While there are currently many resources in place for TF training, such as the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, administrators said it is up to individual departments to take advantage of these resources.
The TFs present also pointed to wide discrepancies in departmental standards.
“In the first department in which I taught, they just threw us into a course we weren’t prepared to teach, but now in Romance Languages we went through a very extensive three day training program,” said Elgin K. Eckert.
Bok Center Director James D. Wilkinson ’65 said he encourages more departments to develop relationships with the Bok Center.
“We don’t like to be thought of as a garage where people tow their teaching fellows in distress and pick them up at the end of the day,” he said.
Ellison said GSAS is currently looking into improving TF training by granting some form of course credit for enrolling in training programs.
But he said this plan would be complicated by the fact that only about two-thirds of TFs who teach within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are affiliated with the graduate or professional schools—the rest are affiliated with other universities and thus could not be held to the same standards.
TFs said that although they are always eager to improve, they often meet resistance from research advisers.
“Often your adviser doesn’t want you to take the time to be a good TF—they would rather you spent time doing your research,” Fagan said.
But Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser said TFs sometimes don’t want to teach.
“It is the goal of some graduate students to spend their lives in labs and not to teach at all and professors often have to convince them of the benefits of teaching in order to communicate their ideas,” Hauser said.
In addition to citing TF quality as part of the problem, both students and faculty agreed that students are at least partially responsible for the quality of their sections.
“The reality is that under the same TF some sections go really well and some don’t and that is a function of the students,” Ellison said.
Eckert said TFs are more likely to put effort into the section if the students are engaged.
“When you have spent hours grading a paper and students throw it into the trash, you think you would have been better off going to the movies,” she said.
No concrete plan of action for improving the effectiveness of sections was proposed.
—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.