Graduate student teaching is an integral part of the life of research universities. On the one hand, graduate students perform teaching activities that are often indispensable to the undergraduate curriculum; on the other, teaching activities are indispensable to the training of graduate students, especially those who are preparing for academic careers.Ideally, these two functions would complement each other. Yet the dynamics between the needs of the university and the interests of graduate students can also lead to conflicts that range from concerns about the exploitation of graduate student instructors to concerns that graduate students do not have access to necessary teaching opportunities.

Graduate student teaching, of course, is also an integral part of our university. However, heretofore there has been no systematic inquiry into how this teaching is structured in our many and diverse graduate programs. While it is unlikely that Rice will face the kinds of struggles that larger research institutions recently have experienced, i.e. graduate student strikes and struggles over unionization, it is important to insure that fair and constructive policies govern graduate student teaching on our campus. In the spring semester of 1999, Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Studies, Jordan Konisky, asked Susan Lurie, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, to form a campus-wide Task Force that would investigate graduate student teaching at Rice. The charge for the Task Force was both to document existing practices and to formulate recommendations for best practices.

The Task Force held its first meeting in February, 1999 and worked throughout the spring semester to gather and evaluate information. Members of the Task Force interviewed department coordinators, chairs, directors of graduate study, and/or graduate students in all departments where graduate students perform teaching activities, and then written reports on individual departments were submitted to the Task Force as a whole. The "Report on Graduate Student Teaching at Rice" summarizes our findings about existing practices and presents our recommendations for best practices.

• Susan Lurie, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Chair
• George Bennett (Biochemistry)
• Steven Cox (Computational and Applied Mathematics)
• Jane Dailey (History)
• James Faubion (Anthropology)
• Richard Grandy (Philosophy)
• Don Johnson (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
• Richard Lavenda (The Shepherd School of Music)
• Debra Purtee (Research and Graduate Studies)
• Michelle Shearer (graduate student, Geology)
• Ron Soligo (Economics)
• Bruce Weisman (Chemistry)
• Julia Smith Wellner (graduate student, Geology)
• Heidi Zeimer (graduate student, Psychology)

OVERVIEW OF GRADUATE STUDENT TEACHING AT RICE

Graduate student teaching at Rice varies significantly according to particular Schools and according to departments within the Schools. Nonetheless, there are certain considerations that affect the availability and the status of this teaching everywhere on campus. These include the extent to which undergraduate programming relies on graduate student teaching activities, the percentage of graduate students that are preparing for academic careers and therefore require teaching experience, and the attitudes of faculty and administrators towards graduate student teaching.

In general, faculty support is strong and teaching experience plentiful in those departments where the undergraduate program requires graduate student teaching. In those departments that do not need graduate students to teach in the undergraduate program, graduate students’ access to teaching experience varies. Some faculty in these latter departments strongly support graduate teaching, and some strongly oppose it.

The large majority of departments in all schools compensate graduate student teaching and teaching assistance by making these activities a training component of the program that is covered by graduate student stipends. Since stipends vary widely between departments, students in different departments receive varying funds in the semesters when they perform teaching activities. A fewer number of departments, including some that also compensate teaching activities with graduate stipends, pay students to teach specific courses. Compensation for these courses can differ between departments.

In this report, the Task Force identifies two categories of graduate student teaching activities at Rice: 1) teaching one’s own class, including classes that have set syllabi, or helping to teach and develop advanced laboratories; and 2) providing limited assistance to an instructor who has the primary responsibility for a class. We refer to students in the first category as "graduate student instructors"and students in the second category as "graduate student teaching assistants."

The Schools of Natural Science and Engineering

In the Schools of Natural Science and Engineering, many undergraduate programs depend heavily on graduate student teaching assistants, whose duties include instructing laboratory sections, leading discussion and recitation sessions, grading for lecture courses, and, in Mathematics, lecturing. In departments other than Mathematics, a small number of students are selected for teaching assignments that involve lecturing in an introductory course; these students receive compensation on top of their stipend. The primary goal of all these activities is to assist in undergraduate instruction rather than to develop teaching experience and credentials for graduate students. There is strong faculty support for these activities.

We estimate that 25 to 30% of the graduate students in these Schools aspire to careers in higher education. Mathematics, in which the majority of students are preparing for careers in academia, is an exception. Training in pedagogy varies according to departments. Some offer adequate training; some offer minimal and inadequate training; some offer no training at all. Mathematics stands out here for its systematic training program in pedagogy.

Students in the Schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering are compensated adequately, through their stipends, for their teaching activities. At the same time, it is widely perceived by faculty that the teaching activities of graduate students are too heavily subsidized by external research funds.

The Schools of Humanities, Music, and Social Science

In the Schools of Humanities, Music, and Social Science, the relation between graduate student teaching and the needs of the undergraduate program are various. Some departments need graduate student teaching (Music, French Studies, Hispanic Studies). Most departments do not have this need. In these latter departments, graduate student teaching is motivated by the needs of the graduate program.

In these Schools, some students serve as teaching assistants, some as graduate student instructors, and some serve in both capacities in the course of their teacher training. Students in the School of Music also teach music lessons to individual Rice undergraduates, for whom these lessons are included in their Rice studies. The overwhelming number of graduate students in the Schools of Humanities and Social Science are preparing for academic careers. In the School of Music, several DMA students (mostly those in Composition Studies) are preparing for academic careers, while most MA students are not.

Within the departments in these Schools where graduate student teaching is indispensable to undergraduate teaching, faculty support is enthusiastic. And both teaching experience and pedagogical training are available to students who are preparing for academic careers. At the same time, in some of these departments, university needs can result in requiring too much teaching and/or in offering inadequate compensation. Indeed, graduate student instructors and graduate student teaching assistants in departments that have a strong need for graduate teaching often receive less compensation than their counterparts in departments that do not have this need. (see attached table).

The far greater number of departments in these Schools do not need graduate student teaching in the undergraduate program. In these departments, students have varying access to teaching experience and teacher training. Some of these departments require that students design and teach one course as a component of the doctoral program. Others appoint graduate student instructors on a selective, competitive basis late in the program; others limit teaching to teaching assistance. While many faculty support graduate student teaching, departments in this category also report the presence of strong faculty resistance. The pedagogical training available to graduate students within these departments also varies. Some departments have systematic training components, including pedagogy courses, consultation, and supervision. Most have very limited training available; some have none at all. Students in these departments receive adequate compensation for their teaching activities (see attached table).

RECOMMENDATIONS

• The Task Force recommends that the Office of Graduate Studies track all graduate student teaching activities at Rice.

The Importance of Offering Graduate Student Teaching at Rice

• The Task Force recommends that departments which prepare Ph.D. students primarily for teaching and research positions in academia should offer pedagogical training and teaching experience at Rice.

If we are to produce Ph.D.’s who can compete for academic jobs in a very tight market, we must provide the training and experience that will allow them to compete with well-trained students from other institutions. As importantly, these departments should provide the training that is fundamental to academic careers.

Teaching experience at Rice is crucial for those students who aspire to positions at research universities and colleges. Such students already constitute the majority in our best programs, and their numbers are increasing in many others. The capacity to increase the stature and national visibility of all our graduate programs, a central aim of Rice’s Strategic Plan, relies on recruiting, retaining, and placing these kinds of students. Recruitment and retention of such students depends not only on offering competitive stipends and excellent academic training from outstanding faculty, but also on offering them the same kind of teaching experience and training they would receive in the best doctoral programs.

• The Task Force recommends that, ideally, all Ph.D. students preparing for academic careers should have the opportunity to teach at least one course at Rice.

The Task Force recognizes the important achievements of our programs that already offer this teaching to all their students. There are also a number of doctoral programs that offer graduate student teaching on a selective, competitive basis. The Task Force applauds these efforts to integrate teaching experience into these programs, and we encourage these departments to continue to expand the availability of teaching for their students.

The Task Force recognizes that departments that limit or have no graduate student teaching are often concerned with quality controls on student teaching, a Rice teaching culture that does not look favorably upon student teaching, and/or the availability of and need for courses taught by graduate students. We recognize these as important concerns, and in the section on "Graduate Student Teaching and Rice Teaching Culture" we make specific recommendations for teaching components that take these concerns into account.

The Importance of Limiting Graduate Student Teaching at Rice

• The Task Force recommends that graduate students should teach no more than one course per semester (as outlined in the AAUP’s draft of a "Bill of Rights" for graduate students).

While many of our departments provide too little teaching experience for graduate students, there are those that may require too much. Teaching more than one course per semester can seriously impede a student’s progress towards a graduate degree.

Teacher Training for Graduate Students

• The Task Force recommends that all graduate students who perform teaching duties be provided with pedagogical training.
• The Task Force recommends that a course or workshop in pedagogy, as well as preparatory teaching assistance activities, should be required for all students who become graduate student instructors.
• The Task Force recommends that all departments should evaluate students’ performances as teaching assistants before appointing them as graduate student instructors.
• The Task Force recommends that all students who perform teaching activities should have proficient communication skills in English. Departments should evaluate these skills before assigning teaching activities.

At present, teacher training in those departments that offer graduate student teaching ranges from non-existent to systematic, progressive preparation. Departments in which graduate students have teaching responsibilities should design a teacher training component that prepares their students adequately. Adequate preparation may involve a combination of coursework, teacher training of assistants by their supervising faculty, and regular supervision and guidance during the student’s teaching of courses. Successful models in place at Rice and elsewhere should guide departments in formulating this component.

Compensation

• The Task Force recommends that no student should be required to perform teaching activities without compensation.
• The Task Force recommends that tuition waivers should be provided to all students who perform teaching activities, but tuition waivers should not be regarded as compensation for teaching.
• The Task Force recommends that graduate student instructors, if teaching as part of their required graduate curriculum, should be provided a stipend not less than $5,000 per semester; in the alternative, if teaching is performed as a fee-for-service, graduate student instructors should be compensated at a rate of no less than $5,000.00 per course.
• The Task Force recommends that graduate student teaching assistants, if assisting as part of their required graduate curriculum, should be provided a stipend not less than $3,000 per semester.
• The Task Force recommends that subsidized health benefits be available to all registered, full-time graduate students and thus to all students who perform teaching activities.
• The Task Force recommends that the university fund new teaching fellowships, available to all students in those departments that primarily prepare students for academic careers and available to selected students in those departments that do not. In the latter departments, selection criteria should include a student’s commitment to pursuing an academic career.

Existing Modes of Compensation: Most graduate student teaching is compensated by fellowship stipends. The Graduate Office awards some special fellowship money to the schools of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Engineering specifically for the support of graduate student teaching activities. When compensated by fellowship stipends, both teaching assistance and the teaching of independent courses are considered to be part of the student’s training and therefore covered by stipends.

The Task Force notes that stipends for students who perform teaching activities vary widely among schools, among departments within the same schools, and sometimes among students in the same department (please see attached table). Some departments also (or only) compensate graduate student instructors with non-stipend funds. In this category, students do replacement or adjunct teaching or teach specialized courses in their fields.

The Task Force recognizes the obstacles to offering equivalent stipend amounts to graduate student instructors and teaching assistants in all departments. However, we recommend that students who perform equivalent teaching activities should receive no less than the recommended minimum amount of compensation for those teaching activities.

New Modes of Compensation: University Teaching Fellowships: The Task Force recommends that the university fund special one-year teaching fellowships for graduate students. These fellowships should be offered to all students, as part of their funding packages, in those departments which prepare their students primarily for academic careers. These fellowships should be available to students in other departments by a selection process that takes into account a student’s desire to pursue an academic career.

Except for Mathematics, where most students aspire to academic careers, in the Schools of Natural Science and Engineering, where an estimated 25% to 30% of graduate students aspire to academic careers, the Task Force suggests that teaching fellowships be allocated in proportion to enrollments in courses at and below the 300-level. For these departments, we recommend a minimum of one two-semester teaching fellowship per 1000 student-semester-hours. This would provide one such fellowship for a year-long 3-credit course enrolling 167 students. Such fellowships would also assume more of the undergraduate instructional cost now carried by graduate programs.

In general, these fellowships should underwrite one year of teaching in which the student would teach at least one and at most two courses; students who teach only one course in this year would also participate in teaching assistance activities. This "teaching year" could be scheduled at the point in the program that each department judges to be best.

Allocating special funds for graduate student teaching will not only insure that our graduate students have the teaching experience they need in order to be competitive on the job market. These fellowships will also help us strengthen our programs by improving our ability to recruit and retain the best graduate students nationwide. Specifically, such a fellowship program could provide the needed fourth and fifth year of funding in the Social Sciences and Humanities, respectively, and sorely needed additional funding for the DMA in Music. Because top students often have four- and five-year funding packages from other schools, the lack of fourth and fifth-year funding has been a significant obstacle in our recruiting such students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Finally, these fellowships could help integrate the needs of graduate programming with new developments in the undergraduate curriculum, for example new freshman seminars and writing intensive courses in various departments.

Graduate Student Teaching and Rice Teaching Culture

• The Task Force recommends that evaluations of graduate student teaching at Rice be available for review by faculty who have concerns about the efficacy of this teaching.

In those departments that offer limited or no teaching to graduate students, there often exist two important concerns: 1) a concern with "quality control"; 2) a concern that there are not enough departmental courses, if any, that would be available for graduate student instructors. Below, we address these concerns.

1) Quality Control: The Task Force recognizes this concern as a very important one. In some cases departments hope to guarantee quality instruction by prohibiting graduate student teaching. Some departments that have a commitment to offering significant teaching experience to their best students monitor quality through competition for a few teaching slots; this approach is often the case for departments that are just beginning to provide teaching experience. A fewer number of programs successfully monitor quality through training and evaluation, even as they require teaching of all their students.

The Task Force both supports all efforts to enhance opportunities for graduate student teaching and recognizes the importance of assuring the quality of this teaching. Recruiting topnotch students, a goal that can be bound up with increased teaching opportunities, is one factor in producing excellent student teachers. A strong training component and an evaluative mechanism that assesses skills before students are allowed to teach their own classes are extremely reliable ways of monitoring the quality of graduate student teaching.

Graduate student teachers often prove to be some of the best teachers in a department. Enthusiasm for new and important work, willingness to prioritize teaching, strong dedication to helping students are just a few of the factors that contribute to this success. Rice already has a strong record of successful graduate student teaching, a record that should be available to all faculty and administrators.

2) Availability of Courses for Graduate Student Teaching: The majority of departments that prepare their students for academic careers do not have a need for graduate student teaching. Here the challenge is to create courses that both enhance undergraduate education and provide our graduate students with necessary teaching experience. The Task Force offers the following suggestions for such courses.

• –Dividing large introductory courses into sections
• –Offering more introductory courses (where most teaching is presently done)
• –Team-teaching courses with a faculty member
• –Seminars in the student’s special field of research
• –Graduate student participation in possible curriculum innovations, for example freshman seminars and writing intensive courses
• –Adding laboratory components to courses

Funds for such courses could come from faculty replacement salary, from the deans’ discretionary funds, and/or from university teaching fellowships that at one time could enhance years of graduate funding and the scope and quality of courses available to undergraduates.

Graduate Student Teaching Outside Rice

• The Task Force recommends that all departments make concerted efforts to reduce the need for graduate students to take poorly paid, remedial level, and labor-intensive teaching in local institutions by providing teaching experience at Rice.

Many departments report that their graduate students routinely teach courses in Houston-area colleges and community colleges. This is as true of students whose programs provide teaching experience at Rice as it is of students who have no opportunity to teach here. The Committee recognizes both positive and negative effects of this teaching.

On the positive side, in some cases such teaching provides the only experience of teaching their own course that Rice graduate students have. Further, teaching at local institutions provides Rice students with experience in the kinds of courses they may be asked to teach if they take jobs at comparable institutions (teaching schools with an overriding need for lower-level and remedial courses). Such teaching also provides needed additional income for students on stipend and, in some cases, the only income for students beyond their stipend years.

On the negative side, this teaching pays extremely poorly and can be enormously time-consuming, taking crucial time away from the student’s completion of the Ph.D. And while this kind of teaching enhances the C.V. of students who go on to teach at comparable institutions, there is also the possibility that such teaching can diminish a candidate’s appeal for research colleges and universities. In a climate where the professoriate is stratified between tenure-track, research and teaching positions, on the one hand, and part-time and adjunct teaching of remedial courses, on the other, a graduate student’s teaching profile (especially that of a graduate student from a second-tier program) may make a difference in how s/he is perceived by hiring institutions.

The Task Force recognizes that, at present and in some programs, "outside" teaching provides necessary training and/or income to our graduate students. But we also recognize that it is in the best interests of our students both to have the opportunity to teach at Rice and to have the option of not doing poorly paid and time-consuming teaching elsewhere.

Summary of Task Force Recommendations

• The Office of Graduate Studies should track all graduate student teaching activities.
• Departments which prepare Ph.D. students primarily for teaching and research positions in academia should offer pedagogical training and teaching experience at Rice.
• Ideally, all Ph.D. students preparing for academic careers should have the opportunity to teach at least one course at Rice.
• Graduate student instructors should teach no more than one course per semester (as outlined in the AAUP’s draft of a "Bill of Rights" for graduate students).
• Graduate students who perform teaching duties should be provided with pedagogical training.
• A course or workshop in pedagogy, as well as preparatory teaching assistance activities, should be required for all students who become graduate student instructors.
• All departments should evaluate students’ performances as teaching assistants before appointing them as graduate student instructors.
• All students who perform teaching activities should have proficient communication skills in English. Departments should evaluate these skills before assigning teaching activities.
• No student should be required to perform teaching activities without compensation.
• Tuition waivers should be provided to all students who perform teaching activities, but tuition waivers should not be regarded as compensation for teaching.
• Graduate student instructors, if teaching as part of their required graduate curriculum, should be provided a stipend not less than $5,000 per semester; in the alternative, if teaching is performed as a fee-for-service, graduate student instructors should be compensated at a rate of no less than $5,000 per course.
• Graduate student teaching assistants, if assisting as part of their required curriculum, should be provided a stipend not less than $3,000 per course.
• Subsidized health benefits should be available to all registered, full-time students and thus to all students who perform teaching activities.
• The university should fund teaching fellowships, available to all students in those departments that primarily prepare students for academic careers and available to selected students in those departments that do not. In the latter departments, selection criteria should include a student’s commitment to pursuing an academic career.
• Evaluations of graduate student teaching at Rice should be available for review by faculty who have concerns about the efficacy of this teaching.
• All departments should make concerted efforts to reduce the need for their graduate students to take poorly paid, remedial level, and labor-intensive teaching in local institutions by providing teaching experience at Rice.