Preparing Graduate Students for Teaching and Service Roles in Pharmacy Education

Abstract

A formalized approach should be used by faculty mentors to prepare their proteges to assume teaching and traditional service roles in an academic position. Preparation in research has long been the focus of graduate education, neglecting other parts of the tripartite mission of academia, while neglecting teaching and service.1 The Boyer Commission rebuked graduate education stating that it “…severely neglects the professional goal of the majority of students who will become college professors, that is to say, teaching.”2 The Commission put forth several recommendations to rectify this deficiency in graduate education including: letting graduate students have time to adapt to graduate school before entering the classroom, treating graduate students as apprentice teachers, encouraging the use of technology in creative ways, and providing encouragement through special rewards for outstanding teaching. The Commission not only made teaching development recommendations but also indicated the need to address the service role1,3 The Commission also stated that graduate students are “…too often expected to know how to teach with little more than a few days or weeks of casual training and with little or no supervision throughout the year.”2 The responsibilities of teaching assistants vary across departments. Sometimes they are assigned teaching responsibilities with minimal preparation or they serve as minimally paid labor for the department, performing only menial tasks.1,3 Requiring a graduate student to teach without adequate preparation usually results in the graduate student repeating the mistakes of his/her previous instructors. On the other hand, working exclusively as “cheap labor” minimizes the value of the learning experience. With proper mentorship, the teaching assistant is treated more as a budding colleague. A report prepared by Golde and Dore for the Pew Charitable Trusts suggested the existence of a mismatch of purposes among doctoral education, graduate students, and the realities of academia. In higher education disciplines, graduate students pursue careers as faculty members, while the majority of graduate programs prepare them for careers in research.4 In order to address the needs and desires of both the students and college, concentration on addressing the rest of the tripartite mission, mainly that of teaching and service, should become paramount. Although many pharmaceutical science graduates pursue nonacademic research careers, the need for sufficient well-prepared faculty members in these disciplines must be considered. A variety of service components can be formally incorporated in the graduate school experience. For example, service activities can be approached with an intense one-on-one mentorship between a faculty member and graduate student, and the use of a teaching assistantship can constitute a practical laboratory for teaching topics. In our experience, a faculty mentor and graduate student can work as a team to instill the scholarship of teaching and learning and thereby prepare graduate students for a faculty/academic position. While supervised internships for graduate students have been discussed in the literature, they concentrated on teaching and were informal in nature. As Wankat cautioned, “…without a formal structure there is no way to certify what the graduate student has accomplished.”1,5 We believe a formal approach to a supervised internship can better prepare graduate students for faculty/academic positions. This method centers around the idea of a supervised internship having not only an advisor and graduate student sharing teaching activities but also participating in service activities. Purposeful preparation is as necessary for the success in teaching and service missions as it is for research. Proficiency in teaching and service roles will not be achieved if left to osmosis or simple modeling.