Why Don’t We Train Community College Professors to Teach?

I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession. ~ John Wooden

Why don’t we train community college professors to teach?

In the California Community College system, we determine who is eligible to teach by following the guidelines of the California Statewide Academic Senate. Typically this means that you must have a Masters Degree or equivalent to teach in a transfer discipline. While you need an Associates Degree and six years, or a Bachelors Degree and two years of work experience in the discipline as a career education professor.. As you can see, these are very discipline driven requirements, with no teaching training requirement.

For transfer disciplines, given the above requirements, this means that most professors have had five to seven years or more, of sitting in college classrooms watching professors instruct college students. They’ve had the opportunity to see what worked and didn’t work for them as a college student. Whereas a professor who only has an Associates Degree, has likely had three semesters of technical training courses and one semester of general education college courses. A significantly lower level of opportunity to watch professors instruct classes. Given that currently, this is the only way community college professors are learning to teach, it puts our career education instructors and students at a significant deficit.

Teaching, like any other skill, requires training. To be a great teacher it is absolutely the result of both talent and training. Some people have a natural talent for imparting information, just like some have talent for performing music, being a mechanic or being an artist. But also like these fields, through training, the core skills of teaching can be taught. What do I mean by the skills of teaching?

The core skills of teaching include pedagogy, lesson planning, curriculum development, classroom management, assessment techniques, effective use of technology, etc… These skills can be taught, practiced and gotten better at through a training process. Teaching is a discipline in itself and the minimum requirements to be a high school teacher in most states are at least a full year of teaching training that includes observation and supervised student teaching requirements.

In the community college system we love to brag about a couple of things that we really think set us apart from the four-year college system. We tell students they can expect smaller classroom sizes and more caring instructors who are more focused on teaching, unlike their research focused counterparts at the four-year schools. Certainly, overall we offer smaller classroom sizes at the community college. Also, community college instructors do not have expectations of doing research as part of their tenure or evaluation process. So by default their focus and typically all or a majority of their workload is teaching. Because of this, people more interested in teaching as professors are drawn to this system. And overall in my experience, community college professor are more focused on being good classroom instructors. Of course today when we say classroom instruction, we’re referencing multiple modalities including online and hybrid teaching situations.

Given that having teachers more focused on teaching is one of the primary calling cards of a community college education, why don’t we train our teachers to teach?

A response I usually get to this question is that colleges fund professional development, often offer learning management software focused online teaching training, technology workshops and flex days at the college. But those small bursts of training do not substitute for actual focused teaching training.

One of the other things we often talk about in the community college is the extreme importance of hiring full-time faculty. We used to talk about it being a million dollar decision, but that was when the twenty year investment cost a salary of $50,000 without benefits. The current average salary for a California Community College Professor is $82,000. The cost of benefits these days range is around fifty percent of salary. That means that annual investment is over $120,000. With an expectation of a twenty year career, hiring a full-time faculty member is now a $2,400,000 investment. That investment is centered on providing a quality instructional experience for our students. Given that level investment, shouldn’t we be doing whatever possible to maximize the skill set of our incoming full-time faculty?

So what should we do?

Ideally, we would provide every new community college instructor with an intensive four to six week, paid teaching experience before their first day in class. That however, is highly impractical especially for part-time faculty. Given the number of teachers each community college hires every semester and sometimes given the short hiring lead time, we could not make this happen. It would be prohibitively expensive and given that part-time teachers might only stay for a semester or two, it would not be an effective use of resources. However, when it comes to full-time faculty this is a much more practical solution.

Given the significant financial investment we already make in doing a permanent full-time faculty hire, it seems prudent to make an investment in lifting their teaching skill level prior to them entering the classroom. Additionally, we typically hire full-time faculty on a much longer lead time, allowing time for this training. This has to have a positive impact on overall instructional quality at the institution.

But we shouldn’t ignore part-time faculty training, particularly in the Career Technical Education disciplines for all of the reasons discussed at the start of this piece. For part-time faculty we should offer a 2-3 week part-time teacher training. I’m talking about a couple a nights a week, 2-3 hours a night. This training would cover those basic skills of teaching we listed above.

I’ve seen first hand the benefit of this type of approach. Last year at my college, we pulled together a group of five prospective automotive instructors. One was actually an existing instructor and four folks we were hoping to bring in to teach. We started with them picking a topic for a lesson on the first night. Then, as we worked through each of the topics, from lesson planning to classroom management to assessment, they integrated what they learned into their presentation. Then on the final night they each presented their lesson, which we video taped and then reviewed with them in a one on one coaching session.

This took a bit of logistical magic. Faculty not yet hired cannot be paid, so the training was done with the agreement that a set number of hours would be paid to them once they were assigned a class. Happily that all happened in a relatively short amount of time. The pay was not significant and the extra hours I put in running the class were uncompensated, as was the time of a full-time faculty member who did the lesson on integrating technology into the classroom. For that particular lesson I had an automotive instructor run the class so that he could introduce specific automotive focused software and teaching technology that the department was already using.

In talking with these now part-time faculty, the training seems to have paid great dividends. While fully qualitative and anecdotal data, they have expressed that they felt prepared on their first day and feel like they have tools to deal with many of the issues they have faced in the classroom. One of the instructors had previously taught for two semesters at another college and he has given similar feedback including that he really wished he’d had this training before he started teaching.

All in all, the main point remains that given the focus community college puts on quality instruction, community colleges need to make a better investment in training community college instructors to be better teachers for both the benefit of our faculty and students.