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647 PREPARING GRADUATE STUDENTS FOR THEIR SCHOLARLY LIVES.

July 21, 2005

Folks:

The posting below looks at four of the overall research findings that can help inform those involved in the preparation of graduate students for their scholarly lives. It is from Chapter Three:The Development of Graduate Students as Teaching Scholars A Four-Year Longitudinal Study by Donald H. Wulff, Ann E. Austin, Jody D. Nyquist, Jo Sprague in, Paths to the Professoriate Strategies for Enriching the Preparation of Future Faculty Donald H. Wulff, Ann E. Austin, & Associates. Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass - A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com]. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: New Faculty: A Practical Guide for Academic Beginners

Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs

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PREPARING GRADUATE STUDENTS FOR THEIR SCHOLARLY LIVES

Question 4: What Study Findings Can Inform Those Involved in Preparing Graduate Students (Aspiring Professors) for the Teaching Aspects of Their Scholarly Lives?

We can use each of the previous results, of course, to inform faculty members and others involved in preparing aspiring professors. However, in addition to the results in response to the specific research questions about teaching, we also identified some more global key findings about graduate education. In this section of the chapter we highlight four of the overall findings from our research that can help inform those involved in the preparation of graduate students for their scholarly lives.

[Too Much of Graduate Education Is Characterized by a Lack of Systematic, Developmental Preparation]

Often the graduate programs for these students did not purposely plan systematic opportunities for their developmental progression as teachers, researchers, institutional citizens, and scholars engaged in their communities. During the first year, many of the students were unclear about what graduate education entailed and what the path to a graduate degree would require. In addition, throughout the study, they reported that they were not particularly knowledgeable about what a faculty career involved, and even less knowledgeable about careers in other kinds of academic institutions. Most of the students knew little about professional service and had little opportunity to talk with faculty about service components of their work. Even at the end of their time in the study, the students reported virtually no knowledge of faculty or institutional governance. Possibly, some might assert, these issues might be more appropriately addressed during the latter part of a graduate !
student's experiences. Nevertheless, we observed that opportunities for exploration of these and many of the other facets of a faculty career rarely occurred in ways that fostered systematic development with the intent of helping the aspiring faculty develop appropriate skills across the range of faculty responsibilities.

[Graduate Education Too Often Does Not Provide for Systematic Feedback and Mentoring That Could Help Eliminate Unnecessary Barriers to Success]

In using metaphors to describe their experiences, many of the students spoke of uncertainties and challenges-chasms, mountains, dilapidated bridges to be crossed, or rocks being throw down on them as they proceeded to climb-that were significant barriers to their progress. In explaining a picture that he drew to represent his graduate experience, one fairly successful doctoral student portrayed himself running a marathon. His path was punctuated with some signposts, but, he explained, they were not accurate. At various intersections, without good directions, he was uncertain how to proceed. Geraniums on a window ledge were falling on him, logs obstructed his path, and a car nearly hit him. He explained, "You know, I've been pretty successful despite these things," but continued by pointing out that too many unexpected barriers occur in the graduate experience. Graduate students often must find their way through the obstacles of graduate education with minimal guidance !
from faculty. Through such examples, the students demonstrated that the departments represented in our study did not systematically or frequently pay attention to providing preparation, orientation, and feedback to graduate students in their work and development as teachers. Much of the assessment of which students were aware occurred in annual reviews (when these did take place), when faculty met privately with students to discuss their programmatic progress. Formative feedback provided for students to assess their progress or make changes in what they were doing occurred far less frequently. Although some of the graduate students reported receiving some feedback from supervisors about their teaching, it often was not thorough or carefully designed to help them grow as teachers. In the absence of thorough input, they relied on feedback from their own students (both formal evaluations and informal comments or discussions) and their students' performance and grades to c!
onsider what constituted effective and ineffective student learning, w
hat teaching strategies were most effective, and how teachers and students should relate.

[As They Progress Through Graduate Education, Many Students Begin to Wonder If They Really Aspire to Academic Life]

We observed too many students who had entered graduate school excited about particular driving passions and questions become increasingly disillusioned and disenchanted. When they began, most were not aware of the value system of the academy. Although ultimately some students explicitly discovered and internalized academic norms, many had a difficult time. As these students struggled to demystify the values of the academy and to make sense of expectations within what some perceived as daunting bureaucracies and difficult-to-decipher institutional cultures, they became concerned about how to align academic values and expectations with their own. Some reported that there seemed to be a "secret model" of graduate education that had implicit norms and rules. Some students also reported difficulty in interpreting various parties' expectations for what counts as "success." Other students experienced clashes of differing values and expectations with their advisors or faculty !
members. Authority and relationship issues-with students, and with advisors and supervisors-were significant.

Simultaneously, finding balance in their scholarly, professional, and personal lives emerged as an important issue for the students. They often commented in interviews that faculty members appeared to experience considerable pressure in lives characterized by lack of balance between professional and personal commitments and interests. Some of these students flatly reported that they could not lead the kinds of harried lives they observed in professors around them and thus leaned toward applying their knowledge in what they thought would be less stressful environments.

Ultimately, some students who entered graduate school with aspirations to become professors perceived that the academic life might leave little room for their own passions, values, and commitments. Some only maintained a sense of empowerment when they felt they could explore alternative approaches or careers and discuss these options with their faculty advisors and supervisors. Some of the students who felt disempowered and disenchanted progressed in silent resignation. For others, however, this sense of their own diminishing priorities and aspirations left them wondering about the desirability of an academic life. In some instances, students prolonged completion of their studies, discontinued their graduate education, or in a couple of the very worse scenarios, simply dropped out of their programs without any word about where they were going.

[Current Graduate Education Does Not Match the Needs and Demands of the Changing Academy and Broader Society]

Looking across the study findings, we conclude that there are problems in the ways that universities prepare graduate students for the future. Many academics seem to be hanging onto an idealized and traditional model that heavily emphasized research preparation with little attention to the other roles of faculty members. This model does not adequately take into account changes in faculty roles, in student characteristics and needs, in modes of education delivery, and in societal expectation of the academy. As illustrated by the experiences of many of the students in this study, faculty members sometimes try to "clone" themselves-training graduate students only for the tasks and roles for which they themselves were prepared. Although many elements of traditional academic training remain very important, faculty members should not ignore the demands of the changing academy and the broader society as they prepare future faculty. Otherwise, the academy will be producing high!
ly specialized graduates who are not sufficiently prepared to make connections between their own work and the needs of their students, the academy, and the broader society.