Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree.
So they know what students should be taught but I don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators.
I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.
> Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree.
This is universal. I’ve had largely the same experience. There’s several reasons for this.
1. Stupider people are better teachers. Smart people are too smart to have any empathic experience on what it’s like to not get something. They assume the world is smart like them so they glaze over topics they found trivial but most people found confusing.
2. They don’t need to teach. If the student body is so smart then the students themselves can learn without teaching.
3. Since students learn so well there’s no way to differentiate. So institutions make the material harder. They do this to differentiate students and give rankings. Inevitably this makes education worse.
It's simpler than that. "Prestigious" universities emphasize research prestige over all else on faculty. Faculty optimize for it and some even delight in being "hard" (bad) teachers because they see it as beneath them.
Less "prestigious" universities apply less of that pressure.
It can also be different within the same university, by department. I graduated from a university with a highly ranked and research oriented engineering department. I started in computer engineering which was in the college of engineering but ended up switching to computer science which was in the college of arts and sciences. The difference in the teachers and classroom experience was remarkable. It definitely seemed like the professors in the CS department actually wanted to teach and actually enjoyed teaching as compared to the engineering professors who treated it like it was wasting their time and expected you to learn everything from the book and their half-assed bullet point one way lectures. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your view, it also meant having to take more traditional liberal arts type electives in order to graduate.
I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not understand?" when the entire class was just blankly looking at the whiteboard.
At least at the undergrad level, it's not impossible to get an "A" without actually learning anything. Especially Freshman/Sophomore level classes. You just cram for the exams and regurgitate what you memorized. Within a few months time it's mostly gone.
Seriously, what so non-understandable in first 20 minutes of QM?
Probably depends on how it’s explained, no?
I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.
They never implied it was the first 20 minutes of the entire course
That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve.
Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while leaving the actual learning to the students.
Universities don’t pick professors because they are good teachers, they pick them for their research publications. The fact that some professors end up being good teachers is almost coincidental.
For the most part, most universities, that is true. I was dissatisfied with the quality of my undergrad college education, and had the resources to try other universities. After two state schools, I figured out that Boston is The University City with 700,000 college students in the larger Boston area when I attended Boston University, MIT and Harvard. I found Boston's over sized undergraduate population created a credit sharing system for all the Boston area colleges, and if one wanted they could just walk onto anther campus and take their same class at your university. So, of course, I took at the classes I could at Harvard. I was formally an engineering student at BU, but as far as the professors at Harvard and MIT knew I was a student at their school. What I found was that at Harvard, and about 75% of the time at MIT, the professors are incredibly good, they are the educational best self actualizing as teachers. Every single Harvard professor took a personal interest in my learning their subject. I saw that no where else.
Yeah at that level you’re basically optimizing for all around excellence, and it’s hard to be a leader in your field without also being deeply interested in it at all levels — and being reasonably charismatic.
I’ve only taken classes at state schools, and my experience was that I’d often get a professor that was clearly brilliant at publishing but lacked even the most rudimentary teaching skills. Which is insightful in its own way…just not optimal for teaching.
This is true for research universities. There are many excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to teach, and don't do research.
Sounds more like the unfortunate differences between teaching professors and research professors. Unfortunately some research schools force professors to teach N credits per semester even if that is not their speciality.
Your approach sounds too elitist for myself. I think you simply figure out the core skills of your professors. Maybe some teach undergrad well, others only advanced degrees. Maybe some should just be left to research with minimal classrooms etc.
I rather think it is a elitist concept of "I am a highly respected professor at a elite uni, how dare you bother me with your profane questions!"
I was at a Uni aiming for and then gaining "Elite" status in germany and I did not liked the concept and the changes.
I like high profile debates. As high as possible. But I don't like snobism. We all started as newbs.
>I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.
There is a lot more on the plate when you are kindergarten teacher - as the kids needs a lot of supervision and teaching outside the "subject" matters, basic life skills, learning to socialize.
Conversely, at a university the students should generally handle their life without your supervision, you can trust that all of them are able to communicate and to understand most of what you communicate to them.
So the subject matter expertise in kidnergartens is how to teach stuff to kids. Its not about holding a fork, or to not pull someones hair. Just as the subject matter expertise in an university can be maths. You rarely have both, and I don't understand how you suggest people get both a phd in maths, do enough research to get to be a professor and at the same time get a degree in education?
I was an instructor for a college credit eligible certification course. While I think that education degree is more than you need, providing effective and engaging instruction is a skill and is part of actual teaching at any level. Concepts like asking a few related open ended, no right answer questions at the beginning of a new topic to prime students’ thinking about that topic. Asking specific students “knowledge check” or “summarize/restate this topic” questions throughout keeps students from checking out. Alternating instruction with application type exercises help solidify concepts. Lesson plans/exercises/projects that build on each other and reincorporate previous topics. Consideration of how to assess students between testing and projects, for example a final vs a capstone project.
If you are just providing materials and testing, you aren’t actually teaching. Of course there are a ton of additional skills that go into childhood development, but just saying adults should figure it out and regurgitating material counts as “teaching” is BS.
Just watch out for who is certifying how things should be taught. It’s honestly one reason education is so bad and so slow to change.
Edit: and why perfectly capable professionals can’t be teachers without years of certification
> I've always found it weird that you need teaching certification to teach basic concepts to kindergartners but not to teach calculus to adults.
I think this is partially due to the age of the students, by the time you hit college the expectation is you can do a lot of the learning yourself outside of the classroom and will seek out additional assistance through office hours, self study, or tutors/classmates if you aren't able to understand from the lecture alone.
It's also down to cost cutting, instead of having entirely distinct teaching and research faculty universities require all professors to teach at least one class a semester. Usually though the large freshman and sophomore classes do get taught by quasi dedicated 'teaching' professors instead of a researcher ticking a box.
>don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators.
If someone is doing something day in and day out, they do gain knowledge on what works and doesn't work. So just by doing that the professors typically know much more about how people should be taught than the administrators. Further, the administrators' incentives are not aligned towards insuring proper instruction. They are aligned with increasing student enrollment and then cashing out whenever they personally can.
This is very different in France. Studying to be a teacher at university level is a big deal.
Since the reform on University administration circa 2011, a big push was done towards 'evaluation continue' (basically regular tests), which now last until your third year in some Uni, to make public universities more like private schools, and against 'partiels' (two big batteries of standardized tests in person, with thousands in the same area, with only pen and papers, one early January, second in may, every year, over a week).
That push was accelerated because of COVID, but with the 'AI homework', it gave teachers a possibility to argue against that move and the trend seemed stopped last year (I don't now yet if it has reverted). In any case, I hope this AI trend will give more freedom to teachers, and maybe new ways of teaching.
And I'm not a big Llm fan in general, but in my country, in superior education, it seems good overall.
Ah, that's interesting, thanks. I lived in France in 2001-2 and was friends with someone who was studying for his partiels to become a chemistry teacher.
Once you're an adult some of the best lessons come from having bad teachers.
Nobody knows "how" things should be taught. Pedagogy is utter disaster.
I am pretty sure that early childhood education (until fifth grade) is a very active area of research in all highly developed nations. Almost, by definition, it you want to (a) become or (b) stay a highly developed nation, you need to have a high quality public education system.
My mother was a first grade teacher for 30+ years. In her school system, first grade is the year that students learn to read. Each year, she was also required to take professional training classes for a certain number of days. She told me that, in her career, there were many changes and improvements and new techniques developed to help children learn how to read. One thing that changed a lot: The techniques are way more inclusive, so non-normie kids can learn to read better at an earlier age.
A PhD was historically a teaching degree: that’s what the D stands for.
No?
PhD - Philosophy Doctor
Doctor is Latin for teacher; cf. "doctrine", "docent".
The instructors may not know the absolute best way to teach, but I think they do know more than the administrators. All my interaction with teacher training suggests to me that a large proportion of it is basically vacuous. On dimensions like the ones under discussion here (e.g., "should we use AI", "can we do this class online"), there is not really anything to "know": it's not like anyone is somehow a super expert on AI teaching. Teacher training in such cases is mostly just fads with little substantive basis.
Moreover, the same issues arise even outside a classroom setting. A person learning on their own from a book vs. a chatbot faces many of the same problems. People have to deal with the problem of AI slop in office emails and restaurant menus. The problem isn't really about teaching, it's about the difficulty of using AI to do anything involving substantive knowledge and the ease of using AI to do things involving superficial tasks.