On Teaching Teachers to Teach
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate one implementation of the American Economic Association-Joint Council on Economic Education (AEA-JCEE) teacher training program. shall briefly describe the University of Wisconsin version of the training program for graduate students, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and conclude with some thoughts about how we might alter our approach to teaching economists to teach. The Seminar on the Teaching of College began in the 1973-74 academic year. was among the fifteen participants who joined the seminar which met once each week for one semester. Our studies encompassed course planning (including instructional objectives and task analysis), course implementation (lecturing, discussion techniques, and audiovisual materials), and evaluation of students and teachers (construction of tests, philosophy of grading, student evaluations of faculty, and critiques of videotapes of seminar participants). The premise upon which the program was based was whether or not great teachers are born (as opposed to made), most teachers can be trained to become better teachers. believe this is true and there are some systematic data to support this proposition, in addition to the subjective evidence reported here.' Interestingly, one of the most important benefits of the seminar had nothing to do with the content that has been described. Out of our studies and conversations came a kind of self-consciousness about the process of teaching. We became acutely aware that there existed alternative technologies for producing Economics XYZ as described in the catalogue of our first employer, ranging far beyond the choice of the appropriate text. Not only were we thinking about teaching, but we were talking about teaching-which for many of us was an important departure from the preoccupation with research fostered by graduate school curricula. One participant described this outcome as consciousness raising. Some participants of the seminar are now, two years later, continuing to correspond by exchanging syllabi, exams, problem sets, and ideas about teaching. A second important outcome results from the study of instructional objectives. There appears to be considerable agreement among the Wisconsin participants that this was the most useful seminar topic. Planning by stating goals in terms of demonstrable student outcomes focuses attention not on the content of the course, which is the stuff of graduate students' training, but on the object of instruction, the student. Commenting on the instructional objective approach, a former Wisconsin participant recently wrote: I find myself constantly returning to questions * Assistant Professor of Franklin and Marshall College. am grateful to W. Lee Hansen for numerous discussions on the Wisconsin Seminar on the Teaching of College Economics, and for sharing his 1973-74 students' written evaluations of the seminar. Jon Christianson, Robert Hutchens, Jack Mutti, and Thomas Pender kindly shared their thoughts on the seminar's influence on their teaching, two years after completing the course. Their comments have influenced this evaluation. ' Darrell R. Lewis and Charles C. Orvis (1973) present data on the Minnesota teacher training program which was effective in increasing pre-post TUCE differences and subjective student ratings of instructors.
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