate student you have different needs. This program is aimed at answering them."
The network, with its emphasis on discipline-specific training, is a powerful tool helping the Graduate Teacher Program fulfill its two-fold purpose of insuring a high quality of undergraduate teaching and preparing future faculty.
"My goal is to get graduate students to become excellent teachers and to find jobs in institutions where they are really happy," Border said.
Ron Madler, a former Lead graduate teacher who graduated from CU-Boulder with a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering sciences in 1994, credits the training he received with helping him get a job as a teacher.
"My involvement in all these programs helped me tremendously," said Madler, now an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "The thing that stood out on my application was that I did so many things to prepare myself for a teaching career."