The future of teacher education?

I'm pretty unsympathetic to the MacIntyre/Williams criticisms of modern moral theories (I think the Kantian/Korsgaardian has more than enough resources to do justice to ground projects/real human flourishing and I have significant doubts that society suffers at all from leaving behind aretaic theories of virtue) but there is still a lot of value in what Higgins has to say about the struggle to maintain a good, integrated life while participating in the practice of teaching.

In Chapter 8, we finally get to the bottom of what Higgins thinks teaching is all about: reflective questioning. Education, he writes, is "the ongoing conversation taking place in the space opened by the question of what best facilitates human flourishing; it consists of the implicit and explicit answers, described and enacted by those theorists, practitioners, and theorist/practitioners who feel called to join the conversation." (258) All education is necessarily concerned with human flourishing in one form or another, and assumes some account of what human flourishing is. (Also, for the record, don't miss his very insightful account of teachers surrounded by textbooks and tests suffering from "pedagogical Stockholm Syndrome" on p. 256.)

It probably goes without saying that this is a pretty romanticized notion of education.

Replacing participation points with preparation points?

We've talked a lot about participation and points for participation on this blog in the past (see here, here, here, here, and here).

I had an idea come out of nowhere today when I was driving home. I'm not sure if I've read it somewhere before (Teaching Philosophy, maybe?) or not. I can't imagine it's original, but it's very simple: replace "participation" points with "preparation" points in my syllabus. Four distinct advantages came immediately to mind:

1. It distinguishes nicely between "good" and "bad" types of participation in the classroom. Idle banter doesn't show preparation, so it doesn't count. Socially adept students don't get points just for joining the discussion.
2. It's a bit more of an incentive for actually preparing by doing the reading than just rewarding participation. And really, the whole point of rewarding participation in the first place was to encourage preparation. In fact, it might be worth ramping up participation points to 15 or 20 percent of points available in the class if the incentive turns out to work well enough.
3. Students who are shy or uncomfortable talking in class can prove preparation in other ways: one-on-one, perhaps. Conversations with me in office hours would count for preparation. One could even count students who show you notes over the reading (imagine: people might take notes on the reading to get points!). 
4. You don't have to prove preparation in every class -- just like you wouldn't have to participate in every class -- in order to get preparation points. But if it looks like someone hasn't done the reading for quite some time, his or her grade would suffer.

So this sounds like a great change to make. What does everyone else think? Are there downsides to this I'm  not thinking of?

Teaching students how to stand up for their values

Last semester was the first time I used Mary Gentile's excellent Giving Voice to Values in the classroom. While I'd been teaching business ethics pretty successfully for five years, I still had one set of comments in student evaluations that kept coming up: all of this talk about ethics from the commanding heights of a business was all well and good, but they wanted to know what they should do when an ethical problem comes up at work. How does one deal with a co-worker who wants to lie to regulators about a product defect, or a manager who is using her position to give perks to friends and family?

Teaching bioethics and religion

I was in the campus coffeeshop the other day (they are serving much better espresso this semester and I want to encourage this) and I overheard a student describing a bioethics-type course he was taking. It sounded like a pretty typical bioethics course, but then he added that his professor devoted a good amount of time to explaining what people from different religions think about issues like cloning, euthanasia, and so on. I don’t do this in my course, for reasons I’ll cover in this post, but as I was sitting there I started to wonder why. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be an interesting issue for discussion. So I thought I’d bring it here.

Academically Adrift Part 5: When College Education Absolutely Has to Work

 I had a surreal experience teaching philosophy once. I was applying for a temporary job and got invited down to give a sample class. It was an introduction to ethics class and the reading was chosen ahead of time (Epictetus's Enchiridion). And when I got there to teach the class, every student was on-time, patient, and ruthlessly prepared. They'd read all of Epictetus, written down questions about his position, challenges to his position, and connections to other topics in the moral philosophy they'd read so far. In class, after my brief introduction, there was a  mini-competition amongst students to see who could impress me the most with his or her preparedness and help his or her fellow students at the same time. It was incredible. I'd walked into a classroom at the United States Coast Guard Academy.

I didn't end up taking the job. The hours were too demanding for a grad student in the last stages of his thesis. But it was all I could think about when I was reading Chapter 4. I don't think college professors needed to be told that students are spending less and less time on studying and other learning related activities. But it's nice that Arum and Roska actually give us numbers. That 75% of student time is spent either socializing or sleeping tells volumes about the amount of learning one can expect. It's not the worst theory to guess that classes with "rigor" (basically extensive requirements backed up by a credible threat of doing very poorly in the class) work the magic they do because they give strong incentives to take a little time back from the 75% and redirect it to academic work.

Doing our part for democracy

In Chapter 4 of Not For Profit, Margaret Nussbaum defends her conclusion that democracy needs the humanities by highlighting the benefits of Socratic methods in education. Since we’re all philosophers here, I’m guessing we’ll have a hard time disagreeing with her on this point. While even the most skilled Socratic thinker’s passions can overrun his or her reason, it’s at least a bit more difficult with an inclination towards self-reflection and logical thinking.

As Nussbaum admits, however, her chapter gives little in the way of practical advice for how to get more Socratic methods into academia. She offers a couple of suggestions: following the Catholic (Jesuit?) university model of requiring at least two semesters of philosophy in college, or introducing philosophy to children early on in elementary education via something like the intriguing textbooks of Matthew Lipman. These are both great ideas, but I wonder how effective they would actually be in today’s modern educational environment.

The difficulty I see is not with the value of philosophy classes, but how and by whom they are taught. It’s all very well and good to see lots of philosophy courses that count as critical thinking in the curriculum, but one has to wonder how much of the crucial information is getting across when tenured professors sequester themselves into teaching graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses, leaving introductory courses to tenure-track professors and graduate students (who rarely if ever get any training in pedagogy, let alone the place of philosophical pedagogy in the humanities.) Heck, having no undergrad courses is seen as a sign of success almost universally across our discipline! How un-Socratic can we get?

Without our best thinkers on the front lines, at best students do not experience the liberating aspects of Socratic thought, but merely the best a good graduate student can do on a really tight schedule with no training. At worst, they experience the opposite of Socratic inquiry: defensive, pervasive doubt, and sophistical attempts to change the subject when a professor doesn’t want to look upstaged by a smart student in front of the classroom. When students see that — and I’m afraid it happens far more often than any of us want to admit — can we forgive them for taking the view that “it’s all just opinion” away from the course that is supposed to teach them exactly the opposite?

Recently, philosophy was controversially labeled a “problem discipline” within academia. In another recent incident, philosophers howled when NEH grants were offered to develop what were basically philosophy courses offered in other disciplines. One way to look at these debates is to see philosophy ignored by academia and the rest of the humanities: toiling ceaselessly with our contributions forgotten. Of course, another way of looking at them is to think that — just maybe —we’re not meeting a democratic society’s needs for education in our part of the humanities.

And if we’re not, we as philosophers need to change our discipline’s place within the humanities, our methods of educating young philosophers, and our expectations of our best to become educators of undergraduates and public intellectuals. (We also need to get a lot better at assessment — the Socratic critical thinking skills Nussbaum emphasizes, unlike some more esoteric philosophical skills, can be assessed.) Nussbaum is certainly pointing the right way here, and her credentials as a public intellectual cannot be doubted. But I wonder if philosophy teachers are ready to take up her challenge. If not — if we’re going to get all defensive about students and administrators just not seeing the value of what we do — maybe it is time for a new legion of Socratic critical thinking teachers to take up the reins, spurred on by grants from the NEH among other things. If Nussbaum’s right, it’s only our democracy at stake.

Sandel's online Justice course

I just came across this website (via Everyday Philosophy at the Purple Bike Café) that is gradually releasing videos from what appears to be a comprehensive introductory ethics course by Michael Sandel at Harvard. I've read Sandel, but I had no idea he was such a gifted lecturer.

The aesthetic is a little weird -- the production qualities suggest daytime talk show meets Sunday preaching meets professional comedy. But the intellectual content is excellent and it's great to see a high profile philosophy professor grappling with highly motivated undergrads and using the discussion to help teach a course -- and a very large course at that. Lots of great ideas for how to teach certain issues. It's also a little eerie to get a peek inside someone else's intro classroom and see how he interacts with his students. I highly recommend it.

On Course, Common Problems Chapter.

It is a bit tricky to find a philosophy teaching angle on Lang's chapter about common problems. I'm afraid I haven't been altogether successful in finding one. As usual, Lang's advice is candid, unimpeachable, and even funny. Nevertheless, one can't help but feel he was running out of a little steam here, especially in his last two questions which ask if he has any final advice and whether these questions constitute exhaustive advice. One can't help but wonder if any academic reading the book would actually have those two questions in mind. But like a good prof at the end of a semester, I believe we can and should forgive Lang for a tired but good humored ending.



Lang offers advice on the following areas: 1) rude student behavior, 2) the use of technology in the classroom, 3) tardy and absent students, 4) remembering student names, 5) dealing with flirtatious students, 6) special concerns about labs and online courses, 7) stage fright, and 8) inadequate superiors. His funniest remarks are at the end of (5), wherein he accurately suggests staying far away from any romantic relations with students, recommending the painting of civil war figurines instead.

I limit my commentary to remarks on (1), (2), and (4). For (1), Lang's advice to choose whether you will confront a student in class or after class is very good. He opts for after class and has found it works well, but any new professor should know that some students will be fundamentally unreachable in either way. In philosophy (because there are no answers, right?) I find that there is a type of student who feels like the need to challenge the possibility that a philosopher could know more than he or she could. This leads to a behavior that is not rude in the sense of academic misconduct, but disruptive all the same. I feel that it is absolutely crucial not to let such a student define one's course and one's perception of the course. This can be a difficult maneuver, especially in an intro class, because our culture likes to see supposed authority hoisted on its own petard and other students can get behind the troublesome student. But the answer is, I believe, Socratic. For these students usually come from a pretty sophistical form of arguing involving equivocation, switching the topic, and (above all it seems), appealing to Hamlet's "more things on heaven and earth". I've found it works to actually engage such a student in a verbal "joust" in class in which one points out and actively refuses to participate in the sophistical techniques while showing how staying on point is vital to philosophical discussion. It can be difficult to get exactly the right tone, but after a couple of tries with this type of students I think I have the pacification measure down well. Sometimes one can even turn on a light in these students' heads that leads to more philosophical study. That's rare. But at least you get your class back.

For (2), we've recently addressed the use of laptops in the classroom and how another blogger, Andrew Cullison, dealt with them. So I'll just make a quick remark on mobile phones. First, the line between a standard phone that can simply call and text and a smartphone (like the iPhone which can do word processing, note-taking, and make you dinner) is starting to blur. It will be hard in the near future to tell if students are using these phones for actual classwork or for fun, but there will be legitimate uses. I like to use the camera in my iPhone after class to take pictures of what I have written on the board. That helps a lot, by the way. But I do believe that as mobile use has become pretty ubiquitous, it is time to end the ridiculous teacher tactics for dealing with phones ringing. Even when they provide great enjoyment for the class, the act of having the professor answer or a student singing a verse of the school's fight song, the class is derailed much more than it ever would have been with a stern look followed by an embarrassed look and a couple button pushes. These tactics are not done in professional settings and we want to think of our students as proto-professionals. I bring my phone to class for reasons mentioned above and though I check religiously, it has gone off once. It's time to accept that it's going to happen, it shouldn't happen, and people don't need extra embarrassment unless the lesson really isn't getting through. All this said, of course, if the student should in any way start *talking* on the phone, hang the person high atop the classroom walls.

Finally, and briefly, with (4): I am one of those people who can remember names. I do a little exercise day one in which I try to remember all 30 students' names. I don't do anything special that I know of. I just happen to have exactly as much short-to-mid-term memory to get them all in and repeat them all back after they introduce themselves. By two to three weeks in I easily have all the names. I understand that there are some people who are "bad" at names. I can't imagine their memory is worse than mine, but so be it. All I have to say is that it really is amazing how the students react if you actively try to remember their names and use them unprompted in the classroom and around campus. Knowing a name lets a student know you consider him or her and end rather than a mere means. I believe that I don't even see a lot of problems other profs do, simply because I know there names and they know I wanted to know their names. If you can do it, do it.

On Course, #2: First Days of [Philosophy] Class - Part 2

This post is the second part of my commentary on the second chapter. It grew a little longer, so I'm separating it into two posts. It also makes for a nice division of topics for the comments. In this post, I discuss Lang's suggestions for using opening-day exercises to enhance student learning based on student preconceptions and one omission from the chapter.


Spicing up the first class (pp. 30-40): For people who aren't terribly new to the classroom, this will be the most enlightening part of the second chapter. First impressions go a long way towards helping students get interested in the course and raising course evaluations. Lang cites innovative ways of learning students' names and ice-breakers that get them comfortable with interacting with their fellow students.

But neither is as interesting as Lang's connection of opening-day exercises to learning theory. He suggests that opening day exercises can be particularly powerful learning tools when they connect to and start immediately to mold students' preconceptions about the course material. Some exercises he recommends involve documenting these preconceptions (in groups) and using them to set the agenda for the first week of the course, documenting pre-conceptions and using them for the basis of a first library research assignment, and using the preconceptions to set up a cumulative review at the end of the course.

For philosophers, dealing with preconceptions is, I would argue, even more important than for a lot of other disciplines. This is due to the fact that philosophy is generally not taught before college. This leaves students, many of whom have a natural interest in the subject, to invent it on their own from late-night talks at coffee houses (or, more accurately, Denny's) and whatever books they can find. Thus, many preconceptions can turn into misconceptions. Opening day exercises of the kind Lang suggests can go a long way towards giving the students a new context in which to understand and enjoy philosophy. For those students who haven't stumbled into philosophy, it can also whet appetites or calm fears, as the case may be.

Setting the tone. There is a lot more information in the chapter that will lead to great discussion (and better philosophy classes), but I wanted to end with one thing that Lang doesn't discuss: a professor's initial attitude. There is a lot of misinformation that gets thrown around at grad schools about the correct way to set the tone for a course. I remember several people telling me that it was not a bad strategy to "put the fear of God" into students on the first day. All of Lang's advice suggests against such an approach (it is hard to scare students while doing fun activities with them), but some professors can pull it off. (I'm thinking of one in particular who posts on this blog!) One popular use for "putting the fear of God" into students on the first day is to adjust students attitudes to the seriousness of philosophy and cull-from-the-herd students who are looking for a blow-off course.

I'm not such a professor because such an attitude would be really stretching my natural personality. This isn't necessarily a good thing. I do tend to end up with students who are trapped in a course that is much more serious than they let themselves realize in the first week or so. But the alternative is worse. Stretching a personality into unfamiliar territory on the first day can lead to real disaster, so it is something notable to avoid. Students can smell inauthentic behavior and they will prey on it like a hungry lion after a precocious baby gazelle. It's something to think about on the first day, especially early on in one's career. Striking a tone that one is not going to follow through on for the rest of the term is a trap that new teachers, particularly philosophers, need to watch out for.

I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone else thought about Lang's second chapter.

On Course, #2: First Days of [Philosophy] Class - Part 1

Welcome to ISW's continuing coverage of James Lang's On Course. This post is centered on the second chapter, "First Days of Class". Welcome to all who want to discuss the chapter in the comments. Following Michael's example, I'll review the basic points of the chapter and then highlight some interesting points and one notable omission. I'll also try to gear my comments towards bringing what Lang has to say into the philosophy classroom. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to keep it as brief as Michael, so I'm separating this post into two parts. This is part one.



Let me start by continuing the trend of saying that Lang has somehow managed to be comprehensive, insightful, and concise in his advice. New teachers as well as old hands can benefit a lot by considering what he has to say. With one omission that I will mention near the end of the second post, there isn't a whole lot more to think about doing on the first day of a philosophy course than what Lang recommends. In this chapter he talks about three basic areas: 1) preparing for the first class, 2) delivering the preparation, and 3) spicing it up. (This post covers the first two areas.)

Preparing for Class (pp. 23-27): Lang addresses two main issues in this part of the chapter: 1) what to wear and 2) whether to dive in right away or give students the syllabus and send them on their way. I think that in the philosophy classroom, both issues change slightly from Lang's treatment. In terms of dress, Lang has good, conservative advice: slacks and a collared shirt for both men and women, with women having some additional options that I don't claim to know much about. What drives Lang's advice is his excellent insight that one's dress on the first day is less about coming off as a professional and more about making students comfortable with your authority over their grades and progress in the course. I think, though, that philosophers have a little more latitude in what to wear than, say, an engineer or a law professor. We've already noted here that offbeat professors can seem somewhat cool to students and (not counting artists) philosophers may be the most able to capitalize on this idiosyncrasy. Perversely, philosophers can sometimes acquire authority by seeming unconventional. Of course, for students who fear philosophy as too eccentric of a discipline, dressing unconventionally can have the opposite effect, reinforcing their worst fears. I'm laboring too much on one small point, but the right advice is probably not to dress too far out of the element you are used to presenting yourself within. If you don't ever really think about it, err on the professional side. (And even understanding all of this, I would recommend fighting any urge you might have to wear a beret to your first philosophy class.)

Lang's issue is whether to give students the syllabus and let them go or to start teaching on the first day. He, as all other educational specialists I've heard, observes that simply letting students go sends the wrong message about the class. It can send the message that the professor doesn't want to be in the class and doesn't consider it a worthwhile usage of time. Interestingly, this issue is connected to Lang's next topic, allowing latitude for students dropping the course or adding it late. A popular reason for not spending much time on the first class is that it is wasted effort on students who will drop and energy that could be conserved for students yet to add. I tend to think that he is absolutely right about the message that simply sending people off with a syllabus sends. But particularly in the philosophy classroom, one is missing a great opportunity to connect to students' curiosity about philosophy and allay their fears. (I have a little bit more to say about this later on, so I won't belabor the point here.)

Giving the first class (pp. 27-30): I have a hard time believing that anyone simply conducts his or her first class by reading the syllabus out loud, but apparently it happens and Lang inveighs against it. There are certain reasons why going over the syllabus is essential, and these are much better accomplished by giving a general overview and only reading certain more legal parts. He also puts forth the interesting idea of putting students into groups to find three things they want to know about the course and/or the syllabus, then asking these to the rest of the course. This sounds like a great activity to me. I've also heard of professors giving a quiz over the syllabus on the second or third day of the course. Of course the latter doesn't have the advantage of getting students talking to one another.


I'll have more commentary in the second post on this chapter, but I'm looking forward to what people have to say about these two areas in the comments.

Asymmetry in teacher-student selection

I haven't made a post here in a while either, so I thought I'd start again with something that's a bit more controversial. It's well established that, unless a certain course is required for a plan of study, a student is free to refrain from taking courses from a certain professor. However, the opposite is not true. If a student is not required to take a certain course, a professor generally cannot "opt out" of having the student in his or her class. Now of course if a professor is just allowed to prevent students from taking a course carte blanche this would be a very bad idea. The opportunity for discrimination of many kinds is very present, to say nothing of professors summarily refusing students to keep grading loads down or professors refusing students who know more than they do in order to avoid accountability to the class.

But we've all had students who go through one of our courses that aren't outwardly disruptive but are certainly corrosive to the course. I figure we should be required to have those students the first semester they take our courses. It's such an unpleasant experience for all involved that it's hard to believe anyone would want to repeat it. And yet, bafflingly, sometimes the name appears on the next semester's course roster. Just when one is ready to start with a clean slate and forget the previous year's trials, there is the whole problem threatening to repeat itself.

I'm pretty sure the answer here is that the potential for abuse far outweighs giving professors even a curtailed right of "repeat refusal". But there are cases that make me want others' input, like very vocal students who do none of the work or do it very poorly, plagiarism cases, or students who walk the disruptive/disrespectful line with great skill. And these problem students can loom very large when one has new or deserving students who need a slot in a full classroom. Thoughts?

The Ethics of Course Design

I was wondering what everyone's thoughts were on the idea of modeling a course on a book -- say, an overview of a particular subject area -- but not requiring students to buy or read the book. Here's the situation I'm thinking of:


One of the courses I have taught in the recent past was a seminar on the "meaning of life". Originally I wanted to cover the recent analytic literature on the problem, but my students weren't quite ready for that. So we ended up reading a few books and selections from an anthology, tied together by connections drawn by myself. It was actually my highest rated course ever, but I wasn't satisfied by the level of structure vs. free-thinking, so I put it on the shelf until I could reorganize things.

Publishing little books on the meaning of life seems to have been all the rage in the recent past, so I was looking over a few when I found Julian Baggini's What's It All About. It's not written for the specialist, but for someone new to the debate. And though it doesn't go into much depth (and contains some misunderstandings of Buddhism), it's pretty good at highlighting passages from philosophy, psychology, and pop culture that apply very smoothly to the overall debate. I wouldn't want to use the actual book for the course: I think students would end up attacking the author rather than the ideas and see the book as hubristic as opposed to the fairly humble work it actually is. They also like to read "the greats" rather than secondary literature about the greats, according to informal surveys. But the sequence of the topics, the literature Baggini refers to, and the basic structure of the arguments would make for an excellent outline in my course.

So of course I would have to give Baggini credit for the structure of the course at some point, and I have no idea with pointing my students to the book if they want to check it out for themselves. But what do you all think about the idea of otherwise completely ripping off someone's carefully assembled reading list without assigning the book in which it appears?

Political Philosophy during the US Election

I know not many of you have seen posts or comments from me for a while, but I haven't disappeared completely. I've just been very busy teaching in London and "lurking". I hope to be back to full strength soon, but in the mean time, I was wondering about thoughts and insights people have on the following:

I have the (good?) fortune to be able to teach an introduction to political philosophy this fall during the 2008 US elections. Normally, I teach the class as a history of pre-liberal and liberal political philosophy with reactions/challenges to liberalism and a little bit of justice near the end. In the fall, I'd like to be a little more topical and concentrate the course on democratic theory. But I'll primarily be teaching to non-majors and those without much political theory/science background. And it's not exactly my specialty in political philosophy, so I'll be learning a lot over the summer. So does anyone have ideas for more easily accessible introductory texts on democratic theory that stress its connections to political philosophy? What about fun articles that present problems with and within democratic theory? Any other experiences about what worked well when teaching political philosophy during elections?

Better to be a burger-flipper satisfied...

More philosophy in the news! As posted on Brian Leiter's blog (via Thom Brooks' blog), the Guardian says philosophy majors are increasingly in demand. The article hits a lot of good points, but I especially like that people are finally starting to recognize the tremendous practical value of philosophical thinking. It's not just about thinking outside the box or questioning assumptions, employers. Philosophers are also much better at working within certain sets of assumptions, precisely because they realize that they are working within sets of assumptions.

Course Refreshers

We've hit the shorter days of November and we've all seen it in our classes: attendance drop-offs, falling behind in the reading that turns to not doing the reading, and even our better students becoming a little complacent. It's time for a little pick-me-up that provides a bit of a reminder that we haven't been just doing the same thing for weeks on end. A little bright memory that carries the course into Thanksgiving break in a couple of weeks and after that the rush to finals. So does anyone have anything special they do at this point to reinvigorate a course?

One of the things I've done in the past is a quick midterm evaluation (though usually earlier in the semester and I completely spaced on doing them this semester). I have a midterm evaluation form which is probably too comprehensive, but part of the form asks students to distribute 10 points into what kinds of different activities we should do in class (so half lecture, half discussion would put 5 points in the "lecture" box and 5 points in "discussion" box) and that part is easily done even without a form. I usually average it out across all the forms and change course if necessary. Another thing I've tried in past logic courses is "fallacy jeopardy", made possible with a couple of Powerpoint presentations that really do work like the Jeopardy board. Finally, in my more applied courses, I try to go a little more into theory and some of the deeper questions to remind students that there's a lot under the surface. In my less applied courses, I try to take a break from the official narrative of the course and spend a course applying old, dead philosophers to recent events. (I try to do this anyway, but these are more sustained lessons that can take all or half of the class period.)

Anybody else have anything they do to perk up a November classroom?

Do dedicated teachers have an easier time on the job market?

Since it is job market season in the academic world and particularly the philosophy world, I thought it would be good to bring this question to the floor here at ISW. Many new PhDs are justifiably concerned about finding gainful employment in philosophy, especially in a job market that includes not just new PhDs but people wanting to make lateral moves or "climb the ladder" in the discipline. The task can be daunting, and even haunting with the amount of uncertainty involved. First, some assumptions: I'm assuming there is a model of a good philosopher who doesn't want to devote all of his or her time to research. This is, of course, someone who does not hold research in disdain, but is comfortable with, say, 60%-90% of his or her time each week being devoted to preparing classes, teaching classes, and helping students. Second assumption: graduate students have a finite amount of time after completing coursework that they can spend writing their dissertations, publishing papers, or preparing courses and studying teaching. Third assumption: there are a good deal more jobs available that make teaching a priority in one's career over research (call these teaching-primary positions) and, with the first assumption, these positions can be fulfilling for good philosophers. Finally, fourth assumption: many teaching-primary positions are looking for good teachers first with supporting evidence of promising research.

Now I think it goes without saying that the best possible preparation one could have for the job market is to be as good of a teacher and as good of a researcher as one possibly can. But with the assumption of finite time, I think things get more interesting. One can choose to spend one's time eeking out another publication in a more research-oriented journal or polishing an article about one's teaching, compiling video, compiling other evidence, interacting with students, and so on in preparation for making the case on the job market. Given that many good philosophers could be happy in a teaching-primary job and there are more of them out there, and these departments are looking for people who have worked on honing their teaching, it seems that occasionally in the hectic life of a grad student in the later years, it can be more advantageous to work on one's teaching than reinforcing one's research. Perhaps it's even right to claim that the upper bound for how much good research can do for you on the job market as a whole is lower than the upper bound for how much work on your teaching can do for you. Dedicated teachers looking for a teaching-primary position would seem to have an easier time on the job market than dedicated researchers trying to hedge their bets by applying to teaching-primary positions as fallbacks. I wish I had facts and figures to support my hunches here, but I only have anecdotal evidence from my own graduate studies where the people who made teaching a primary focus rarely spent more than a year on the job market, compared to others who had more mixed success.

Some practical fallout after the break.



I think this kind of thing is important to start noticing more forthrightly because there is a certain kind of bias that must inevitably creep into graduate programs. After all, graduate programs are staffed by philosophers who are usually not in teaching-primary positions. So their natural inclination (and what they know) will be to train philosophers in a research-primary fashion to compete for research-primary jobs. But it's important to keep this bias in mind because one may be pushing students towards a path where they have less of a chance to compete for teaching-primary jobs, and thus less of a chance of having a potentially fulfilling career in philosophy. I've heard tell of graduate students who couldn't get letters for any school their advisor deemed "beneath" him/her.

The practical fallout is twofold. First, philosophy graduate programs should have at least some kind of real teacher training program, if not a whole teaching-track for graduate students (that, again, isn't treated with derision by people who view research-primary jobs as the sole destination for good philosophers). There are grad programs that do this (Syracuse is one I know of for sure, I'd be very happy to collect stories of others). Graduate programs should also hire with an eye towards finding at least some people who can meaningfully contribute to such a program. Second, prospective graduate students need to be better informed about which programs do and don't do a good job of supporting teaching development (perhaps we even need a separate kind of Gourmet Report; it would already be handy to have a ranking solely by placement given how many prospectives use the Report). Third, students who find themselves in a program without such an emphasis need to understand how to develop their teaching and "sell" their teaching on the job market. It can be the gateway to not only an easier time on the job market, but also a fulfilling position.

Expecting the Old Guys

For me, one of the hardest courses to design is the Introduction to Philosophy course. First of all, it has an impossible premise. There's simply too much philosophy. But that's not what I wanted to write about here. In addition to the topics one chooses, there is also the method of presenting those topics. Since I do a very problem-based type of philosophy, I tend to emphasize the same in my Introduction course. We cover several topics, including free will, personal identity, the mind-body problem, the problem of evil, and the problem of relativism. The last time I taught it, I actually hunted down five dialogues (all from Hackett, it was a cheap course) and used them to lay out the problems. It went pretty well, but I could definitely improve it.

However, the whole time, I was convinced that a good number of students were thinking to themselves, "I signed up for philosophy. Why aren't we reading Plato, Aristotle, or Nietzsche?" That of course leads to the other way of teaching Intro: a more historical approach. Below, I discuss some pros and cons of each approach, with a plea for similar thoughts and experiences from our audience.


The Problem Approach:

• Pros: For me one of the primary benefits of studying philosophy was the liberating method of thought. In fact, I wish that I had learned how to think critically and philosophically before I'd been let anywhere near Descartes, Anselm, and the rest. This method can be easily shown to be applicable in places other than philosophy, allowing the course to make the learning curve shorter on all of his or her other courses. The problems approach can emphasize argumentation, clarity, and precision with slightly more ease than the historical approach. Also, I think the problems approach better prepares students to read papers in contemporary philosophy. If they plan on going on in philosophy, this is an important asset. Finally, because the extra step of interpretation can be minimized in most cases, anybody can jump in and play. You're at most intimidated by tough arguments, rather than towering historical figures.


• Cons: It certainly won't be what most people have expected as a philosophy course at first, and this can turn some students off completely. Also, while it prepares students for contemporary reading, they may be left behind somewhat in a future curriculum that emphasizes historical figures and interpretation. Furthermore, because most contemporary philosophers like to emphasize technical points, it can give students perhaps too narrow a version of all the skills that philosophers employ -- especially interpretation. Also, while it can be very beneficial to learn to think critically, it can be hard to emphasize the kind of imagination that students tend to be able to employ in a more historical introduction. At least if one doesn't like a historical introduction, one can say that one has read some Plato. If you're not into argumentation despite the professor's best efforts, you may report that all you did was "run in circles" all semester.

The historical approach:

• Pros: It's how philosophy has been introduced for hundreds and hundreds of years and they'll be prepared when they hear the names in the future. Students are reading not just this century's mediocre minds, but minds that have stood the test of time and have inspired thousands who never even took a philosophy course. Plenty of people feel the need to pick up Plato at some time in life, but many fewer remember with fondness the day they first read John Perry's dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Also, students studying the great philosophers encounter several issues at once, and are able to mine the text for more without a bad chance of success. The great philosophers inspire readings that draw connections between different topics rather than lasering in on one. Finally, argumentation can be introduced alongside the issues as the great philosophers are offering good arguments. It takes a little more work to explain to students how it works because the arguments are sometimes less explicitly stated, but that difficulty allows students to develop better interpretational skills. Also, from the professorial perspective, it can be considerably more rewarding to gradually become familiar with the older texts than it is to come back to a simple, clear argument every semester.


• Cons: It can be intimidating to study the great, old, white, dead guys, and even more so if you're not old, white, or a guy. Contemporary philosophy has a much more diverse array of voices. Because the philosophies are so developed, it can be harder to play along in the way one can after one has learned simple argumentation. The old guys can certainly leave students in admiration, thinking it would be hard to improve on things rather than sharp and critical of new ideas. Teaching historically also underlines the the idea that a "philosopher" is someone like Plato or Kant rather than the person standing in front of the room teaching them Plato or Kant. It can be much harder to imagine yourself as a philosopher when you're reading Kant than when you're trying to emulate your professor's skill at coming up with counter-examples to numbered arguments. Finally, students can get "stuck" in the history rather than really interacting and coming up with their own ideas and arguments. I've seen more than one person who decided that Spinoza or Marx had it all right, and never felt the need to do any more philosophy, let alone going beyond to the great new frontiers that are being explored today in academic journals.

Ok, so that was way too much. But I'm eager to hear what others have to say about their favorite way of teaching Intro and/or the alternative. And, of course, there has to be something to be said for a mix, or ways that I'm not even entertaining here.

Please God, No Group Work!

The title of this post comes from a response to one of my midterm evaluations in which I ask students to allocate 10 points to three different activities that I do in most courses: lecture, discussion, and group work (I also sometimes include "other"). The allocation is supposed to correspond to how they would like to spend the class time. The particular response, "Please God, no group work!" actually came in a course in which we had not done any group work, so I don't believe it was in reaction to something in my course. In fact, I find that I receive many such comments and those who are most opposed to group work are usually my most motivated and brightest students. So the questions I want to throw out to others here at ISW are these: (1) What is the place of group work in the philosophy classroom? (2) In encouraging modern pedagogical values of teamwork and collaboration are we holding back or harming our brightest students to some degree? (3) If group work works well in your courses, what kinds of activities do you use (other than ice-breakers at the beginning of the course)? And finally (4) if there are undergraduate or graduate students reading this blog, what are your thoughts?

An Assignment for Fighting Student Isolation

I'm using a new type of assignment in one of my courses this fall and it seems to be working out pretty well, so I thought I would write up a post about it. I'm teaching an upper level course on Social Ethics and my students come from many different disciplines with varying levels of philosophical experience. In the past, I've used electronic discussion forums to bring students together outside the classroom, but I don't have that much time this semester and the students here seem a little more reluctant to use them. In college, I once had a seminar where the professor had us write up questions about the reading to submit to her. I saw the wisdom in it, but it was a little frustrating because I hadn't had enough experience to know what kind of questions to ask.

This semester I'm trying the same thing with a twist to alleviate the frustration. Students have to submit three (we started with four, but three turns out to suffice) questions on the reading for the week. However, once they've submitted them over email, I take all of the emails, concatenate the questions, delete any identifying details, and resubmit all of the questions to the students in the course. Then, in class on Thursday (it's a Tuesday/Thursday course), I spend a considerable amount of time reading and trying to answer the questions and discussion seems to naturally arise about the questions. I'll say a little more about why I think this will work well after the jump.


I don't really have data yet to say that this will work well for the entire semester, but it seems that the assignment has real potential for the following reasons:

• One has to at least attempt the reading to ask some meaningful questions and it's fairly easy to see if someone didn't do much of the reading. This serves the function of a reading quiz without all the messy grading and time-suckage of doing a quiz in class.


• It taps directly into the questions that students themselves have while reading rather than having to guess about what their interests might be or what the instructor has typically assumed questions would be. The questions do occasionally surprise me and open up really interesting possibilities I hadn't thought of.


• It generates better quality questions than one gets in class because students have more time to think about their their questions.


• In answering the questions in class, I thought I was boring my students to tears, but they didn't see it that way at all. I think this is because they anticipated their questions being answered and enjoyed seeing what others were thinking about.


• When my professor did the assignment in college, I got frustrated because I didn't know what to be asking questions about. But I anticipate that everyone's questions will get better as the semester goes along because they actually get to see other people's questions and can measure their subjective level of understanding by trying to ask questions that generate more discussion and really clarify the reading. Thus, I hope the assignment actually makes people into better readers.


• It decreases the anxiety of asking tough questions by anonymizing the questions on the document they get. I'm the only one who actually knows who asked which question and honestly I don't often remember when I start answering questions from the whole list.


• For a few questions I have to do a little research, but for the most part it's student-centered learning and very little preparation is necessary for the Thursday sessions.


• If someone has a question, often everyone has the same question. When you get multiple people asking the same question that you hadn't even thought of, there's a lot more opportunity to clear up confusion.

That's just off the top of my head. I imagine the assignment would work much better for smaller classes than for bigger ones. But hey, I think it works and it's much more fun than grading quizzes (which aren't really appropriate for upper-level courses anyway). Feel free to steal, implement, and improve.

What should philosophy majors know?

We have an outcomes assessment requirement in our department for those graduating with a philosophy degree. It hasn't been used much in the past because people had sort of forgotten about it and the assessment was the now defunct philosophy subject area GRE. So I was wondering what our cohort here thinks would be a good summative assessment for undergrad philosophy majors. I'm actually mostly curious about the most general questions. As our students tend to take a wide variety of courses, questions relative to particular courses are not really allowable (other than introductions to ethics, logic, or philosophy). If possible, I'd like to put an emphasis not on knowledge-based questions (Plato's theory of the forms says?) but on skill-based questions--questions or puzzles that philosophy majors should be better equipped to answer than the average college graduate who hasn't taken much philosophy. (Something like, "Write the following abstract argument in a much clearer form.")

Also, what do people think about these kinds of outcomes assessments? It strikes me as "yet another exam", but also one that helps plan and focus a philosophy major. That is, I think that when done correctly, it can give people a definite sense of what they're supposed to learn and what they have learned as a philosophy major.