Improving TF Training

The Teaching Fellow training regulations approved Wednesday by the Faculty Council are a compromise between competing interests.

On one side, undergraduates want a guarantee that their tuition money will buy them uniformly good teaching.

On the other, professors defend the autonomy of individual faculty members and departments, which have traditionally seen little interference from Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) administrators.

And in the middle are the TFs themselves, who fear that departments will use regulations to attack section leaders.

The plan adopted this week seems closest to the faculty ideal: the power to determine TF training regulations is still in the hands of individual departments, though Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell must approve their designs.

Two alternative proposals offered by Buell and the Undergraduate Council, respectively, would have subjected all teaching fellows to a uniform standard.

Buell two weeks ago proposed a language test for all TFs, and the Undergraduate Council in December suggested common evaluation guidelines for all section leaders.

Buell's original plan was altered, and the Undergraduate Council's guidelines haven't made it to the Faculty Council.

Faculty Council members defend the new plan and the autonomy it grants individual departments.

They objected to Buell's original draft because is violated that autonomy. Faculty also feared that certain departments which rely heavily on foreign TFs would lose qualified members of their teaching staff based on arbitrary and impersonal assessments.

"The previous proposal was considered to have two defects," Buell said this week. "One was that it was too narrowly focused on the language issue, and the other was that it was too rigid in developing a central plan for dealing with [the training].

The new guidelines give departments the initiative while still forcing a renewed commitment to the training of teachers, professors say.

"This allows each department to have flexibility to do what they think is necessary and important," Baird professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, a Faculty Council member, said this week.

Departments are fully capable of taking care of their own problems, professors say.

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi, who is the chair of the Physics department, says his department recognized its own difficulties and dealt with them long before the new plan appeared.

"Everyone's on the same said here," he says. "We want our TFs to be as well prepared as they can be, regardless of any edict from the administration."

He acknowledges that the reforms inherent in the formulation of a new screening and training plan could cause the department to lose a few teachers.

But given the attention Physics already pays to the problem, Georgi says, he would 'be surprised if the new plan made a big difference."

That, is precisely the problem, undergraduates say: there won't be a big difference.

Where faculty members see welcome "flexibility" those charged with representing undergraduate interests see a lack of enforcement.

"There's too much flexibility in this program, there's no bottom line," says Christopher J. Garofalo '94, who chaired the Undergraduate Council's student affairs committee last semester.

The Universal TF evaluation guidelines suggested by Garofalo's committee last December include such requirements as "explains material clearly" and "provides helpful comments on papers."

Council members take credit for keeping the issue of TF training on the table long enough to result in any training requirements at all.

"Unqualified TFs have always been an issue for us," says Hassen A. Sayeed '96, chair of the student affairs committee of the Undergraduate Council. "U.C. members were crucial in getting this issue into a central forum at CUE meetings we pushed this until administrators realized its importance."

But the new plan is not going to keep the undergraduates quiet, says Undergraduate Council President Carey W. Gabay '94.

If the new plan remains in effect for long, Undergraduate Council members will soon be back in Buell's office pushing for more TF reforms, he says.

"I hope this is just a transitory step," he says. "I'm concerned that this plan is not universal enough--I would prefer more uniform rules."

"But it's step in the right direction and I'm really glad the administration is taking it," Gabay adds. "They just need to keep going."

The direction Garofalo and Gabay would like the administration to "keep going" in is the one faculty members hate the most: the students want centralized uniform standards like the Undergraduate Council guidelines or the original Buell plan.

"I would like to see Dean Buell take up a central screening mechanism," Garofalo says. "Professors do need autonomy over their classrooms, but within guidelines The administration does need to set a standard."

Teaching fellows, like undergraduates, have reservations about the new compromise plan. But their concerns don't center around the need for a uniform standard to keep teaching quality universally high.

Instead, many graduate students say that the new, flexible departmental rules could be used to attack TFs.

"There are some departments in which professors are out to get students," says Andrea Malaguti, a graduate students in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. "Some professors would like to screen their TFs every day just to find flaws in their preparation."

Andrew Robertson, a second-year graduate student in the History of Science department, says he fears that a flexible system with standards differing between departments could be used against some TFs and to the benefit of others.

"But that could also happen under the present system of no rules," he adds.

Robertson says another issue of concern with the imposition of new standards is the limited number of available TFs.

"They can't start setting standards too high or some departments will run out of `qualified' TFs and they won't be able to teach some classes," he says.

TFs also say that the complaints undergraduates have about foreign TFs do not all stem from real language problems.

Xenophobia and racism can also play a part in undergraduates' dismissal of teachers from other countries, graduate students say.

"There are always going to be some people who aren't going to make the effort to understand what someone's saying," Robertson says. "Frankly, there is an element of racism that is just barely being covered up by the excuse of student's interests."

Graduate Student Coordinator for the Mathematics Department Donna R. D'Fini says some of the problems students have with their section leaders result from undergraduates' prejudices.

"A lot of students use their TF's accent as an excuse not to do their best work," D'Finisays. "Some students concentrate on the accent, not on the math."

TFs also bring up another concern: the education of graduate students. TFs say novice section leaders are learning the skills that will make them better teachers in the future.

"Departments use discussion sections as a pedagogic tool for graduate students," Robertson says. "The point of doing this for a lot of graduate students is to teach them how to teach in the future."

Testing graduate students' teaching skills before they even enter a classroom may be to the detriment of the graduate students' education's, Robertson says.

"By saying that we have to be [polished teachers] when we're just starting to TF may be threatening that aspect of our learning process," he says.

And like Undergraduate Council members, graduate students wonder if the new training guidelines are the best thing for undergraduate education.

"I'm not sure what's going to be accomplished," says Margaret Kim, a third-year graduate student in the Department of English and American Literature and Languages.

"Of course it's an important goal to enhance teaching and to ensure that everyone has gotten the proper training before they start taching," she says, "but I don't think this plan will have much effect in my field."

According to Malaguti, the flexibility of the TF training and screening plan could hurt undergraduates.

Malaguti says TF screening done by a faculty member may not be effective because "it is very difficulty for the teacher to put him or herself in the position of [an undergraduate] student."

"In some departments the professors try to protect their graduate students-each department has its own particular problem," he says.

Many graduate students say they're not even sure how large the problem of ineffective TFs really is.

One M.D./Ph.D. graduate student in the bio-physics department says that, as a Harvard undergraduate, he found TFs "are generally quite adequate, and they're especially helpful one-on-one."

But the student, who graduated with a joint degree in Chemistry and physics in 1989, acknowledges that his American Born TFs were usually more comprehensibel than his foreign-born instructors.

The graduate student says: "The TFs that spoke English better I understood better and I got more out of the learning experience from them."