4 ms·

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

• Super_Jambo 1y ago
  Once you're an adult some of the best lessons come from having bad teachers.
  • iwanttocomment 1y ago
    Adult here! No.
  • vacuity 1y ago
    Adult here; there are lessons everywhere, but people learn very differently.
• dr_dshiv 1y ago
  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
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  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.
• hoseja 1y ago
  Nobody knows "how" things should be taught. Pedagogy is utter disaster.
  • throwaway2037 1y ago
    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.
    • orwin 1y ago
      A lot of research is made. Are the discoveries applied properly? Not always.
• throwaway2037 1y ago
  > Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree. I attended two universities to get my computer science degree. The first was somewhat famous/prestigious, and I found most of the professors very unapproachable and cared little about "teaching well". The second was a no-name second tier public uni, but I found the professors much more approachable, and they made more effort to teach well. I am still very conflicted about that experience. Sadly, the students were way smarter at the first uni, so the intellectual rigor of discussions was much higher than my second uni. My final thoughts: "You win some; you lose some."
  • falcor84 1y ago
    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.
    • lukan 1y ago
      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.
    • infecto 1y ago
      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.
• stevage 1y ago
  This is very different in France. Studying to be a teacher at university level is a big deal.
  • orwin 1y ago
    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.
    • stevage 1y ago
      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.
• fastasucan 1y ago
  >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?
  • 542354234235 1y ago
    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.
• Telemakhos 1y ago
  A PhD was historically a teaching degree: that’s what the D stands for.
  • raverbashing 1y ago
    No? PhD - Philosophy Doctor
    • cookielover 1y ago
      [dead]
    • treis 1y ago
      Doctor is latin for teacher
    • valleyer 1y ago
      Doctor is Latin for teacher; cf. "doctrine", "docent".
      • raverbashing 1y ago
        Fair enough. I had looked into it but missed the "Doctor" part.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• rtkwe 1y ago
  > 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.
• hollandheese 1y ago
  >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.