Teaching Labs
Published on Oct 20, 2006 at 11:54 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under college teaching.
I teach at an entirely undergraduate institution. So, we don’t have graduate students to teach our labs. That means that the faculty have to teach labs. I know that some of my colleagues at the big universities sort of balk at that idea. After all, at the big research universities, you have lots of graduate students. To free up time for the faculty to do research, the graduate students teach the labs. Now, this has a couple of effects. For one, it gets graduate students involved in teaching. The “traditional” career path for physics graduate students is to get a PhD, do a post-doctoral study, and then get a tenure tract faculty position somewhere. That means that they will have to teach. But, faculty never really get any training in teaching. It is simply assumed that if you know the material, they you can teach it. So, the graduate students teaching labs are getting hands on teaching experience, which will come in handy later. Also, this frees up the faculty to do more research. This has both plusses and minusses, for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates enrolled in the labs.Â
Now, inexperienced students, who often have only a few more classes in the subject matter than the students that they are teaching, often don’t really do as good a job as they could. Also, they have their own education to worry about, and being serious about that takes time away from teaching. Now, that doesn’t mean that they all do poorly, and in fact as a graduate student I was always getting students saying that they were learning more in my labs than they did in the lectures. But, I know that a lot of graduate TA’s would come to lab without any preparation, and they would just sit and proctor the students fumbling through the lab manual. Normally, the labs were laid out by someone in charge, and the TA really didn’t do much but be there and grade lab reports. I always did more than that. I gave a short lecture at the beginning of each lab explaining what the lab was and how it fit in with the class, but that was rare at the universities where I went.
Now, the other thing about graduate students teaching labs is that the faculty and students seem to devalue the lab as a learning experience because it is only a graduate student teaching, and even then they normally didn’t teach. So, the labs didn’t count much of the course grade.
But, where I am, we don’t have graduate students, so the faculty teach labs. That means that they are taught by people with advanced degrees in the subject who know just how the material in lab fits in with the subject matter. In fact, I teach both lecture and lab of the same course, so I also know exactly what the students are learning in each component of the course. For me, the lecture and lab are, in fact, the same course. I lecture in lab, and when I teach the lecture in the lab room, I can do some lab things, too, during lecture. I schedule what lab exercises to do and when so that they fit with the complement the lecture material. I also know exactly what students do in lab, so I can even ask lab related questions on exams. For years, I’ve written my own lab exercises for astronomy, and this semester I am doing so for physics, too.  The laboratory is really important, since that is where students get hands-on experience. So, I weight it more than many of my counterparts at the big universities. But then, I know that there is real meat in my labs.
And, you know, I really like teaching labs. When I first started teaching here, people warned me that I’d have to teach my own labs. Well, that didn’t bother me, since I’ve been teaching labs since my first semester in graduate school. Even after I was teaching classes, I still either taught or oversaw labs, so I was never away from them.  And, I’ve always liked it. The labs are less formal than the lecture, and more hands-on. You also get to interact with the students far more in lab than in lecture, and this is where you get to know them.
So, I am actually glad that I teach labs.
-Astroprof
Global Citizen on October 21, 2006 at 4:16 pm: 1
If we don’t teach our own labs, we don’t see the lightbulbs come on.
This is easier for me, a docrotal candidate instructing at a community college, and for you at an undergrad institution, but every instructor and professor should insist on it.
When a scientist doesn’t know what she is doing, she is conducting research; –GC
Astroprof on October 21, 2006 at 4:32 pm: 2
Oh, definitely. Even if I had graduate students as TAs, I think that would like to teach my own labs, if possible. Of course, some big universities have sections of 150 students with 6 lab sections to go with the lecture. In that case, there’d be no way to teach your own labs. But, then I don’t think that is best way to teach in the first place.