Nick Carbone writes:

Depends on the instructor. For GTA's in our program, we offer a one week training program before school begins, plus weekly meetings with a faculty teaching mentor, plus bi-monthly meetings of the TAs to address teaching issues. I don't know that it's possible to transform an instructor who's already been teaching and has habits and beliefs they rely on and which seem to work. In outreach, we see teachers when they feel they need help, when they aren't getting the writing they thought they would, or when they sense that they want to change how they approach the teaching of writing.  That is, we see teachers who are at different approaches to the cusp of transformation, and some have further to go and will move more slowly than others. Training new teachers is still a challenge, however, because those teachers come in with preset ideas (based on the courses and teachers they've had) of what teaching is. So some part of the training involves class management, how to start discussions, why discussions are good, how to do peer review, how to teach peer review, why peer review is good, how to use the syllabus, why the assignments are sequenced in a given way, how to learn from the experienced teacher they observe and so on. With new instructors, they get the equivalent of two or three courses worth of learning how to teach.

Entrenched teachers require more subtle approaches, suggesting small steps while holding up the larger picture, making change comfortable and as safe as possible, so that both they and their students can benefit. One of the first reminders on technology to teachers is that you don't have to know it all or use it all, take your time, grow into the classroom and the pedagogies, things will come. It takes some teachers 3 or 4 academic years of experimenting, trying, and so on to shift pedagogies. That's not an unreal or unsurprising number.

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