Preceptors prepare to take charge

When Rebecca Arkin ’10 walked into her first neuroscience precept last fall, the first words out of her graduate student preceptor’s mouth were: “Hi ... I’ve never really precepted before. Do any of you know how this is supposed to go?”

The preceptor proceeded to “hem and haw about exactly what we did in class ... offering no insight,” Arkin said in an e-mail. Twenty-five minutes into the 50-minute precept, Arkin recalled, the preceptor glanced at the clock, and said “Oh, fuck it.  Let’s just get out of here.”

Two weeks later, Arkin switched out of the section.

Though the University offers a great deal of training for preceptors, little of it is mandatory. But for undergraduates in many of the University’s larger classes, graduate student preceptors can make or break their learning experience.

“At their best, graduate students bring a fresh perspective to preceptorial and classroom discussion of material being presented in lecture by older faculty members,” former University president William Bowen GS ’58 wrote in his 1977 report on liberal education at Princeton.

For preceptors — who often see academia and teaching in their future — leading a precept of a dozen students can be a very rewarding experience. But, as Bowen noted, graduate students must “be carefully supervised and trained while here.”

Getting trained

Graduate student preceptors go through a two-day preceptor orientation at the beginning of each semester to prepare them to teach. The orientation program, offered by the McGraw Center, is led by experienced preceptors and consists of a series of workshops that focus on topics like grading student writing and leading discussions. The training culminates in a “microteaching” exercise in which each participant leads mini presentation or discussion for his or her peers and receives feedback on his or her teaching style.

Many graduate students agreed that the McGraw Center orientation was “helpful” in preparing them to lead precepts, but several also found the training to be lacking in some crucial areas.

Lori Smith GS, a student in the sociology department, said the mandatory training did not establish the goal of precepts clearly enough.

“We are familiar enough with the formal definition [of precepts],” Smith said in an e-mail. “But is the point to familiarize the students with the perspective of the given discipline and refine their thinking ... or to simply provide the students with a platform for engaging with the assigned readings with their peers or classmates?” Smith noted that the former requires a much different kind of preceptor involvement from the latter.

Art and archaeology preceptor Anna Swartwood GS complimented the training for its “nice balance between talking about teaching in the abstract and practical exercises like mock-teaching a short lesson.”

Though the orientation program greatly increased her confidence, Swartwood explained that there is nothing like the real thing.

“I don’t think anything can totally prepare you for precepting because part of the experience is getting to know yourself as a teacher and developing your own methods,” she said.

Involving undergraduates in the training process might also improve the effectiveness of the orientation by providing a relevant perspective, Smith added.

The language barrier

Forty percent of graduate students who began their degrees in fall 2007 were not U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Though the University requires preceptors who are not native English speakers to take a language test to ensure that their proficiency is sufficient to teach, it is unclear if the test and the training for non-native English speakers is enough.

Those who do not pass the preliminary oral proficiency test in September must take English Language Proficiency classes until they demonstrate increased proficiency by passing another oral proficiency test at the end of the semester.

Yaron Ayalon GS, who was born in Princeton and is both an Israeli and a U.S. citizen, did not have to take the spoken English test. He added that “it seems that the image of international grad students among the undergraduates is that we are basically preceptors who can’t speak English.”

“I’ve known graduate students who barely spoke any English,” he explained. “If I had to learn something from them, I would be frustrated.”

Frustration with the language barrier can go both ways.

“Because I am a nonnative speaker ... I was wondering for a while if the students understood a word I was saying or not,” mechanical engineering graduate student Ben Nabet said last spring. “But I think they [did].”

In some cases, however, it’s a price the University has to pay to maintain the high quality of its academic research, Ayalon said.

“If really brilliant minds in math and science don’t speak good English, the question becomes do you compromise on the quality of precepting or compromise on the quality of research,” Ayalon said. “I suspect the University would compromise the quality of precepting.”

Foreign graduate students looking to better master English can enroll in a voluntary English language workshop offered by the McGraw Center, said Jeff Himpele GS ’96, an associate director of the McGraw Center who is also in charge of its graduate programming.

Opportunities for further training

Native speakers of English can also take advantage of McGraw’s wide variety of optional workshops on different aspects of teaching.

Graduate students who are particularly interested in teaching can participate in the center’s teaching transcript program, which involves five workshops, having their precepts evaluated and writing a one-and-a-half-page statement of their teaching philosophy.

“The teaching transcript program is a credential graduate students can earn over the course of a year or two,” Himpele said. “It gives them an opportunity to dialogue and reflect about teaching, and it gives them a credential to show in the academic job market that they’ve taken the time to reflect on their own teaching.”

Chen Liu GS, a student in the art and archaeology department, said she attended one of the McGraw workshops earlier this year called “What is critical about critical thinking?” Though she found the course very interesting and helpful in teaching her how to evaluate her students’ thinking, she noted that very few graduate students take advantage of McGraw’s offerings.

The “problem is that they’re not mandatory,” Ayalon said, adding that he has heard from friends that the programs are “really, really good.”

Only about 12 students will finish the teaching transcript program this year, Himpele said, and it is unlikely that more training will be required for graduate students in the future.

“I don’t think we could make a year-long program in pedagogy mandatory for graduate students,” Himpele said.