By: Morgan Rooney
I’ll never forget the sense of excitement I experienced when I learned I was going to teach my first course. I had been advised by a number of parties to avoid teaching for the first few years of my doctorate so I could concentrate on the work at hand, but when the opportunity came, I jumped at it. The course assignment was nothing remarkable—an introductory literature course for non-English majors—but I was ecstatic nonetheless.
Like many people facing the unfamiliar, however, I was also trepidatious. Naturally, I turned to colleagues who had recently gone through the same transition, and they happily provided me with copies of their syllabi and chatted about their experiences over coffee. My department, too, was kind enough to provide still more copies of other syllabi, the names of bookstores and sample textbooks, and other such mundane matters that every professor has to take into account. I hadn’t crossed that magical PhD boundary yet, I rationalized, but I have studied my subject for almost 10 years, and I have consulted with everyone I can think of about teaching this course. How could I not be ready to do this, and to do it well?
From that time until about a year ago, I have been building upon and tweaking my teaching approach, mostly through trial and error and peer consultations. If student evaluations, feedback, and performance are any indicators too, I had to believe that I was doing a reasonably good job and, what’s more, was steadily improving. Five years into my teaching career, I felt like I knew what I needed to know in order to handle the teaching component of any faculty assignment that might come my way.
A year ago, on a whim—or rather, in what I think of now as a happy moment of healthy self-doubt—I enrolled in Anthony Marini’s Certificate in University Teaching program. I went into the program with the modest goal of finding new ways to engage my students, but I quickly found out that the experience would be more transformational than I ever could have anticipated. On the first day, Anthony opened with a point that forever altered my perspective on the subject of post-secondary teaching: most graduate programs, he observed, spend countless hours making sure we master content, but precious few dedicate any time to training us how to teach that content. As the enormity of that fundamental truth sank in, I gave myself up wholly to the possibility that I had much to learn about teaching—and, indeed, I did. I still do. In fact, the more I look back on my own development as a teacher, the more strange and, frankly, shocking I find the assumption that people preparing to spend a lifetime teaching don’t need to undergo any kind of instruction that focuses on teaching.
Imagine my delight, then, when I learned that one part of my new job with the EDC would be to teach a certificate course that tackles the gap that Anthony had pointed out, and which I myself knew too well. Preparing to Teach is a 9-week, 27-hour certificate program designed, as its title announces, to prepare upper-year PhD students to teach in a post-secondary environment. The program covers issues such as assessment, feedback, and learner-centered teaching, and it requires students to complete a number of practical assignments such as designing a course, preparing a lesson plan, and delivering it during a microteaching session, and drafting a teaching philosophy statement. Having both taught for years with minimal official training and braved the job market, I can’t exaggerate how directly applicable such topics and assignments are for students nearing the completion of their PhDs—not only will they prepare you for your first classroom experience, but they will also help you to build a strong teaching portfolio for prospective employers.
In spite of persistent calls to reform the PhD in a number of disciplines, academia might not yet be at the point where it is ready to integrate fully the twin mandates of mastering the complex, diverse content of a discipline and instructing its students how to teach that content. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t seek out partners such as the EDC to help close that gap for yourself. If you’re considering a career in academia, I urge you to take advantage of the unique opportunity that Preparing to Teach represents. As tenure lines become increasingly scarce, adjunct professoring is normalized, and more schools produce still more PhDs, the competition for faculty appointments grows ever-more fierce, and employers want reassurances that the people they are hiring are cutting-edge researchers and amazing teachers. Earning the Preparing to Teach certificate is one way to signal to potential employers that you are committed to teaching—and also, more importantly, to learn what goes into great teaching.