Michael Giberson
Last summer I had a lot of fun at the too-short IHS Liberty and the Art of Teaching workshop. Well, I say “too short,” but the truth is that they packed so much information into 2 days that I couldn’t absorb it all.
I did absorb a few bits, though, as related in my reflection on what I gained from the teaching workshop, which has been posted at Kosmos Online. The workshop was a great production on IHS’s part, filled with teaching advice backed by years of successful practice (and in many cases, also backed by systematic study of student progress and retention).
As reported in my Kosmos post, I used what I learned at the workshop to reorganize my U.S. Energy Policy and Regulation course as well as (less successfully) to tweak my Energy Economics course. In addition, I’ve made several more minor adjustments in classroom practice, partly due to presentations at the IHS workshop and partly as a consequence of reading Teaching With Your Mouth Shut prior to this Spring semester.
I continue to be amazed at how willing universities are to push graduate students into the classroom with little actual guidance on successful teaching, at how often PhD programs will send their students out into the academic workforce with little training in this key job skill, and at how little supervision universities provide to newly-hired teachers fresh from the graduate programs that provided little training in teaching well. Teaching well can be hard work, yet often it is treated as so obvious as to be beneath serious concern. The IHS workshop helps fill the gap.
They are taken applications for the Summer 2012 workshop up until April 15, 2012.