Center Balks At TF Hotline

More than a week after the Undergraduate Council (UC) established an e-mail hotline for student feedback on teaching fellow (TF) performance, TFs, administrators, and the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning have been reluctant to fully endorse the program.

UC president Ryan A. Petersen ’08 and Bok Center Director James Wilkinson have discussed the possibility of the Center providing training for the undergraduate board charged with synthesizing and acting on student feedback.

The Center oversees TF training and reform.

In a swift response to a Feb. 14 Crimson op-ed co-authored by Petersen stating that the UC was “partnered” with the Bok Center, Wilkinson wrote to the editors to express his surprise at that characterization.

As of yesterday, Wilkinson was still unsure of a future relationship between the UC and the Bok Center.

“There will be no training until there is more knowledge about the general initiative,” Wilkinson said. He added that if the Bok Center facilitated training, it would be to help in assessing the gravity of student complaints, and not in approaching TFs with feedback.

While Petersen acknowledged that the hotline—which has seen traffic since its inception—could be improved if the Bok Center could be brought on board as a partner, he maintained that the project would go forward regardless.

Another point of concern raised by the program is its precision, said Theda Skocpol, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which supplies many TFs for the College.

“We should all consult on a variety of steps to ensure mid-course feedback that can help teachers and students to improve learning,” Skocpol wrote in an e-mail. “The hotline is a blunt tool for that, and probably not the best one.”

The hotline scheme has already been altered once in response to Skocpol’s original concern that the hotline’s undergraduate board would directly approach TFs with complaints. Skocpol’s unrest led Petersen to change the program so that the only parties approached would be course heads.

But, according to one TF, this conciliatory gesture may in fact have compromised the initiative’s effectiveness.

“You’re bypassing the TF itself, which is probably an easier and less alarming way to reform,” said Kenny R. Cupers, a TF in Literature and Arts B-20, “Designing the American City,” this semester. “But to pass them on to the course head—I don’t know if that’s the best way because course heads tend to be very far away from the immediate teaching experience.”

In defense of the Skocpol-spurred modifications, Petersen noted that he believed the program could now facilitate contact between course heads and the TFs under them.

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.