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Tips for teaching a grad seminar?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

I am starting as an assistant prof in the fall, and will be teaching my first graduate seminar in the spring. I’d love to hear how you vary your teaching approach and methods with graduate students. I suspect that teaching a grad seminar won’t be all that different from teaching advanced undergrads in small seminars. But I don’t want to pitch things at too low a level, and I also want to teach in a way that recognizes that many graduate students are aspiring professional philosophers, which involves a set of skills that I might not prioritize with undergrads. I’d appreciate reflections on this, or any general advice. Thanks!

Great query! Do readers have any helpful tips to share?

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12 responses to “Tips for teaching a grad seminar?”

  1. Anonymous

    A lot will depend on your students. You need to learn what the typical background, strengths, and challenges are of the students that are admitted to your program. This can vary vastly. You mention skills. I think this is very important. I think we spend far too little time teaching skills: how to do a literature search, how to write a paper, how to write a strong conference abstract, how to present an argument in 15 minutes, etc. So do not think of the seminar just in terms of philosophical content. But, enjoy, and good luck with it.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I am at an R2 with a PhD program. I was honestly surprised by how hard it was to design and teach a grad seminar syllabus. While a lot does depend on your students and the kind of program honestly I think a general best-practices approach is NOT to aim the class at specialists even a little bit, but basically pitch it at very talented upper level undergraduates. (Obviously allow them a lot more self-direction.) This approach is also corroborated by the fact that the very best undergraduates across the country can outwrite or out-reason lots of first and second year grad students, especially if they are interested in the area you’re working in.

    Here’s a rationale… By the time you are starting a job you have been out of grad seminars for at least 4-5 years, often longer if you’ve been hopping around the job market. And you will also have not been regularly exposed to the target audience of your grad seminars in a class setting for at least 4-5 years, i.e., 1st- and 2nd-year grad students. Even if you regularly attend conferences, your exposure to grad students will likely be the top 10% of grad students at their home programs, i.e., those who are not only area specialists, but are also motivated enough to present their work and seek out connections. So it is easy to forget that most students in most grad seminars are not specialists in the area you’ll be teaching, and indeed, a large portion of students won’t have touched the area since their undergraduate 200-level survey of ethics or political philosophy or whatever. Some students, even those who are interested in cognate areas, won’t have touched the area EVER — it’s not uncommon for 1st/2nd year PhD students interested in general M&E to have never encountered (say) a philosophy of science course.

    In sum you will have to remember that despite the fact that they are bright and motivated, they are still first and second year PhD students. Hence, although it’s pretty obvious that relatively few of them will have direct *interest* in the area of the course, it may not be as obvious that relatively few of them will even have a real working *exposure* to the area.

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  3. Anonymous

    Dedicating time to research and writing skills is a good idea. I expected that our grad students would be able to notice patterns in pretty good philosophical work and apply those patterns to their own. I was really wrong about this. That was a failure on my part, and it meant I wasn’t setting my students up to do well.

    Grad students vary tremendously in their abilities and training, even at much more selective programs than mine. As a graduate student, this was not apparent to me. But I was not a good judge of other people’s abilities and training as an undergraduate student, either, and only understood why my own work was good-in-comparison once I started TAing. If you had a similar experience once you started grading, you might repeat it once you start grading grad students.

    I also would suggest: sometimes exams are a very good tool in grad seminars! It doesn’t have to just be papers! And giving grad students (and undergrads) opportunities to practice teaching-related skills, like leading discussion, presenting readings, and commenting on others’ work are also good tools. These kinds of skills are fungible in a way the content isn’t.

    Reply
  4. recentlytenured

    The above suggestion about thinking about professional skill development is a good one! Think about what skills you found you needed (or needed to improve). However, one caveat to this is to think about your phd-granting institution versus where you are now. Students will be different because they are different people but also because institutions have specific cultures/shared values in who they admit. So, talk to your colleagues and see what they think the students at your institution most need and work from there. Where I am now, for example, a lot of my grad students have good ideas but don’t have great writing skills. So, I have them do more writing now than when I first started so that they can learn to explore and express those ideas more effectively.

    Another way to think about this (though not my preferred strategy) is to structure your seminar around your own research. Lots of people I know, at my institution and elsewhere, use their grad students as a captive audience to test out material for books, other projects, etc. This has some professional benefits (seeing behind the intellectual curtain of professional writing, saving you a lot of time in pedagogical prep/research) but can be a bit limiting. I like to structure my grad seminars to get us thinking about topics that are interesting and relatively novel in the subfield which will provide students opportunities to publish their own writing – that is, topics that will set them up to turn term papers into journal articles. I’ve had students publish and present versions of their term papers many times now. It is our job, I think, at graduate-training institutions to help our students navigate a highly professionalized discipline, and this is one way to do that.

    The best advice I can give re: pitching the level correctly is to talk to them like they are other academics at your professional level (e.g., postdoc, assistant professor). Set expectations that this is a peer community where we are working through things together and as equals. That will push them to see themselves and act as professional philosophers rather than undergrads. Refuse the impulse (that you may have and that some of them likely will have) to defer to your understanding of the material. That deference is understandable for an undergrad but is professionally and intellectually deleterious for a grad student. That is why many people have grad students lead conversations about assigned readings.

    Good luck! Remember that you’ve been through this already as a grad student, so you know what you liked/disliked and what you needed/found wasteful.

    Reply
  5. Love grad teaching

    I remember very well how nervous I was to teach my first grad seminar! Now I love them. Here is what works well for me:

    1. Require students to send you 3 thoughtful questions about the readings in advance, and to be prepared to share their questions verbally in class if asked.
    2. Use their questions to help you plan, allowing you to pitch your teaching at the right level for what they are struggling with.
    3. Try to ask all students to share one of their questions most weeks. This helps prevent the dreaded situation where only a few students ever speak.
    4. Also bring a few broader discussion questions of your own and share them with students at the beginning of class on the board. Use them to structure the overall discussion and flag to students when you are moving the class on to the next one.
    5. In terms of topics: choose a book or some interrelated articles that you need to read for your research, and then assign some other things that will help students have enough background to appreciate the thing you really want to read. This allows your prep time to be research time too.

    Good luck!

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    I’ve seen two models on offer here and I think they have their strengths and weaknesses especially in the terrible job market we all live with.

    The first is to pitch a seminar much like an advanced undergraduate lecture course or seminar. As some commenters have said, this does not assume that the graduate students are fellow experts. As such, the course doesn’t start at the cutting edge of the field. Instead, it might work its way through the contemporary canon. E.g., a graduate seminar on metaphysics at an analytic department starts with “On Denoting,” gets to Naming and Necessity, and then there’s some new articles by trend setters to round out the seminar. Or, e.g., a course could be about Hobbes and teach the Leviathan from nose to tail–this is not much different from an advanced undergraduate class, just more rigorous and demanding. Students walk away from this seminar having filled in a possible gap in their knowledge and ready to engage with the cutting edge work (maybe in someone else’s seminar, maybe with their prospectus advisor).

    The trouble with this first type of seminar is that the job market is bleak, and the people who seem to still be eking out success are playing a different game. For them, the seminars (to the extent they aren’t deprecated) are a chance for professionalization. So you get the second type of seminar. You read cutting edge stuff,; you write a paper that’s good enough to be worked on for publication or conference submission; and you don’t get a survey–you learn what’s hot right now. On this model, graduate school is not about accumulating knowledge about the discipline’s history–not even in the first and second years. Instead, even the coursework is where you hone your craft to jump into the journal and conference circuit.

    I think in an ideal world, students, especially students with weaker preparation, would have most of their seminars on the first model. However, in the actual world, I think the second model is what students need to hold a 20% lotto ticket for the job market instead of a 2% ticket.

    Regardless of which model OP chooses, I think it’s a good idea to include presentations to the group, etc., to teach skills like lesson planning and conference presenting.

    If the OP is working with the second professionalization model, I think that seminars should go beyond presenting the cutting edge papers and research and encouraging students to write their own frontier work. The students should also be deliberately taught how to use Google Scholar, PhilPapers, journal websites, etc., to figure out where the discipline is moving, what the debates are, where they could possibly intervene. Feedback on papers could also serve this goal in part: students could be taught where they sound like undergraduates doing book reports rather than players in the professional debate.

    Reply
  7. Daniel

    Almost everyone is answering in terms of how the seminar can help prepare grad students to publish papers. But grad students will also eventually be applying to jobs that care about teaching (entirely or partially), and if they ever get a job, they will spend most of their time teaching. So one good thing a graduate seminar can do is expose students to enough of a topic so that they have a background that enables them to teach one or more courses in that topic without an onerous degree of preparation. (This overlaps somewhat with the comment above about whether to focus on cutting edge stuff.)

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    I write as a postdoc who has experience as a student in two different philosophy PhD programs. I’ve completed more than 25 (!) graduate seminars over the years, and I can only recall one (!) content seminar that devoted any time to helping us reflect on and develop professional skills (that is, apart from the two proto-seminars I took in my two ‘first years’). In that seminar, the professor devoted the first ~20 minutes of our weekly time together to discussing something about being a good professional philosopher. For example, if we had had a colloquium the week before, we’d discuss what was successful (and not) about the talk (i.e., the speaker’s success at communicating, handling Q&A, etc., not the content of the talk). Otherwise, we’d discuss what was successful (and not) about the assigned materials (i.e., the quality of the writing itself). Surely there were other things I’ve forgotten by now, but I submit this comment out of an abundance of respect and admiration for the professor who did this for us. Shy as I was to contribute at the time, this professor’s approach to professionalization was immensely helpful for me. I attribute much of my success in my second grad program to the professionalization skills I learned in my first program (and not in my second, more prestigious one, in which I had to do more work on my own to seek out help for professionalization).

    Anyway, take this as a practical suggestion for how to help grad students learn how to be (and regard themselves as!) good professional philosophers.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    This thread is timely for me. We don’t have a grad program, but we do have a graduation requirement in our major for students to take a 4000-level topics class, and it is my turn in fall. (Philosophy of Time and Time Travel–I can’t wait!) I told them I would teach it like a grad seminar, since several of them have expressed interest in graduate school and others are curious what a seminar is like.

    Their levels of preparation and skill are diverse to say the least, so that is going to complicate things a bit. But this thread has made me think about professionalization and transferrable skill building. I’ll add some content on literature searches, building a bibliography, how to give presentations, and expectations for writing at that level.

    There will be 12-15 students, so they should each be able to lead a class discussion twice. (I won’t throw them in the deep end: The first presentation will be 15-20 minutes.) My current plan (I mention it because it might work for others) is to assign them each a journal article in the first month or so that they will be responsible for presenting and leading a discussion on. They’ll use that as the basis for a draft essay due at midterm, adding other sources, arguing for a thesis, etc. They’ll get my and peer feedback on the draft, then write the final version. Their second presentation will be of their own paper, and I’ll ask them to assign the class a reading from their bibliography for that as well.

    One of my goals for the class is to convince them that philosophy is done best a team sport, not cutthroat individual competition. So, for example, I’m going to tell them to be prepared to save someone who flubs their presentation, whose draft essay is not going well, to be able to keep a productive discussion flowing, and to learn how to write philosophy collaboratively. I’m going to take much less of a role in all that than usual.

    I like the idea mentioned in the thread of having students submit questions about the reading in advance. I was going to have them do a weekly one-page commentary on a reading in advance of class anyway, so having them add a question for discussion will be straightforward.

    Someone mentioned the job market: I think I’ll spend part of a class talking about the undergraduate-to-professor pipeline–especially how leaky it is, how demanding, and how much luck is involved. But I’ll also spend time talking about how to parlay their philosophical training into other kinds of jobs if they don’t go to grad school or don’t end up as professors (and of course most of them won’t).

    Reply
  10. Anonymous

    Grad school got me used to the “one major final paper” model (sometimes with a couple presentations or smaller papers along the way). Now that I teach in a department with a (low-Leiter-rank) PhD program, I have not found that to be the best option for my students. It’s better for them to write three shorter, conference-length papers. The longer papers are frustrating for them to write and for me to grade, and they’re very unlikely to be publishable–but the shorter papers meet them where they’re at and are the kind of thing they could take to an APA or another conference. Of course this isn’t the right call for every department or even for every seminar within a department like mine.

    Reply
  11. dazesensationallye39c0dc2cd

    Have fun. This is one opportunity where you’re not doing the kind of teaching they mainly hired you to do, namely undergrad enrollment boosters, or holding up your research to high stakes professional scrutiny. It’s low pressure, if you let it be. So bust out. Teach something on that favorite topic you always dabbled in, and argued with friends about, but couldn’t (yet) justify publishing in for now, because too outside your AOS. Or use it (partly) to workshop some ideas — and the surrounding lit review — that have been on your mind lately, even if it benefits your own research.

    As for format, don’t sweat it. Don’t prepare a detailed lesson plan. Have students take turns commenting on various readings, and bring your own fresh reactions, and let the conversation just roll.

    And if you’re worried that this won’t necessarily benefit or train grads in the way they need, I cannot disagree more: this is exactly what they need! It’s a rare chance to do philosophy with a professional junior enough to be herself in front of them, and to whom they can relate. Whether you’re tackling a new topic or fine-tuning your specialty, you’re modeling something very useful for them.

    Reply
  12. Anonymous

    OP here. This is all enormously helpful, thank you for taking the time!

    Reply

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