Yale programs aim to teach the teachers

"Teaching is of utmost importance to me," Susan Brubaker, GRD "00, said. "One of the reasons that I chose Yale's Ph.D. program in French over other comparable programs around the country is the excellent teaching environment that we have here. Furthermore, what attracts me most to the career of university professor is not research and publishing, but teaching undergrads."

If the Yale Administration and Yale's graduate students agree on anything, it is the need for more teacher training at Yale. For the Administration, training graduate students creates apprentices, not employees. For graduate students, mastering the skill of teaching makes them commodoties in a tightening academic job market. These are not the only motivations for each side, but such incentives are the sources of continuing tension and wariness on both sides of the teaching spectrum.

Push for Training

In the 1994-1995 academic year, 977 graduate students were appointed as Teaching Fellows. Competition for these positions varies wildly among departments. In economics, for example, the requirements are almost non-existent.

"Anyone who wants to teach, teaches," economics graduate student Kevin Foster, GRD '98, said. He added that only about 15 percent of economics graduate students were born in the United States, and therefore many of them "don't know where the undergraduates are coming from." Foster described the abilities of economics Teaching Fellows as "wildly disparate" and said, "there is a great necessity for more teacher training."

Liz Oliner/YH Andrea McQuay, FS '98, teaches her section for "Introduction to Environmental Studies." The University has numerous plans to create more opportunities for teacher training for its TAs.

It would, however, be unfounded to claim that the push for teacher training comes solely from graduate students. As Andrew Moore, associate dean of the Graduate School, explained, "The Graduate School has been looking for ways to improve our [teacher training] programs for over a decade...We set up the Working at Teaching program (WAT) [and] have been applying for grants from outside sources [for such programs]."

WAT, Yale's teacher training program since 1993, has received praise from its participants. Each semester, WAT offers workshops run by advanced graduate student facilitators to teach practical classroom skills in different disciplines. A given workshop ranges from six to eight sessions, but actual time logged in training only ranges from nine to 15 total hours. Typical workshop topics include course design, the internet in the classroom, and the teaching of both writing and foreign language. Graduate students receive a small monetary stipend for attending a WAT workshop.

In addition, some academic departments have their own teacher training programs. In a survey report done by the WAT staff in the spring of this year, however, 64 percent of the respondents had not had any teacher training other than WAT. Although a vast majority of language students had received additional training, only a small percentage of students in the sciences had. 83 percent of WAT participants expressed their satisfaction with the program, though only about half of the survey respondents had actually participated in it.

"In an ideal world, I would like the number [of participants] to be higher," WAT Coordinator Alison Sills, GRD '99, said. She added that WAT, a voluntary program, has attracted a significant portion of the graduate student body.

Indeed, the WAT staff hailed the success of their program in the survey report, but also made several recommendations for the creation of a new Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). In particular, they recommended that the budget for the new CTL be substantially increased to augment the programs already in place through WAT, and that the CTL hire a full-time director to control its budget and act as a liasion to the Dean's Office, McDougal Center, and academic departments.

Salovey's Committee

To that end, a committee headed by noted psychology professor Peter Salovey was formed in May to search for a new director of teacher training at the graduate level. Although this new director will be in charge of a program incorporating the ideas of the aforementioned CTL, the name "Center for Teaching and Learning" is not being used by the committee. Professor Edith MacMullen, Director of Teacher Preparation for Undergraduates and a member of Salvoey's committee, said that she thinks "Working at Teaching is doing a good job. I don't think it's enough, [but] it's a developing program."

The new director would be in charge of further developing both WAT and the other training programs in the individual academic departments.

"We want to have a better central program, and better programs within the departments," Moore said.

Salovey described his ideal candidate as someone who knows about pedagogy (the art of teaching), but who did not necessarily go to school to study it. He is searching for someone with experience teaching at a competitive university, and who has the skills necessary to coordinate the administrative end of the program.

"We're looking for a person that may not exist," Salovey said.

Director of Teaching Fellows Katherine Kearns, a committee member, described this dilemma. "We had in mind this perfect person who could be both an academic with a Ph.D. in a discipline and with explicit experience in teacher training.... We've really been struggling to find what we feel is the right combination," she said.

The work of the committee, therefore, has been to determine what balance of administrative, teaching, and training experience would be most suitable for the new director; or as Salovey puts it, "clarifying to us what seems most important." The committee is comprised of both graduate and undergraduate faculty, including Moore, two graduate students, and Foster, totaling ten members in all.

Delays and Frustration

Since the WAT staff published its report in March, some graduate students have expressed frustration over the amount of time it has taken the Administration to respond to WAT's recommendations. Brubaker is one of the rare graduate students who has received extensive teacher training both at Yale and at programs run by Dartmouth College's Rassias Foundation.

"I wish that the Yale administration would invest more money in [WAT]," Brubaker said. "It was a good experience for me, but there are so many ways that it could be expanded. Why has Yale waited so long to act to improve teacher training for graduate students?" Estimates on when Salovey's committee will recommend the new director range from November of this year to January of 1998.

Some have raised questions about the absence of an undergraduate on Salovey's committee, since its decision will have a tremendous impact on the undergraduate student body. The most common response to such complaints is that committee members such as Associate Dean of Yale College Joseph Gordon, MacMullen, and Salovey himself, as undergraduate faculty, have the interests of the undergraduate population in mind.

Perhaps an even more pressing concern is how the Graduate School will fund this new program dedicated to teacher training. "They don't have a set budget [for the program]," Deborah Applegate, GRD '97, (now a lecturer)said. Without a budget in writing, the source for the funding remains a mystery as well. The policy-makers have repeatedly tried to assure all of the parties involved that funding for the program will be in place when the director arrives. Moore claims that Graduate School Dean Thomas Appelquist has a budget in mind which has not yet been finalized.

WAT has been severely hampered by a lack of funds. If the graduate school cannot finance the new program satisfactorily, the efforts of Professor Salovey's committee may be wasted.

"I think it is essential that the Graduate School maintain financial aid at current levels or better," Appelquist said.

Kearns, maintaining that the future of the nascent program is not already in jeopardy, echoed these sentiments. "When we find the right person [to run the program], it will be funded," she said.

But until a budget is finalized and approved, there will be skepticism about the future of Yale's teacher training programs, especially in the wake of last semester's highly controversial Teaching Fellow Program Review Committee report (also known as the Kutzinski Report) published last semester. The Kutzinski report included recommendations that all graduate students be required to teach undergraduates, and that the number of sections a graduate student may teach during his or her tenure be capped at four. Furthermore, the report requested that stipends for graduate stipends be fixed independently of the amount of sections taught.

By requiring graduate students to teach and by separating their stipends from the amount of teaching they do, the Kutzinski Committe, either intentionally or unintentionally, strengthened Yale's claim that graduate students are students, not employees. The timing of the report only added to the controversy; it was released just weeks after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed suit against Yale for unfair labor practices against Graduate Employee and Students Organization (GESO) members.

Now, since increased teacher training makes graduate students seem more like apprentices than employees, any committee formed to even discuss Teaching Fellows is likely to find its detractors. Even Salovey's committee which includes GESO member Foster, has not been immune to such criticism. The fact that committee members have admitted to encountering difficulties in their search for a director has not gone unnoticed. Applegate implies that Salovey's committee is looking for a candidate that will be overly responsive to concerns of the administration.

"[The committee members] are very concerned with control, so it's making it hard for them to conduct their business in a professional way," she said.

Committee members have stated that the new director will not report to anyone except for the dean of the Graduate School. Kearns in particular explained that the Graduate School is "wonderfully non-hierarchical."

"While I've done teaching, I've never done teacher training, and I consider that a special skill.... There is no mandate from above about how we do our job. We hope to get someone with enough expertise to guide us," she said.

Another somewhat more clandestine committee was recently formed by Appelquist, Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, and Provost Alison Richard. It consists solely of senior faculty members and is known as the "working group" among administrators. Their goal is not to publish a report, but to educate each other about teacher training and come to "respect departmental and disciplinary differences," according to Kearns. GESO members and undergraduates alike have lambasted the absence of students--graduate or undergraduate--on this committee. Appelquist, however, said, "A group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates will begin meeting soon. The discussions will be centered, however, in the departments and programs."

Beyond Kutzinski

Buried under the controversy and political innuendo surrounding the Kutzinski Report was the recommendation that Yale should establish a central teaching and learning program. For undergraduates, the decisions made by Professors Salovey, MacMullen, and the rest of their committee could mean the difference between a knowledgable section leader and an unprepared one. Yet the undergraduate student body, without representation on the committee, can only wait to hear their fate.

"There are people [on the committee] who have the undergraduate interests at heart," Salovey said, acknowledging the importance his committee holds for undergraduates.

The ability to teach effectively is becoming a valuable commodity in a shrinking job market, especially in academia. The marketablity of teaching as a skill was one of the main reasons graduate students initially voiced their need for a teacher training program. Appelgate explained that this trend goes beyond Yale, to a national level, in part because of the philosophy that quality teachers will attract the best group of students. "Nationally, there's a big trend towards more focus on teacher training, [since] institutions have begun to compete a lot more to get good students," she said.

Although politics may get in the way of any discussions focused on graduate student Teaching Fellows at Yale, the effort to put a comprehensive, effective, and far-reaching teacher training program in place continues. Whatever the motivations, undergraduates should brace themselves for potentially drastic changes, in both the format of their sections and the overall structure of their courses.

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