The Benefits of Talking About Graduate Teaching

“The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia”

Before I taught my first graduate seminar, I received no mentoring about how to approach graduate teaching. To be fair, it was my very first quarter as an assistant professor, and I didn’t ask for any guidance. I remember being (a) deeply intimidated by the task, as I had been a graduate student just months earlier and didn’t feel that I knew enough to rise to the task; and (b) at something of a loss for models of how I wanted to teach a graduate course.

I think there may be a false impression that graduate teaching is easier than undergraduate teaching. I greatly enjoy teaching graduate students, but I would not call it easy. I think creating an effective learning environment in a graduate seminar and facilitating productive discussions, where everyone feels empowered to speak, comes with a set of challenges unique to the environment.

I remember sitting in graduate courses in my own Ph.D. program, years ago, pretending to understand terms and feeling as if everyone else had read scholars I had not read. It felt as if I had missed the manual for what to read before going into an English Ph.D. program, and I would make mental notes about what to go look up after class. At times we seemed to use discussions to perform a kind of graduate-school smartness, which didn’t allow space for “I’m not sure I understand this” — let alone, “I’m not sure how this theory/reading/method helps me answer the questions I am trying to answer.”

Now, as a result, on the first day of the graduate seminars I teach, I have “the talk” with students, describing my own experience in graduate school and encouraging them to aim for the kind of genuine discussion in which we wrestle with hard concepts and help one another understand what we don’t understand. As I point out, what can seem like a basic question about a term can often spin into an important discussion that helps us clarify a key concept. I try to model this scholarly approach by highlighting passages in readings that I am not sure I understand, asking for insights from students so that we can sort it out.

Graduate students tell me that they still encounter seminars that rely primarily, if not solely, on the format of relatively unstructured full class discussion about the readings. There are, of course, many good reasons to have full class discussions, but I also love hearing about colleagues who are playing with hands-on activities in small groups, note cards with discussion questions, and directed pair work before coming back to full class conversations. Many of the techniques we use to facilitate discussion in undergraduate courses can be usefully adapted to graduate seminars in order to encourage more voices in the room.

After that first graduate seminar (where no one got hurt, but I would not describe it as a high point of my teaching career), I also came to realize that I could experiment with assignments beyond the “seminar paper.” Almost every graduate seminar I had taken asked us to write a long essay at the end of the course, but as I reflected on my coursework, I realized I had also been asked by instructors to create a syllabus — which was a terrific learning experience — and to write a book review.

As an instructor, I have employed shorter essays early in the course so that I can provide feedback on writing earlier in the term. And I have had good luck with different versions of a collaborative handbook, which hones a kind of research we are often asked to do. For the handbook in a course on language and gender, each student took a central scholar in the field and wrote an encyclopedia entry about that scholar’s career and key contributions. They also did a presentation when we started reading that scholar’s work in the seminar. In a course on the history of English, each student selected a point of usage or a grammatical rule, wrote an overview of the history and current state of usage, and provided a lesson plan for a first-year writing course. I created bound copies of these handbooks, but they could easily be put online, too. I know colleagues who usefully assign conference proposals and talks — which students then deliver and receive feedback on from peers.

Perhaps the most important thing I do in graduate seminars (an idea that I stole): I read drafts and provide feedback. I remember the only time a professor did that for my final seminar paper in a graduate course, and I remain grateful to this day for what that feedback taught me about academic writing. For example, I remember the professor taking much of the first page and saying, “This could be a footnote.” And as soon as I read the comment, I thought, “Oh, I have seen footnotes like that.”

I think faculty members could also talk more about mentoring graduate students about master’s theses and dissertations, but I’ll save that for another post.

I feel sure there are departments and universities with graduate programs where conversations about graduate teaching are happening regularly; I feel equally confident that there are departments and universities where they are not. I encourage us to think more about how we might provide more-consistent mentoring and collaboration around graduate teaching, for the sake of newer (and more senior) faculty members and to the great benefit of graduate students.