GRADUATE SCHOOL-WIDE TEACHING REQUIREMENT

FOR PH.D. CANDIDATES

(Effective beginning with Ph.D. students entering Fall 2004)

The Graduate Council believes that a crucial component in our training of successful scholars should be helping every graduate student become an effective teacher. Of course, the attributes associated with good teaching are also those of good scholarship: the ability to communicate ideas clearly and even vividly; the careful distinction between what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable evidence within an intellectual community; the recognition that even worthy objects of scholarly endeavor must compete with other, no less worthy, topics of research interest, given the limited resources available (whether those resources are publishing capital or hours in any given semester). The scholar who has received effective training in pedagogy and sufficient experience in front of a class will also become a colleague who ably represents his or her research in the scholarly symposium or, more locally, the departmental coffee room. If teaching is not separable from any of our academic tasks, it also cannot be presumed thereby to require no special training or experience. For that reason, we strongly encourage every Ph.D. program to provide teaching opportunities as they are appropriate to individual disciplines.

Central to effective teaching is the communication of knowledge and ideas to others. Our Ph.D. candidates should gain, during their graduate training, that experience by satisfying two formal teaching requirements. The requirements exist at two levels to emphasize differences in communication skills that come with different levels of responsibility within any field. At the basic level, is the communication of fundamental elements of knowledge, or training in basic skills, such as can occur in introductory or lower-level undergraduate courses. At the advanced level, the communication more likely concerns ideas: their development, their evaluation, their defense, and their formal testing through argumentation or experimentation, such as can occur in upper-level courses, graduate seminars, and graduate-level journal clubs or formal discussion groups.

A unit of teaching may be defined broadly as an hour spent communicating with a group of students or scholars. As such, holding one-on-one office hours, grading exams, or note-taking, while often part of Teaching Assistantship duties, should not count toward the formal accumulation of teaching units.

Ph.D. candidates should accumulate a minimum of 14 units of teaching experience at the basic level. There are many ways these units could be obtained, such as giving an actual lecture in an undergraduate class, conducting discussion sections, introducing /interpreting laboratory exercises or conducting formal help sessions.

Ph.D. candidates should also accumulate at least 4 units of teaching experience at the advanced level. The Graduate School recognizes that opportunities for such experience will vary widely across the disciplines within the University, and so is flexible as to what experiences count toward this accumulation. For example, presenting one’s research at a regularly scheduled colloquium or seminar that is attended by other graduate students and faculty, would satisfy one unit of advanced level teaching. Another possibility would be presenting a paper at a conference, including conferences organized by scholarly societies as well as local conferences, such as the yearly Graduate Student Research Symposium at Washington University. Another possibility would be presenting and leading the discussion of a journal article in a journal club or formal discussion group at the graduate level. In certain cases lecturing in an advanced (300-level or 400-level) undergraduate class or running an advanced undergraduate laboratory might be appropriate.

The above examples of teaching at both the basic and advanced levels are by no means exhaustive or exclusive: there may be other types of excellent teaching or communication experiences which are discipline specific. Moreover, the appropriate group size or composition may vary from discipline to discipline. For these reasons, every graduate program is encouraged to draw up guidelines for meeting the graduate school requirement. This requirement does not preclude departments from creating additional discipline specific teaching requirements.

In meeting these requirements, graduate students will ideally have opportunities to learn the skills and practice the art of scholarly communication.

Approved April 2004, Graduate Council