Training for Teachers

A perennial student complaint, expressed in the CRIMSON's "Confidential Guide" each year is directed against the professor or instructor who knows but cannot teach. "Competent but dull," "Knows his stuff but can't put it across," are frequent descriptions. This year for the third time, the Radcliffe Graduate School is making a partial effort to meet this ineptitude.

An extra-curricular lecture series in college teaching will be offered; its main concern will be with introducing graduate students to the problems of teaching--organizing a course, selection of material, grading, understanding the student's point of view, his resistance to learning. The lecturers will be such experts as President Conant and Professors Demos and LeCorbeiller, and the course ought to fulfill its intentions. But those intentions are not nearly high enough.

The series is valuable as a pioneer effort and as a precedent for other schools, but attendance at these lectures will hardly equip graduate students for the complicated job of teaching. The course needs to be more thorough in its approach, and should provide for more active participation on the part of students--with collateral reading, practice teaching, and written work.

These suggestions add up to a full-time course for credit and such a course should be required for many graduate degrees, because the majority of professional people in the academic world go into teaching, not research. The present graduate curriculum creates a frame of mind often specialized and sophisticated to an ingrown stage, not oriented to teaching--which requires simplification and work with unmotivated students.

The move to create such a course should be up to Harvard, not Radcliffe with its meagre budget. A course in college teaching, required for the majority of graduate students, would mean a large revision in Graduate School policy. The result, however, would be an extremely valuable precedent in a neglected area of higher education.