At many universities, graduate students take the helm in introductory or lower-level classes, gaining practical experience in the classroom before many of them become professors themselves.
But at Brown, which prides itself on a low student-to-faculty ratio and a large number of classes taught by full-time faculty members, it sometimes seems there is little room for graduate students to get this kind of experience.
Dean of the Graduate School Karen Newman said the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning offers a wealth of resources for graduate students, among others, to improve their teaching skills.
The center offers a certification program to introduce students to the issues they will face as teaching faculty, and a peer review program lets graduate students who serve as teaching assistants work collaboratively to strengthen each other's skills.
Sheridan Center Director Rebecca More said the center exists in part to provide teaching assistants with the skills necessary to teach their sections and classes better.
The center is there to "provide all faculty and grad students with a center where they can talk about teaching and student issues," she said.
It is a "professional development center that asks, what do people need to continue to improve?" she said.
Although any graduate student can seek assistance from the Sheridan Center, there is no University-wide requirement for training. The responsibility for determining teaching training lies with individual departments.
As a result, Newman said, some departments feature more collaboration between faculty and graduate students than others. In the Department of English, for example, students and faculty jointly develop syllabi, and all English Ph.D. candidates must teach for three years.
Sections of EL 20: "Seminars in English Literatures and Cultures" are all taught by graduate students in the Department in English, but the courses are developed in cooperation with a faculty advisor.
According to Newman, the English department's program also requires that graduate students take the department's class about the teaching of literature and writing to prepare its students for teaching both at Brown and after graduation.
In other departments, such as the French studies department and the literary arts program, graduate students teach courses, but they do not design them - instead, the courses are designed by a faculty overseer.
And in some courses where TAs would typically only run sections, some professors allow their TAs to deliver a lecture or two. In HI 135: "Modern Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity" this semester, for example, Professor of History Omer Bartov is letting three of his graduate student TAs deliver a lecture each.
Other departments have other requirements for training in teaching. In the language departments, the Center for Language Teaching offers a class for teaching foreign languages that all students in the program have to take.
The Department of American Civilization requires that all of its doctoral students take a "professionalization" course in their second year in the graduate program.
This course "gives them skills they need to become professors," said Susan Smulyan, associate professor of American civilization.
And while graduate students in the sciences typically teach less than their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences, they still gain classroom experience by running lab sections. The Department of Chemistry, which emphasizes the importance of original research in its graduate program, also requires its candidates to teach, though typically for only one year.
Other programs designed to enhance graduate students' teaching skills include the Brown-Wheaton Teaching Laboratory in the Liberal Arts. In this program, graduate students from Brown teach courses at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., getting experience in a small liberal arts community that will be valuable if they plan on going into academia. There is currently considerable interest in expanding this program, Newman said.
For some graduate students, being a TA is a preliminary step toward deciding whether to pursue a career in academia. Eventually, most graduate students at Brown have a chance to be teaching assistants and thus earn experience teaching, Newman said. She said that in many departments, for example, teaching assistantship is part of a financial aid package or a requirement for the degree.
Still, Newman said Brown does "have a very small number" of graduate teaching assistants "in comparison with most of our peers, (and) a very small number of graduate students that are teaching fellows themselves."
She also said that only about 380 of Brown's 1,600 enrolled graduate students currently are working as teaching assistants. This means that roughly one-quarter of graduate students are currently teaching.
This number, however, does not necessarily represent the overall number of students who become teaching assistants at some point, said Newman.
"Most (graduate students) will become TAs. Some are (research assistants) and don't teach, but a good portion of them do," Newman said.
