Teaching Fellows Under Fire

In a University with over 6,000 undergraduates and 900 classes, the reality that much of undergraduate teaching is done by teaching fellows (TFs) is one that Harvard students have to face.

But behind student complaints about the quality of their TFs lies a decentralized system through which departments hire, train, and use them.

“We hold sections because it enhances undergraduate education by providing an opportunity to deal with the material in a hands on way,” said Jeffrey Wolcowitz ’76, Associate Dean of FAS for Undergraduate Education.

And professors do not dispute the fact that in many cases, TFs can be beneficial to a student’s learning experience.

“I use my section leaders for the kind of exercises that I cannot do, namely administering weekly quizzes and making sure the students are close-reading the text,” said Lino Pertile, the professor of Literature and Arts A-26 “Dante’s Divine Comedy and Its World.”

But the reality is that professors can only provide guidlines and not mandates for what goes on outside lecture.

Making the Grade

Problems resulting from differences in TF teaching styles manifest themselves most prominently in the area of grading—the only means by which students can quantitatively assess their performance in a course.

“When my section leader assigns papers that others in the same course don’t, it makes you wonder what our grades are based on and what they really mean,” said Sophie L. Gonick ’05.

In “Literature and Arts B-51: First Nights,” section leaders grade their own papers and then meet with the professor and the other section leaders to see where their results fit in.

“I never tell a section leader to regrade the exams, but when they see where their preliminary results fit in, they have the option of readjusting them,” Kelly said.

Despite the attempts at consistency, students rarely feel satisfied with the process.

“In big classes grades don’t mean anything,” said Douglas A. Balliett ’05 .

“After all, you can know the same amount of material as someone else and get a completely different grade,” he said .

Students with concerns similar to Balliett’s are trying to make their voices heard.

After a bad experience with a TF at the beginning of this semester, Alexander B. Patterson ’04 began an aggressive campaign for the Undergraduate Council (UC), hoping that would better enable him to effect change in the system.

“My TF told us that the purpose of section was not to discuss the reading because [he] had not done it,” Patterson said.

Under the leadership of Patterson and committe chair Rohit Chopra ’04 the council’s Student Activities Committee (SAC) is currently addressing the concern regarding the lack of standardization among section leaders.

SAC plans on presenting a proposal to Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan Pedersen and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) in the near future.

SAC believes that the goal of consistency in TF training can only be realized if departments have a better sense of the size of their classes further in advance.

As a result of Harvard’s shopping period, many professors do not know the exact enrollment of their courses until two weeks into the course, when they often have to scramble to find additional TFs.

This year Pertile had to hire four section leaders from Brown after the first week of school due to the unexpected popularity of his course.

“We may want to develop some sort of non-binding pre-registration system to solve this problem,” Chopra said. “You cannot train people to be TFs if they don’t even know that they are going to teach.”

The Source of the Problem

SAC’s targeting of the TF hiring procedure is not the first time that it has been identified as a problem. The Faculty Council voted in 1996 to adopt new guidelines for the registering and training of new teachers.

Since then individual departments have been required to annually submit a plan to Wolcowitz’s office as to their method for hiring and training their teaching fellows from Harvard teaching assistants from other schools (TAs), and undergraduate course assistants (CAs.)

The plan must contain provisions as to how the department will assess English competency and how their TFs will be trained.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and the Faculty Council also adopted a proposal that requires section leaders to attend all lectures.

“Our goal is to make the departments take this seriously and there are many different hybrid plans that have emerged,” Wolcowitz says, emphasizing that there is no overarching set of requirements.

Departmental Differences

In spite of FAS’ efforts to standardize TF hiring and training procedures, some departments encounter more difficulty than others because of the availability of qualified graduate students to teach their courses.

While some departments have the luxury of choosing from a wide pool of applicants, others are often scraping to find them last minute, leaving little room for extensive training.

In hiring TFs for “First Nights,” Kelly had to draw from a pool of music department graduate students that is tiny in comparison to the course’s size.

“The notion that some departments create large Core courses to supply employment for TFs is not the case with us,” Kelly says.

This year Kelly was forced to look beyond Harvard to other schools, like Brandeis and the New England Conservatory.

“TF’s are a very important piece of a Harvard education, and the music department treats hiring them as seriously as hiring professors,” Kelly says.

But for a class like Social Analysis 10 “Principles of Economics,” an 800-person course, two-thirds of which is taught in section, availibility of graduate students is a non-issue.

The process of hiring TFs begins with extensive recruiting among Harvard’s economics Ph.D. candidates, and Harvard Law School and Business School students with economics degrees.

The recruiting process yields many more candidates than necessary, and the hiring process is highly selective.

“We spend a lot of time recruiting and assessing the interactive skills of all of our applicants by having them teach segments of actual classes in the interviews,” said Judith Li ’94, an associate professor of economics.

Centralization?

Even after qualified TFs are hired, the training process that is subsquently required is as decentralized as the hiring process itself.

“All our new TFs are required to complete a teacher training program before classes start in which they prepare and present the first few sections of the course in the presence of more experienced section leaders ,” Li says.

However, in the math department all that is required of undergraduate CAs, the most inexperienced of all section leaders, are two seminars—one about the challenges of undergraduates teaching undergraduates and an orientation session by the department.

Seminars like the one for undergraduates are organized by the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, which is located on the third floor of the Science Center.

The center was created 25 years ago and is currently FAS’ only centralized system for training section leaders. Its services are both voluntary and anonymous.

The center employs a staff of fourteen people which receives nearly a million dollars a year from FAS, most of which comes from unrestricted funds.

And though participation in Bok Center services is usually voluntary, TFs who receive low CUE ratings will be required to work one-on-one with the Bok Center on their teaching skills.

A second low rating will put them on probation from teaching in FAS until they receive further instruction from the center.

The center also rewards excellent teaching, awarding TFs who receive a CUE guide rating of at least 4.5 out of 5 possible points.

“The most ideal program from our standpoint would be for the TF to attend our one or two-day orientation at the beginning of the semester, and then for them to come in with their class and be taped,” said Bok Center Director James D. Wilkinson ’65.

Yet Wilkinson said that this is not usually the case and that the center has contact with only about half of TFs, TAs, and CAs each year.

The Opposition

As the Bok Center and individual departments continue to try to improve the quality of teaching within FAS, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) emphasizes the burden that teaching places on their students.

“There is a lot of demand on TFs at Harvard. The expectations are high for both the students and the teachers here,” said Katerina Markovic Stokes, a TA in First Nights from Brandeis University. CAs also admit that the demands placed on their time can be daunting.

“Between section, office hours, grading, and attending lecture it takes up as much time as a fifth class,” says Ariel B.E. Shwayder ’03, a CA for Math 101.

Dean of the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Peter T. Ellison said that most departments do not allow graduate students to serve as teaching fellows until after they have completed their general exams.

The GSAS is also working to eliminate first-year graduate students from the TF market, where they are most frequently present in the natural sciences, something that will require a substantial financial commitment on the part of the GSAS.

“We are currently working on focusing the teaching that graduate students do so that it is more fully integrated as part of their academic and professional training,” Ellison says.

But FAS does not see this new policy as a threat to TF availability.

“The intention is not to reduce the availability of TFs but rather just to move teaching to a later point in a graduate student’s career,” Pedersen says.

Wilkinson adds that such a rule would also allow TFs to begin teaching at a point in their careers when they can both benefit from the teaching experience more and be a better resource to their students.

“There are definitely times during which the natural conflict between wanting to be a good teacher and having deadline for my dissertation arises. The two are often difficult to juggle, but it is a conflict inherent in all academia,” says Matthew D. Lundin, a TF in the history department.

And while FAS continues to focus on hiring and training teachers, and TFs work to balance their schedules, students are left to make the most of their undergraduate experience with, at best, inconsistent support from the College.