Teaching future professors how to teach

This paper describes a course designed to provide hands-on teaching experience to future professors and to incorporate techniques for more effective teaching. A team of Ph.D. candidates, under the direction of a senior faculty member, prepared a new course from beginning to end and then offered it to a class of graduate students. The course was developed using the unit map concept so that the presentations by the five student-instructors complemented and built upon one another. Immediately after each class, feedback was given to the student-instructors by the faculty advisor and the other student-instructors. Review of video tapes of the lecture reinforced this feedback. At the completion of the course, both students and student-instructors were surveyed as to the effectiveness of the course and the student-instructors. This teaching experience and the feedback obtained from the surveys will be invaluable to the student-instructors in their future development.