CUE Considers Importance of Sections

In a meeting yesterday of two top committees that oversee education at Harvard, faculty, administrators and students agreed that the structure and function of sections needs to be rethought

The joint meeting of the Committees on Undergraduate and Graduate Education was called by members of the Undergraduate Council’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC) to address student grievances over the quality of their teaching fellows (TFs).

Yesterday’s discussion veered away from how to improve TF quality to pointing out the weaknesses of Harvard’s sections and reexamining how to make these class meetings a more effective use of time.

“Section is an opportunity for discussion that is necessary for mastery of the material. If that doesn’t happen, it is a great loss,” said Adam P. Fagan, a graduate student who has been a TF in a number of undergraduate science courses.

Students present said problems with sections were not necessarily the fault of the TF, but of the very structure of sections themselves.

“You can’t blame TFs for a bad section when you have had 18 chapters of reading and everything is a free-for-all,” said SAC Chair Rohit Chopra ’04.

Administrators present at the meeting also said they saw flaws in the way sections are used.

“The problem here is really how much planning goes into section, and this should receive significant scrutiny,” said Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Peter T. Ellison.

Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen ’81-’82 agreed and said professors should take more responsibility for their sections.

“The Faculty are the ones who are ultimately responsible for everything that goes on in their course,” she said.

But Pedersen also acknowledged that planning an effective section takes significant effort.

“The model for how to run a large lecture course is hugely time-consuming for Faculty members,” she said.

Pedersen suggested that the University look into ways to help faculty—particularly those teaching large core classes—effectively design their sections.

In addition to lack of faculty guidance, those present cited problems with TF training and student motivation.

Ellison said more uniform standards could be helpful. Currently, individual departments are charged with creating their own plans for hiring and training their TFs.

While there are currently many resources in place for TF training, such as the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, administrators said it is up to individual departments to take advantage of these resources.

The TFs present also pointed to wide discrepancies in departmental standards.

“In the first department in which I taught, they just threw us into a course we weren’t prepared to teach, but now in Romance Languages we went through a very extensive three day training program,” said Elgin K. Eckert.

Bok Center Director James D. Wilkinson ’65 said he encourages more departments to develop relationships with the Bok Center.

“We don’t like to be thought of as a garage where people tow their teaching fellows in distress and pick them up at the end of the day,” he said.

Ellison said GSAS is currently looking into improving TF training by granting some form of course credit for enrolling in training programs.

But he said this plan would be complicated by the fact that only about two-thirds of TFs who teach within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are affiliated with the graduate or professional schools—the rest are affiliated with other universities and thus could not be held to the same standards.

TFs said that although they are always eager to improve, they often meet resistance from research advisers.

“Often your adviser doesn’t want you to take the time to be a good TF—they would rather you spent time doing your research,” Fagan said.

But Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser said TFs sometimes don’t want to teach.

“It is the goal of some graduate students to spend their lives in labs and not to teach at all and professors often have to convince them of the benefits of teaching in order to communicate their ideas,” Hauser said.

In addition to citing TF quality as part of the problem, both students and faculty agreed that students are at least partially responsible for the quality of their sections.

“The reality is that under the same TF some sections go really well and some don’t and that is a function of the students,” Ellison said.

Eckert said TFs are more likely to put effort into the section if the students are engaged.

“When you have spent hours grading a paper and students throw it into the trash, you think you would have been better off going to the movies,” she said.

No concrete plan of action for improving the effectiveness of sections was proposed.

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.