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Today's Topics:
1. luring graduate students. (Bruce Reznick)
2. Re: Motivating grad students (Kenneth P. Bogart)
3. Re: Motivating Graduate Students (S. Hauk)
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:13:07 -0600 (CST)
From: Bruce Reznick <reznick@math.uiuc.edu>
Subject: [PSTUM-list] luring graduate students.
To: <pstum-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu>
Message-ID:
<Pine.GSO.4.33.0502211102160.8735-100000@u52.math.uiuc.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Derek --
Our graduate director is a big believer in pizza, soda and other free
food. In an ideal world, bribery wouldn't be necessary, but you asked.
I guess I should introduce myself. I'm essentially a research
mathematician who has always had a strong interest in good teaching, even
in the bad old days of the 70's and 80's, when those interests were
thought to be mutually exclusive. [Two true stories from those days:
In my first week of my first job, another newly hired colleague asked
"You seem to like teaching, why didn't you try to get a job at a
4-year school". The first time my Head nominated me for a teaching
award, a concerned senior colleague asked me if that meant I wasn't
getting tenure.]
After I got tenure in `84, I wrote a teaching guide for our grad student
orientation, and after several incaranations, it currently resides at
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~reznick/ciu.html
Comments are always welcome; I ought to do another version before I
retire. When it comes to teaching advice, I'm full of it.
-- Bruce
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 pstum-list-request@lists.fas.harvard.edu wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Motivating grad students (Derek Bruff)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:10:07 -0500
From: Derek Bruff <bruff@fas.harvard.edu>
Subject: [PSTUM-list] Motivating grad students
To: Preparing and Supporting Teachers of Undergraduate Mathematics
<pstum-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu>
Message-ID: <BE3F720F.534A%bruff@fas.harvard.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
PSTUM-List,
This year we have been running a seminar on teaching undergraduate
mathematics designed to help our graduate students improve our teaching.
The seminar is optional, and attendance has generally been low. I'm
wondering if anyone on the list has experience with attendance-optional,
math department teaching seminars. What, if anything, have you found
particular effective in motivating graduate students to attend?
If it helps, here's the seminar's web site:
http://abel.math.harvard.edu/preceptor/tums/
Thanks in advance for your help!
Derek
--
Derek Bruff, Preceptor
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University
Email: bruff@fas.harvard.edu
Web: http://www.derekbruff.com/
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Message: 2
Date: 21 Feb 2005 14:45:44 EST
From: Kenneth.P.Bogart@Dartmouth.EDU (Kenneth P. Bogart)
Subject: Re: [PSTUM-list] Motivating grad students
To: pstum-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu, pstum-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu
(Preparing and Supporting Teachers of Undergraduate Mathematics)
Cc: Kim Rheinlander <Kim.Rheinlander@Dartmouth.EDU>
Message-ID: <50263244@newvixen.Dartmouth.EDU>
Content-Type: text/plain
Hi All. I think my earlier attempt at a post was before the listserve was
actually running. So I'll begin with my introduction.
I'm Ken Bogart. My only full-time job has been teaching at Dartmouth since
1968. My research for years has been in various branches of combinatorics, but
around 1995 I caught the bug of wanting to apply research in how people learn
mathematics to the teaching of undergraduates. (This was the resul of being
asked to participate in our teaching seminar, described below). Over the years
this has changed my research agenda and I now think of research in how
undergraduates learn mathematics as my primary interest.
My short answer to Derek's post is that unless students perceive the seminar as
a more important use of their time than preparing for qualifying exams or
writing a thesis, the only hope is, as Bruce Resnick suggests, to bribe them
with food. But in the long run, if the tradeoff of food for time cuts into what
they perceive as the department's top priorities for them, they will stop
participating. In our department we have flexible rules and inflexible rules
for graduate students. The three most inflexible rules are
1. You have to write (and successfully defend) a thesis.
2. You have to teach at least two (ten week) courses on your own, and to be
allowed to do so, you must take the teaching seminar.
3. You have to pass qualifying exams in a timely way.
I list them in this order, because the timeliness of the teaching seminar is
less flexible than the timliness of qualifying exams. We have been consistent
in enforcing requirement 2 so that it is now a part of our graduate student
culture that this is something everyone does and it is part of our faculty
culture that we cut our thesis advisees slack when they are in the teaching
seminar or when they are teaching their courses.
Dartmouth has had some sort of teaching seminar since the mid seventies. It
began as an opportunity for (second year) grad students who were about to teach
on their own to give two one-hour practice lectures with 3 faculty and all the
other second year graduate students attending and trying to act like
undergraduates. Eventually it was undermined significantly when a senior
faculty member who was chair of the seminar committee decided fifteen minute
lectures were long enough. After that it was hard to bring up issues of student
involvement, etc., because there wasn't enough time for the grad students to
really get going in their practice lectures. In the late eighties when I was
chair, faculty members Dorothy Wallace and Marcia Groszek wrote a proposal with
Claudia Henrion from Middlebury to FIPSE to desing a seminar that would use the
research literature of math education as a basis for a required summer-long
seminar (with lots of practical experience) for all grad students who were going
to begin teaching the following year. It ended up getting funded by Pew
Foundation, and the department approved the plan that resulted: The graduate
teaching seminar at Dartmouth is effectively a ten quarter-hour graduate course
in which graduate students who are preparing to be undergraduate teachers read
and discuss the literature of how undergraduates (and others) learn mathematics,
prepare and run two one-week workshops for high school students (in which they
attempt to put what they have gleaned from the research literature into
practice), engage in practice of various skills that are hoped to be useful to
them in teaching, practice teach in two one-hour classes that are being run by
other faculty members in Dartmouth's summer term, and reflect on their
activities. We make heavy use of videotape to give the grduate students fodder
for reflection.
When I stopped being chair, I was recruited to join the seminar teaching staff
as part of Dartmouth's Math Across the Curriculum grant. (It funded two
teachers for the seminar for five years, and allowed Dorothy, Marcia, and then
me to train several other faculty members in the methods.)
I don't recall any complaints about graduate student teaching since we
instituted the seminar. It is required of all students when they make the
transition at the end of the second year from being TAs to being in charge of
their own courses or sections of courses.
The administrator for the seminar is Kim Rheinlander at Dartmouth, and
information about the seminar is available from her or from any of the above
faculty members. Visitors, either short-term or long-term,
including a limited number of graduate students from other institutions, are
welcome. In particualr, we are happy to have faculty members from other
institutions not only observe but co-teach the seminar in order to become
familiar with our methods. We have a long range project of creating a web-page
for the seminar, but that has so far fallen victim to our perceptions about our
own institution's priorities for faculty members!
Ken Bogart
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:29:09 -0700
From: "S. Hauk" <hauk@unco.edu>
Subject: [PSTUM-list] Re: Motivating Graduate Students
To: pstum-list@lists.fas.harvard.edu
Message-ID: <2652A3A2-8471-11D9-8E5A-000A95AEF880@unco.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Hi,
A few suggestions:
1. The meetings should be on a predictable, REGULAR BASIS so that grad
students can plan to attend (modeling one of the important strategies
for successful teaching: Planning). This is not the same as regularly
announcing an irregularly scheduled meeting (e.g., always announcing a
meeting two weeks in advance).
2. Make clear in announcements what kind of INFORMATION AND ACTIVITIES
can be expected (from what I see on the web, only the information part
of this is generally offered).
3. Another key to increasing attendance is DISTRIBUTION. Remind
teaching faculty (not just grad students) that the regularly scheduled
meeting is coming up in 7 days and in 2 days. Do this on the web,
through email, and on flyers. For flyers, choose a distinctive color
for the teaching seminar and always put teaching seminar flyers on this
same color. These flyers should be BOTH: distributed to mailboxes AND
posted in places frequented by teaching faculty (e.g., over every copy
machine in the department - give them something to read in that
photo-copy-zen state of mind). Also, remove the flyer as soon as the
meeting is over or post flyers that list SEVERAL upcoming meetings and
leave in place for a long time (the first strategy is actually more
likely to generate attendance, since the old flyer disappears and a
blank spot on the wall exists for a bit before the new flyer is posted).
4. Personally invite five people to the meeting, one at a time. For
each who promises to attend, ask them to commit to bringing a friend.
Shandy
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