Philosophy Teacher ASAP Preperation for Fall

A nice check list for teachers to mark off. These are all simple things, but if forgotten or left for the last minuet they could prove frustrating if not destructive to your fall class. 

UTexas Resources for Teaching Your First Class

Some great resources form Texas University on creating a course at the university level. This will be a great resource for any student teaching their first course.

http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching-resources/


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All About Teaching Portfolios

In this post I give you some resources for creating a teaching portfolio and a list of  possibly required materials.


A teaching portfolio is a very important part of applying for jobs in philosophy because the majority of graduate students will not go straight into research positions and most will be at teaching colleges the rest of their careers. This being the case it is  really good to have a portfolio to prove one can teach well. 

Using Partial Notes to Improve Student Performance

From ISW:

My own faculty center highlights a technique that I've used periodically: provide students with partial notes whose blanks they fill in. It's a good compromise between providing students notes and making them do all the work in taking notes.

Here's a description of a study about this technique:

http://insocrateswake.blogspot.com/2011/04/using-partial-notes-to-improve-student.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FqNdd+%28In+Socrates%27+Wake%29

Teaching Research Skills

Some sound advice from our Friends at ISW about teaching research.

This last semester I finally came up with a series of assignments that taught students how to do independent research over time over the course of the semester. The research project culminated in a final research paper of five to seven pages (revised once) and a class presentation of ten minutes. Both the final papers and presentations were very successful.

http://insocrateswake.blogspot.com/2011/05/teaching-research.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FqNdd+%28In+Socrates%27+Wake%29

Teaching Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition

I found this article very quite helpful and hope to add the information to my teaching arsenal.



Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition

The majority of philosophy graduate students who end up gaining employment, are those who apply to teaching universities as well as research universities for a job. There are many more teaching universities than there are reseach universities. What this means is that if one does not want to face the beast that is unemployment, one should prepare for both. If you are attending NYU or Rutgers you many want to only want to focus on research universities, but for the rest of us it's important to keep our options open.  As mentioned in the post on Getting a Job in Philosophy, one should collect teaching evaluations  for later job applications/interviews/ letters etc.. in order to show that one is a good teacher.  If you decide to keep your professional options open, becoming a good teacher is really important, articles like this will help you teaching ability grow.

Qualifying Exams

Qualifying exams mark in an MA program when you are able to start teaching your own classes. In a PhD program it is when one starts work on a dissertation. One should prepare for this exam as early as possible, while any dedicated philosophy student shouldn't have a problem with it,  it can make your life difficult if you do not pass it. In many programs you can take it early or multiple times.   Teaching ones own class would be highly rewarding with regard to experience teaching. Teaching positions as a grad usually pay more than graders. Comprehensive examination are designed to test your background in key philosophical areas such as ethics, modern philosophy and ancient.

Here are some links to material on the subject:

Graduate Teaching: Good or Bad for Hiring?

Leiter's readers respond to the question 'Can teaching too many courses while in graduate school hurt you in the hiring process later on?'
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/how-much-teaching-experience-should-a-job-seeker-have.html

In Favor of Prospective Exams

Someone posted this article on "In Socrates' Wake". It seems like it might work better as a secondary or preliminary final.

Last quarter I gave what I'll call a prospective final exam in my introductory ethics sections. The idea here is that though the exam was intended to test the skills, etc., that the students were expected to acquire in the course, they had to display these skills with totally unfamiliar material. (I've been kicking around this idea for a while — see this post from 2008 — though the format differs from what I described there.)
Here's how this worked:
http://insocrateswake.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-favor-of-prospective-exams.html#more

Just a thought on the nature of in-class testing and ethics:

5 Phases of a Philosophical Career

This was a post outlining a basic time-line of the career path of the academic philosopher. Some of the facts here are a bit off which I have tried to correct in my notes on this post. Over all it seems dead on.

 Split into 5 phases as follows:

Phase One: The Undergrad Days

Phase Two: Applying to Graduate School

Phase Three: The Graduate Student Years

Phase Four: The Job Hunt

Phase Five: Attaining Tenure

Phase Six: Tenure

Phase Seven: Death

http://philosiology.blogspot.com/2011/04/myth-philosophers-especially-academic.html

Lecture Breaks and Students Learning

One study suggests that students learn more if given some time to process concepts in the middle of lecture. I know when I was doing undergrad, many classes would have a 5-10 min break in the middle. This allowed the students to talk and develop questions informally before asking the teacher.
http://insocrateswake.blogspot.com/2011/04/press-pause-to-encourage-learning.html

Living with a Philosopher

check it out: http://philosiology.blogspot.com/2011/04/living-with-your-philosopher-incessant.html

Blogs as a Teaching Tool in Philosophy

A interesting essay on how to effectively use blogs as a teaching tool for undergraduate students. The author suggests that implementation of blogs encourages students to use "I" in their philosophical writing as well as creating discussion.