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E-PrinceA fundamental aspect of the Princeton academic experience is the precept — a meaningful and much-needed source of feedback and discussion for undergraduates enrolled in lecture courses. Indeed, graduate students who lead these precepts often serve as the primary means of ...(back to the article)
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If I were required to take a semester-long seminar on teaching precept, I would not have enrolled here as a graduate student. With average time to degrees in the ballpark of 5.5 years for my department, the last thing I want is to make that longer.
What the editorial should have talked about is the ineffectiveness of the two-day training session and how simple improvements to the training could lead greater improvements in precept. The only you learn at the training is "don't date your students." You sit through a day of discussion about what-ifs (what if a student argues about their grade, what if a student is found to be cheating?) and learn nothing about how to teach. Then you have to give a 5-minute lesson and get two minutes of feedback on it. That's it. It's wildly ineffective and a waste of time.
The editorial board should suggest improving the two-day training session before considering a semester-long program.
If McGraw can't teach a two-day training effectively, then they won't be able to do a semester-long course effectively either. It would be a waste of time.
A far greater problem is the University's raising of the cap for precepts, which means that the large number of students in each precept is beginning to compromise the quality of a Princeton education. I often split my precepts just to lower the numbers in each, which makes for much better discussion. We're not paid extra for doing that, nor do we get a course release, and many members of the faculty, especially untenured ones, don't have the time to take on extra teaching. Although the administration claims that the raising of precept caps isn't tied to the current financial situation, it's hard to fathom any other reason for this progressive and systematic diminishment in the quality of instruction in the College. The ballooning in precept size has substantially changed the nature of the education that undergraduates get, and I'd think the Prince would be interested in exploring the decisions and assumptions behind this policy.
While I applaud the general idea of making better teachers of our graduate population, this proposal isn't really going to do this. What makes a good teacher, is teaching. You really have to get into a class and try to see what your style is and how to best utilize your strengths in order to engage students. And you have to start teaching somewhere, and usually this is in your graduate studies.
Someone who isn't willing to try and become a good teacher, isn't likely to respond to a semester course in teaching. Likewise, someone who want to be a good teacher, will seek out the tools and mentoring they need to do so. I think a two-day prep is enough, but it sounds like there should be more emphasis on how to lead a discussion, how to deal with student's who "won't talk" and how to evaluate whether or not you are being effective.
In addition, I would like to see online evaluations required specifically for each preceptor. I think this can be done with the new system, but I am not sure. If the preceptor could see how the student's rated their performance in comparison to other preceptors for the same class, it would give them the information and the incentive needed for making improvements.
Whatever the U can do to make preceptors stronger is welcomed. The community ought to collaborate on a solution.
Many of commenters here are more insightful than the editorial (presumably because they're looking at it from the GS/faculty perspective rather than the undergrad). I want especially to emphasize fac's point -- it's really a numbers game. If you want better precepts, focusing on precept size, and especially also on the *number* of precepts carried by each preceptor, is the way to improve them. Grad preceptors in DCE and post-enrollment, and recent PhDs still precepting, are forced to carry large course loads -- from 4 to 6 precepts each semester depending on circumstances -- just to barely make ends meet (and retain health insurance!). If undergrads want to work on improving precept quality, that's the place to focus.
As an undergrad who has taken some teacher training courses here, I can say that those courses do help: not because they teach you how to teach, but because they teach you the variety of factors that influence student learning. This means that whereas teachers without that training may feel helpless in the face of a slow precept, those with training would know better what subtle factors to look at when evaluating their own teaching performance and how to improve. That isn't to say someone with good intuition for student psychology can't do the same thing, and certainly I've seen superb teachers with little training do just that. But poor preceptors could probably benefit from such formalized training.
Moreover, teacher training courses teach you how to get quick, effective feedback from students regarding your own teaching performance (resorting to course evaluation at the end of the semester is way too late - there are ways preceptors could easily get feedback on the spot or at the end of each class, e.g. by simply asking students periodically throughout the lesson if they comprehend the material, which few do).
I do agree that a 2-day teacher training could be designed to introduce preceptors to all of these merits of teacher training, and it's a shame the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning doesn't seem to do that. Why don't they collaborate with Teacher Prep, which has prepared students for teaching for 40 years at Princeton?
Why don't they collaborate? Because the McGraw Center* is far more concerned with defending its bureaucratic turf and funding, and taking over every teaching/precept-related function that it can from the individual departments, than it is with actually improving teaching at the University. McGraw plays the U's petty administrative politics for all they're worth, and couches their material in nonsensical educationalist jargon in order to defend themselves as the "experts". The 2-day preceptor training, and a lot of the other stuff McGraw does, exists primarily to secure McGraw's funding and institutional standing, and only secondarily to help anyone teach. Removing them from their entrenched, funded, separate administrative position and putting teaching back in the hands of the departments (with all the additional support that'd make possible) would be a great help.
* This is meant to apply to McGraw as a whole, especially its top-level administrators -- some, even many, of the individual lower-level staffers should be excepted from this description.
If you want to make Princeton into a state school (or a Harvard, equally infamous for large discussion sections), then by all means let Dean Malkiel continue to authorize humanities precepts of 18, 20, 24, 28 people. That's not a precept, that's a tour bus.
OK, as a parent who's shelling out a lot of money for my kid's Princeton education, whom do I contact to (a) request a smaller cap on precepts, and (b) better training. Finally, as an educator myself, while experience does help, professional development (workshops, mentoring, feedback, self-reflection) most certainly improve one's teaching faster.