You can, in fact, teach someone how to teach

Matthew Stein just published a great piece in JPSE on the 2024 status of pedagogical training in political science PhD programs, and the results are pretty eye-opening. There’s been little to no progress since Ishiyama, Miles and Balarezo’s (2010) study on this, and Stein finds that a plurality of programs have no required training in teaching, instead relying on TA-ships and informal mentoring from faculty and graduate students.

But here’s the part that struck me:

Inconsistent TA training is one justification for implementing a pedagogy course, but some interviewees insisted that experience, and not coursework, was the best training method. Ana said, “you can’t teach somebody how to teach … you can only learn by doing … I think it would be valuable if we provided more teaching training but at the same time, I’m of the opinion … that experience is the best guide.” Bob echoed this resistance in saying, “most of it is ‘on the job training’. There’s a limit to how much preparation you can do by sitting people down and going through possible scenarios.” These interviewees, alongside others, stressed the value of teaching experience, rather than pedagogical training.

Um…how do I say this politely? Ahem: good teaching DOES involve learning by doing. Any instructor worth their salt knows that you have to actively engage students in their learning. That doesn’t mean throwing them into the classroom and having them learn the hard way, leaving students to suffer as you figure things out. A well-designed course on teaching requires students to practice their skills in front of an instructor and peers, and get valuable formative feedback on everything from lecturing to discussion leadership, syllabus design, policies, grading, and dealing with challenging classroom dynamics. In a lesson on lecture skills, I’d probably start with a discussion about effective and ineffective lectures (drawing on the experiences of those in the room), plus some direct but interactive instruction on lecture-writing principles (see tips in chapter 6 in my new book, or the excellent Interactive Lecturing by Barkley and Major). I’d then give students some time to put these ideas into practice, to create short lectures themselves that they would eventually present and receive feedback on.

The ideas that teaching experience and pedagogical training are entirely separate halves of a Venn diagram to me just smacks of ignorance of how skill development works.

This is yet another reason why it is so valuable to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning and required training. Most faculty don’t know that there’s a literature on all of this, and for some, because they learned the hard way, think that this is how their students should learn as well. But I would argue that a little real training goes a long way: think how much more time students will have for their research in year 1-2 of their job if they already have the fundamentals of good teaching down?