The Ideal of Teacher Training within the Reality of the Ph.D. Program

Abstract

We have learned a great deal in the preceding papers about the training in teaching that American Classics programs provide for their graduate students. As Robert Cape showed, most or all Ph.D. programs provide training for students who will serve as teaching assistants, and at least six schools now have teaching courses like the one Miriam Pittenger described. In this paper, I do not have time to deal with all of the various possibilities for teacher training, so I will concentrate on one, namely, teacher-training courses. A good deal is known about such courses, their advantages and shortcomings, in part because they are common outside of Classics. At Chapel Hill, for example, the Sociology department has been offering a course on teaching since the 1960s, and nationally there are so many teacher-training courses that there is now a considerable literature on them, assessing their strengths and weaknesses (Marincovich, citing earlier bibliography). While I am no expert in these matters, I have talked about graduate training with other Chairs of Ph.D. programs, and corresponded with them about it, and in this paper I will try to give you some thoughts, from the point of view of the department Chair at a Ph.D.-granting institution, about the stresses that implementing a teaching course may create. In the last part of the paper, I will move somewhat beyond that and consider teaching courses within a broader context.