EAST LANSING, Mich. — Prowess in the laboratory doesn’t always translate into the classroom. However, a program at Michigan State University is giving doctoral students – those who spend most of their time in the lab – the skills they need to be good teachers as well.
Since it was developed in 2006, more than 40 students have participated in the Future Academic Scholars in Teaching Fellowship Program, or FAST. A number of those students have gone on to accept faculty positions at institutions such as North Carolina State University, Central Michigan University and the University of Michigan.
“Just because people are smart and they know research doesn’t always mean they can teach it effectively to a diversity of other people,” said Henry “Rique” Campa, director of the program and associate dean of the MSU Graduate School. “And that is the essence of what we’re trying to change.”
FAST is a one-year program that offers extensive training through seminars, workshops and an exchange program with other universities, through the Center for Integration, Research, Teaching and Learning, or CIRTL.
MSU was one of six original members of CIRTL, which was established as a National Science Foundation Center for Teaching and Learning in 2003. Recently, CIRTL expanded to 25 institutions, a move that will allow for more student-exchange opportunities.
“This new collective group of institutions could dramatically impact how doctoral students are prepared to teach in the classroom,” Campa said. “It will provide a lot of new opportunities for them, opportunities that may not exist for students at other institutions.”
One specific goal of FAST is to prepare future faculty who will teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the so-called STEM fields.
“What FAST is doing is helping these soon-to-be teachers create better classroom experiences and learn how to assess teaching and learning,” he said.
Many science and technology undergraduate students are not going to go on to careers in higher education, but by providing better-prepared professors “we give them an educational foundation in which they can be more effective practitioners or more informed citizens,” Campa said.
Students who participate in the CIRTL exchange program present seminars on their areas of research and a teaching-as-research project, as well as meet with others in their disciplines. The experience is similar to what one would go through in a faculty position job interview.
“The experience was invaluable in that it mirrored the expectations that would be inherent to an on-campus interview,” said Robert Montgomery, a FAST fellow who visited the University of Wisconsin last year. “Many of the fears that I would have had pertaining to an on-campus interview have been overcome.”
“The resources and connections I have made through this program have really helped me to develop professionally as a future faculty and has created opportunities for me that I would otherwise not have had,” said Allison Rober, a FAST fellow who is working on a doctorate in zoology.
For information on FAST, visit http://grad.msu.edu/fast/. Information on CIRTL is available at www.cirtl.net/.
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